What a potato head!

When Welsh farmer Ifor Edwards dropped his keys he called in a metal-detecting agency. They found the keys and also 14 medieval coins from the 14th and 15th centuries, according to a story published Monday in the Shropshire Star.

Can you even imagine? Well, I can. My son was digging in our back yard when he was a little boy and he found a partially corroded coin with an 1800's date. Someone advised us to place the coin into a slit, raw potato. We did and he put it in the fridge. Of course the potato shriveled and turned black around the area that was cut.

My mom was very helpful and often folded laundry or hand washed my dishes when she came for a visit. Can you imagine my son and his dad when they went to check out the coin in the potato and both were gone?

Mom thought she was tossing food-gone-bad. The trash truck was long gone and by then, so was Mom.

Do you want to know a secret? I am old enough to remember the first Mr. Potato Head game. The plastic pieces were inserted into a REAL potato. Eww, can you imagine storing that?

Non-traditional pumpkin activities

These activities were fun at school today, and just imagine the fun your children or grandchildren will have if you do these things with them this month. Fall is in the air; fall is everywhere, why not fall into a pile of leaves, kick up your heels, or decorate a pumpkin in a non-traditional way?

Sure, everyone loves a Jack-o-lantern, but carving a face into a pumpkin is not the only thing that you can do with one. The kids pounded golf tees, and I removed them. Then they used the Mr. Potato Head features to create their own Jack-O-lantern (multiple personality) as you can see.



Then I gave the children colored discs and tees and let them pound away. They giggled so hard whenever they'd say, "Again! Again!" and I'd say, "Oh my, you are making me coo-coo saying 'again-again'." They pounded tees and discs into practically every inch of this pumpkin. The best part is, tomorrow we will remove them and they will do it all over again. This is a great hand-eye coordination activity.



Oh sure, other people paint features,and produce a "product", but we simply enjoyed the "process" of painting a pumpkin, and let me tell you, by the time we went indoors, this pumpkin had layers of paint.



What a beautiful fall day to go outdoors to jump in a pile of dried leaves, roll in them, toss them up and crunch them in our hands. One child said, "This was my best day all year!" I'd have to agree.