Friday Favorites: Amazon Tour Week

We had a pretty good week despite 4 days of rain!  We managed to squeeze in some hiking, a fun field trip, and my husband and I also had a COUPLE of dates-- as in more than one!  How was your week?

Alec and I were out of the house nice and early on Friday for his annual physical.  As soon as we finished up at the doctor's office we headed home, picked up his brothers and headed out to meet up with our friends for a hike.  We had beautiful weather and a wonderful day catching up with friends we only get to see a few times a year. Funny enough we hiked this exact same trail last year on Halloween. We found the squirrels and chipmunks were so cute and playful while storing up nuts for the winter.  The boys played Bears Vs. Babies (a card game from the makers of Exploding Kittens) and had a ball!

The colors were just stunning!

I ran a bunch of errands Saturday morning and Alec began a baking marathon.  Making cupcakes, piping chocolate "legs" (explained later in the post I promise!), and candy corn blondies.  I worked on a Christmas craft in the afternoon making a really cute candy cane wreath from Dollar Tree supplies (the finished product will be shared on the blog Nov. 11th)!  Later in the afternoon my husband and I headed out shopping and to dinner.  We ended up at two different malls before we found everything we needed; a funeral appropriate outfit and shoes for the both of us.  We ate dinner at TGI Friday's and splurged with a brownie sundae!  It was delicious.

Sunday morning it was pretty rainy and dreary but my husband owns a small hydroelectric plant and part of the "fun" of owning one in New England in the fall is getting to rake leaves out of the grates a few times a day.  He offered breakfast out for anyone that wanted to help him-- turns out it was just me!  After a delicious cinnamon apple pancake breakfast we headed out to rake.  I'm not strong enough to run the BIG rake for the grates but I do help push all the leaves and sticks we rake out of the grates back into the river (we pull out any garbage and throw that away).  Luckily he lent me his raincoat as it began pouring by the time we were done.

Once home I spent the afternoon letting the hem down in Alec's karate pants-- he's grown 4" in the past year and I am forever buying him new clothes but he is due to go up in belt level soon and will need all new uniforms then and I'm trying to make this one last until then.  Alec worked on putting together his spider cupcakes.  He piped spiderwebs on each cupcake, used two different sized M&M's for the bodies and painstakingly put 8 legs on each spider-- all 24 cupcakes!

I was up bright and early on Monday and managed to squeeze in a Pilates workout and clean the bathroom before starting school with the boys.  We finished up all the schoolwork in time for lunch and then headed out to a new hiking place to meet up with our hiking group.  We ended up getting a little lost and our hour hike turned into two.  Luckily it was a beautiful day so I didn't mind at all!  There is an old abandoned mine and we found so many salamanders out and about in the rainy, muddy leaves.

Alec had his homeschool karate class and Halloween party on Tuesday.  Once home we finished up our schoolwork for the day and since it was rainy, I let them watch TV the whole day.  The younger boys watched Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix while Ian decided to buy the latest season of Alaska the Last Frontier and start watching that.  Around dinnertime  I headed out to meet with the photographer and pick out our favorite shots from or photo shoot; they should be ready in under 3 weeks and I can't wait!  They came out soo good (and I typically hate any phots of me!).  We ended our night with a scrumptious bowl of hamburger soup.

Alec had an orthodontic checkup bright and early on Wednesday morning and then we had an unexpected doctor's appointment with Ian.  We thought he might have Lyme disease after he noticed a bite on his leg Monday night that began swelling along with feeling just overall icky.  Lyme is so prevalent in our area that it's one of the first things we suspect; thankfully the doctor is fairly confident that he does not have Lyme.  My mom came over in the afternoon for a visit and then Alec and I ran out to the library and a few other errands.

The boys and I were up bright and early on Thursday. We had an appointment to tour our local Amazon fulfillment center.  Sadly pictures aren't allowed inside but we were so glad we got to see how it all works!  Ours is the only center in the United States that is called a Non-sortable center (there are 6 types of distribution centers and you can read about them here).  Basically for us this meant that our center doesn't work with small items and does not have the use of robots but rather lots of small fork lifts and other lifts they use to "pick" the items out of the "bins" for shipping.  We were really impressed with both the facility and Amazon's employment practices (as told to us by their employees).  After our tour we headed to lunch at Longhorn and ended our day with a viewing of Hocus Pocus and eating some sugary snacks.

The centers are named after the nearest major airport so our local one is called Bos7