Pumpkins 2013

Last year, October was a cold and rainy month and it was hard for us to find the right weekend to go to a pumpkin patch.  This year, the weather has been much more cooperative!  Saturday would have been a gorgeous day (over 70 degrees and sunny) to have gone, but we were having a garage sale and were tied to the house. 

 

Instead, we chose to go on Sunday.  The weather was cooler and much more fall-like.  It was overcast, so I missed the sunshine, but we still had a great time.

 

We went to one of the local Pumpkin Patches that advertised pumpkins, apples, a farm stand, a corn maze, and a petting zoo.  They had lambs, pigs, and chickens for the kids to attempt to pet, so we knew there would be at least one activity that Carder would love.  After a couple of visits to the sheep pen, Carder got to pet the lambs.  The pigs were quite lazy and spent most of their time snoring, although they did get up and route in the mud for some apples before we left.  But the real prize of the day was the chickens.  This was the first time Carder had seen chickens that were not in a pen.  After watching another little boy try, he spent the longest time chasing the chickens around the yard trying to catch them.  I wowed him with my ability to get close to the chickens by showing him to stand very still and hold an empty corn cob.  He was amazed that the chickens came right up to try to peck off the corn.  But apparently tricking the chickens isn't as fun as catching them because he went right back to running after them.

 

After seeing the animals for a while, Derek decided that it was time to try out the fresh pumpkin donuts and hot apple cider.  Delicious.

 

And then we tried to get Carder to pose for pictures in the pumpkins.  He was much more interested in the donuts and cider than in smiling at the camera.  So we I finally gave up on the perfect pumpkin picture and instead we searched for the perfect pumpkins.  We gave Carder free reign in picking out the ones he wanted and ended up with 4 pumpkins - a couple of really big ones, a medium one, and a small one.

 

Carder wasn't the biggest fan of the "scarecrows" - life sized hay stuffed clothing with milk jug heads...he eyed them suspiciously for quite a while and never got too close to them.  Those painted on smiles didn't fool him for one second.  He finally did get close enough to inspect that they were really stuffed with hay.

 

Another super fun activity that we didn't expect was a maze out of square hay bales for the smaller kids.  Carder was still a little young to understand the concept of thinking his way through the maze, so I quickly abandoned that idea and just let him play as he saw fit.  This consisted of climbing up onto the hay, jumping from bale to bale, jumping off the hay...He would throw his arms in the air and victoriously shout "I MADE IT" and other times he would tell us he was "working on his house"...

  

We were able to get this great family picture in the hay maze.  It is probably one of my favorite pictures of the 3 of us together.  

 

Since Carder is now my "little helper", I knew that carving pumpkins would be a challenge this year as I was sure he would want to have his turn to cut the pumpkins.  I found a great set of stickers at the dollar store that I thought might be a good solution.  When I first bought them, I thought that we would still carve a pumpkin and just let Carder help to clean out the inside.  But the stickers were such a success that I decided to just let him do all 4 pumpkins in stickers and we won't be carving one this year.  (We have the Styrofoam one that I carved last year that we will light up on Halloween night so I am totally fine with this plan.)

Here is Carder with his pumpkins.  And yes, he has a "mustache".  He had done Face Time with Grandpa earlier and had to have one...