Our First Trip to the Pumpkin Patch

I haven't been to a pumpkin patch since kindergarten, if I remember it correctly. I can picture seeing a hay ride, not going on the actual ride, but seeing it. I remember something about the Wizard of Oz, or maybe that's a completely different field trip altogether (dangit, I'm not doing so well here am I?). And I remember dressing up as a devil, which wasn't actually at the pumpkin patch, and probably not even that same year (memory FAIL). So anyways, I was really excited to take the kids to the pumpkin patch for the first time.


On Sunday afternoon, we loaded up the kids into Jetfire (we have both autobot and decepticon stickers on it, so...), handed little hands sippy cups full of Simply Apple, and hit the road. We had tried to find this same pumpkin patch 3 years ago (really, its been that long? Time flies...) when my sister in law was in town visiting around Eleanore's first Halloween. We never found it that day, instead we drove around for nearly 2 hours, eventually settling for boring Walmart bought pumpkins, or maybe we didn't get any at all (since I'm rockin' the memories). Now that we know the area better (when I say we, I mean Christopher, I had no idea where we were going), it was easy to find. We could see it from the freeway, which triggered a fire alarm type reaction from our 3 year old daughter when we didn't drive directly off the side of the overpass right away, and instead took the exit like good parents who lack magical powers. When we actually got there, parked the deceptiboticon, and put our 6 feet on the ground (Charlie's don't quite reach when hes riding on Mommy's hip)- Eleanore freaked. "We are here! We are here! PUMPKINS EVERYWHERE!", she shouted.


Just as we were in the middle of a battle with a swarm of bees, that I'm pretty sure were attracted to my scent (Laila, I smell like Norway), an older gentlemen came up to us and asked us if we'd like to go on a hay ride. What?! The answer to that is obviously yes. I think that maybe I ran to the tractor (and away from the bees, who we didn't end up escaping), dragging my family behind me. Eleanore didn't know what a hay ride was, so she wasn't excited until we stepped up onto the trailer and she got to roll around a stiff bed of straw, but I was ecstatic. Once we started moving, I started clapping Charlie's hands together (he'll get the hang of this clapping thing soon enough) and nudging Elie with my elbow over and over again. "Here we go Elie! We're moving! We're moving!", I yelled. It was a full ride, there were 4 or 5 other groups of people sharing the hay with us, but the tractor was so loud that nobody would have noticed my childlike excitement. And who cares if they did.


After the hay ride was over (it lasted a lot longer than I thought it would), we went to find our pumpkins. I'm not going to lie, I spent a ridiculous amount of time with the camera (but didn't the pictures turn out so good? Totally worth it), and didn't really participate with the actual pumpkin hunt (it was fun for Elie and Christopher to have that all to themselves though) until the very end when I was tired of swatting away the stingers (I've never been stung in my life, ever) and went ahead and picked out the pumpkins for everyone. We ended up leaving with three (tiny, small, and medium sized), and some really great memories. All for less than $6.

And somehow, nobody got stung by a bee.