Corn and Pumpkins

Today we went with our friends to the Corn Maze. JW, KW, and MW were able to make it, but Bubba wasn't. It was too bad because we actually got really lost this time (and somebody said the maze looked simple this year).

M made special shirts for this year's corn maze, so we matched. This year's theme was rats! I think I only sang the Metallica song once. At one point in the maze, when it looked like we might actually solve it, M managed to make up a song called "Down With People" that was pretty funny.

After the Corn Maze, we said goodbye to the W Women and went to the Pumpkin Patch! Don't let this photo fool you, the Pumpkin Patch was about two miles away from the corn maze and we had to walk. OK. We didn't have to walk; we could have taken a horse and cart ride, but we were too cheap to pay. And it was a nice day.

Once we got to the Pumpking Patch, there were pumpkins everywhere. I won't include the photos I took of some of the nastier pumpkins that had gotten chomped on by some wild animal and left to rot. There was one that looked like a beached whale next to an abandoned baby's sock.

We decided that we wanted to get a traditional looking pumpkin -- so that cut out the ones that were cylinders, or green, or white, or too Cinderella-coach like. A wanted one with a good stem. We wandered around finding different candidates and taking them back to our wheelbarrow.

I kept finding ones that I thought would be nice and they kept getting vetoed as too big. I suppose that it makes sense not to have something hanging around the house that outweighs your child. We also agreed to get just one pumpkin instead of a bunch of smaller ones, although it will be fun in a few years when we can get one for each of us to carve.

A enjoyed himself a lot. He did start to lose interest in the pumpkins in favor of the many fascinating rocks and dirtclods lying around. And he also figured out when I was too busy taking photos to intervene in some puddle stomping.

By the time we had been in the patch for about twenty minutes we had found five likely candidates. We kept asking A which one he liked, but by this time he was much more interested in other pumpkin hunters (and rocks) to make such a complicated choice. We cut it down to two, and that was still a little too much for him (and by this time it was about two hours past his usual nap).

Finally M asked him if he cared which one we took home and he said he didn't. So we chose one that looked more head-like (and had a more interesting shape). We tried to get A to walk with us, but by now the puddles and stray flowers and pretty much anything were much more distracting and interesting than heading two miles back to the cashiers' lines.

So we plunked him in the wheelbarrow behind the pumpkin. I think he would have fallen asleep except the horse-drawn cart passed us.