Hay Ride

A few Saturdays ago we had the best day. The weather was amazing. And it was the one day out of a million that we somehow managed to blunder our way into balancing play time/family time/productive time just right. No pics (or recollection, frankly) of the productive time portions of the day, but here are some from a fun little family outing.

There's a nursery a little ways down the road that exchanges hay rides to a pumpkin patch for canned food each fall. We had it marked on our calendar this year and loaded up a bag of food and took the scenic route to the nursery and ate sandwiches in the car on the way down. We hit it just right somehow, and there was no line for the hayrides. So we planted ourselves on bales of straw, and off we went. That tractor booked it! I was worried we'd fall off the back a couple of times, but everybody hung on tight and we all made it to the pumpkin patch in one piece.

Each of the kids got a free pumpkin, and we had fun picking our way through the patch to find the perfect ones. We even found some watermelons in the mix! The bees had found them too. Nate found a watermelon that had split open and he couldn't stop staring at the 100 + bees on it in grim fascination. We finally pulled him away and headed back to wait for the next green tractor (the kids insisted it be green), with pumpkins in tow.

This picture makes me laugh. Because about 15 seconds after it was taken, a bee flew up Nate's right sleeve. Or so he claims. It was hilarious. We were in a pretty good-sized group of people, and it was immensely entertaining to watch him try to perform his little "there's a bee in my shirt" dance with grace and poise, flinging pumpkins every which way. I finally stopped laughing about half an hour later when he was finally convinced that his little friend had escaped. Next time we'll steer clear of the "watermelon crawling with bees" show for his sake.

After we put our pumkins in the car, we looked around inside the nursery for a while, guessed how much a giant pumpkin weighed (a million pounds, according to the kids), and found this dinosaur, which the kids were quite taken with.

The kids requested photo ops with the statuary.

And we finished it off with a trip to Krispy Kreme. (You have got to try their sour cream doughnuts. Heaven, I tell you.)