One of our October traditions is to take Ellison to visit a nearby farm with her cousins. The owners have it all set up for fall fun with hay rides, corn mazes and spooky ghost trails. It's a pretty great afternoon spent outside if you're a kid. While I have to admit that as a parent the fun at this farm is limited to watching your child have a good time, I do find myself looking forward to our annual fall visit. I get to spend the day with my sister-in-law, Lindsey (who is all sorts of wonderful), and her family and it's a chance for the kids to race around outside and jump on a giant bounce pad. Plus, I love taking pictures of the cousins together and seeing how much they've grown. Here are a few taken over the years, along with one from this visit, in the same corn maze.
The hayride takes you past a field of sunflowers and out to a pumpkin patch where the kids get pick out their own pumpkins. The pumpkins are too small to carve, but Ellison still loves decorating hers.
There is a spooky trail that the kids love to race through, pointing out all the ways in which they are not scared by the skeletons and witches and creepy sounds, and a small petting zoo where you can feed goats, chickens, pigs and donkeys. The animals are always so full that they never want the food we give them. And they bite, especially the pigs. Because of course a petting zoo made for small children would be filled with biting livestock.
And there's this. Whatever you want to call it (running back and forth in a big pipe?) they thought it was a blast.
This trip always makes us want to have a farm of our own. I don't know that I would want to be a farmer by occupation, but to have one just big enough to grow the food we need and raise a few animals would be perfect. There is a lot to be said for knowing exactly where your food comes from and I would like Ellison to have that connection, plus after living in our tiny condo for so long it would be nice to have some space to run around. But for now we are happy to just spend the afternoon outside enjoying a race through a corn maze. One that is supposedly made simple enough that small children can easily find their way out, but which confuses me every single time. So much for my wilderness navigation skills.
See you back here next weekend!
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