Pumpkin Patch

Thursday we took our annual trip to the Pumpkin Patch, a common fall tradition around this area. (We don't have trees that reflect the season's colors so we have to pretend we can enjoy the fall colors in other ways.) It's definitely not something for the faint of heart parent.

Imagine 100 sets of parents with cameras around their necks and 200 kids running around, the air accentuated with calls of "Look at Mommy!" "Smile" "Stand right here" "No, don't move!" or "Don't eat the pumpkin!" (In our case with Kayla.) The scrapbooker in me was cringing at the thought of all the cute shots I wasn't getting after my painstaking efforts to match the girls so that my scrapbook layout colors would work out. All that to have almost no pics that I really wanted to scrapbook. For example, it took at least 10 trys to get Abri to stand for a "This Fall I am this Tall" pic, and when I finally did there was a kid that walked by in the photo. *Sigh*

The funniest and most stressful part of the day was when I was there alone with the girls and needed to take Abri to the port-o-potty. She didn't want to go (a usual experience during out last 3 months of potty training) but hadn't in a long while, so I picked her up to carry her myself. I passed Kayla off to Emma and prayed the two of them would be ok while I tried to convince Abri to cooperate, knowing the portlet wouldn't be big enough for them anyways.

When I returned back to Kayla and Emma where I had left them 15 yards away, some pumpkins were out of their orderly rows. Instead of their normal distance of 2 ft apart, Emma had surrounded Kayla with about 8 huge pumpkins in a circle, with the simple explanation: "Kayla would crawl away if I didn't put the pumpkins around her." I was impressed at her problem solving. (I had given up on getting photos by this time and Todd had put the camera in the car when he left much earlier, so I missed yet another opportunity. Incidentally, a former stake President of ours, Pres Riding, was also at the pumpkin patch that day with his family and I had spoken with him earlier in the afternoon. He mentioned to me later before I left the patch that he noticed when I left Kayla and Emma and kept an eye on them while I was gone, and Emma did a good job of being responsible and not an abandoned child to arouse attention.)

All in all, part of me wants to try again before the season is over, but not sure I'm actually up for it, even for the sake of scrapbook pages. Some things are better not remembered.