Fall Fun

Me and my girls:
Well, you can see one of them, anyway! :)

It finally feels like fall here, and over the weekend we went up to the mountains to enjoy it. It was a wonderful, busy day - first we did a corn maze, then "panned" for gemstones, then hit the pumpkin farm. The weather was gorgeous, and everyone had fun. What a great day!

The corn maze was actually quite big, and it had a card with a series of punches you could do while wandering through it. M got cranky after a while, so she and I bailed to have a snack while A and Iestyn finished up all the punches. Here's a picture of her examining the map:

(Which was surprisingly unhelpful for getting around the maze, if you ask me. Once you're in the middle of all that corn, all directions look pretty much the same!)

The panning for gems was very popular with both girls. They each had a bucket of rocks/dirt, which we rinsed and put through a sieve, and you were supposed to find the gemstones. Of course, the girls both ended up deciding about half of their bucket was "pretty", so we have a LOT of little rocks in our house now... ;)

They did each get a few nice quartzes and some other things like that, but mostly it was just fun to play with rocks and water.

After that it was time for the pumpkin farm. We went to Burt's Pumpkin Farm, which we've visited many times before, but never when it was this crowded. It was totally nuts! But the lines (for what we wanted, anyway) were actually pretty short, and we got a bunch of pumpkins for a reasonable price - sugar pumpkins for cooking, some small ones for drawing faces on, some bigger ones for carving.

Here's A getting a wheelbarrow ride before we picked out any of the pumpkins:


And M picking out one of her " two perfect pumpkins".

It was really a lovely day. Time with my family doing fun activities in beautiful weather. Just exactly what I wanted. :)