Pumpkin Patch

So I guess Blogger might have gotten its shit worked out. At least as far as the pictures go. Not sure about the video, but I guess I'll find that out the next time I have a video worth posting.

Now I can share the stuff from the pumpkin patch. Papa's Pumpkin Patch is really a very nice place to visit. It's free, unless you want to buy stuff, obviously, and they have a few games that I think you have to pay for as well, but it's possible to enjoy an hour or two there and spend nothing, which is always a fine option. Many of the options that Gabe enjoyed so much last year were still there, and they added a few others along the way.

Probably still the activity that Gabe would have done the entire time we were there if we'd let him. This is a horse tank filled with corn that the kids can play with like sand. Here they were making corn angels.

This is a hole that is located in corn. There's probably a good, catchy name for something like that, but I'll be darned if I can think of a good one.

King of the hay bale.

There's a bit of a story to go with this next picture. The night before we went to the pumpkin patch, Libby laid up in Gabe's bed for a little while telling him stories (he's been sleeping horribly for the past two weeks or so, and now he's insisting that she lay up there and tell him stories and sing him songs before he'll go to sleep--which he still won't do for another hour or two most nights). Usually, he gets to choose the characters in the story, and this time it was Momma Wrencher, Daddy Wrencher, Gabe Wrencher, and Norah Wrencher. Sometimes we're Squeezers or Dinosaurs or Owls or whatever happens to come to his mind first, but Wrencher (what he calls all wrenches, as I'm sure nobody recalls) is the one he goes to the most often.

In this story, we were trying to find the perfect pumpkin. It needed to be big, orange, and round. Norah Wrencher found a round green one, but that wasn't any good. Daddy Wrencher found a square orange one, but that wasn't any good either (can't say as I can disagree with this one--I WOULD find the oddest pumpkin in the group). Momma Wrencher, for some reason (probably because she's "superior" or a "slave driver" or something along those lines) didn't find ANY pumpkins, instead choosing to just look on and pass judgment on what was and wasn't a pumpkin that lived up to her standards of perfection. But then Gabe Wrencher found the perfect pumpkin. It was big, round, and orange!

So, on the way there, Libby had him retell her the story, which he actually managed to remember pretty well. And that became his goal, to find the perfect pumpkin while we were there.

This is the pumpkin he found. I'm not sure I'd call it "perfect," though. It is big--compared to Gabe, anyway--and kind of round, but it had a pretty ugly brown spot on the side. I guess it's not a BAD thing if he has slightly lowered expectations for perfection. They will certainly increase his options when he starts dating.

Oh, and Norah was there, too. Sadly, since she's still not getting around all that well, she spent most of her time in the stroller. She spent most of the time she was out and about falling on everything that was on the ground. I'm a little surprised by this, actually. As messy as our living room and dining room are by mid-morning every day, she should be pretty good at walking over tricky terrain by now. She's not. So we had the choice of having a frustrated baby girl who wanted to get out of her stroller or a frustrated baby girl who was covered in mulch and mud and tripping head first into pumpkins. Tough choice, but we mostly went with the one that didn't involve a dozen wet wipes to recover from.

When we got home, Libby and Gabe made octopi out of spaghetti and hot dog chunks for dinner.

Poor impaled hot dogs. Reminds me of some etchings done of the courtyard surrounding Vlad Dracul's castle. These "poles" are even coming straight out of the hot dog's anuses--just like Vlad was a fan of doing--because, technically, ALL of a hot dog is anuses.

The finished product. More octopussy and less impaley at this point.

And Gabe enjoying the fruits of his work. I was not a fan. Of course, I don't have much use for hot dogs in general. If they're cooked on a grill, maybe, but otherwise, meh. And, frankly, the "meat"balls inside a can of Chef Boyardee have a bit more appeal to my taste buds than these hot dogs when added to spaghetti.