I looked up at the calendar this weekend and realized that holy craperoli, we only have a few days before Halloween. Not only are the kids' costumes not quite done yet, but we also hadn't done our annual trip to the pumpkin patch to score some seriously overpriced gourds.

Wait, are pumpkins gourds? Or squash?

Anyway, we loaded up the kids and tossed my sister into the car as well, because that's what we do around here. We load up on extra adults to give the boy a fresh audience for his prattling on.

Look how excited my sister looks! That was before she spent 40 minutes being tailed by my son, describing every possible battle scenario between two species of dinosaurs that sound suspiciously made up.

I was all - hold still! Smile! This is not too different from years past:

2008

2006

2004

Which, I think, is the very first photo I ever posted of my kids on this site. I'm suddenly seized with the urge to warble The Circle of Life.

ANYWAY.

So, my oldest and my sister found pumpkins right away. My son wandered the field, vaguely dissatisfied with all the fruits of the field, but finally settled on one. My youngest found one, she thought, but then she got stung by a bee and freaked out. As I had sent the hubs up to get a wheelbarrow to drag the pumpkins up the hill, my sister and I made an executive decision. I put her and the kids on the flatbed hayride back up the hill, and I walked up, to intercept my husband before he made it back down to the field with a wheelbarrow.

Of course, when I found my husband heading back our way, he was empty handed. It seems he had gone to the bathroom and then didn't see any wheelbarrows, so he was just bumbling around up there. Oy.

Anyway, we met up back up at the top, where the kids promptly spotted HAY MOUNTAIN. My son, he of the seasonal allergies, decided that it would be totally awesome to slide headfirst down the stacked bales. I figured he'd do it once, and get tired of it. But no, he belly-slid down that stack 900 times.

My youngest bounced her way up and down like q-bert:

While my oldest posed:

And then we paid something like $50 for 5 pumpkins, which we are going to chop up and smoke and then leave to rot. I usually just toss the seeds, but somehow, I feel obligated to do something with them this year. I don't even know what to do with them - but I'm open for suggestions!

Thanks so much for all the kind messages - my sister's got a couple of tests and appointments at the end of the week, and we expect that we'll have a much clearer picture of what we're looking at then. In the meantime, we are going to keep on keepin' on - and maybe take out some of our pent up frustration on some hapless squash.