Tuesday, November 2, 2010

In celebration of pumpkins





Oh, I don't remember how we decided it was time for us to go pumpkin patching on a rainy day in Chico-- it may have been the restlessness of being trapped inside, or maybe it was simply the season of Halloween pressuring us to be festive-but nonetheless we grabbed our one umbrella, I put on my "peter pan" boots and we headed to herd ourselves some pumpkins.
Garner Ranch: 
perks?:  free parking which us and one other adventurous family happily used, nice ambiance, lots of pumpkins, free pumpkin pie/bread recipes. :)
bummers--- so we walked up to the friendly family-run barn and saw that to actually get into the patch and the "fun kids activities" area there was a 5 dollar charge per person.... bah. after doing the quick math, we decided that since we don't yet have little fitzstevens to engage in 5 dollar activities, a 10+ dollar pumpkin may be a little pricey. So instead of venturing off into the pumpkin patch we found ourselves picking from a pile of pre-picked pumpkins. Definitely not as exciting, but there was still a little free-choice involved which was sufficient. 
We proudly hippety-hopped off with our two little pumpkins in hand, excited that we had gotten a 2 for $4 deal. We love ourselves some deals.




Driving away, we spotted an abandoned toilet which always calls for an "I'm sitting on a toilet in the middle of nowhere" picture. I'm sure we'll make a scrapbook of these one day. Ryan was delighted that we pulled over, as seen in his facial expression. See, we didn't even have to pay $5 for this extra fun "kids activity"... we make our own fun, just like creative kids should. : )   



     
 

Halloween Night:
A week later, and we decided that it was time to carve our beauties that had been serving us well as centerpieces for the week. We learned well from last year when ryan had bought pumpkins for us and we had neglected them long enough that mold had overtaken them before we could even carve them. Not this time! We succeeded in making our two very own jack-o-laterns:
Names: Pete and Sasha (just made these up because we forgot to name them last night)
By the end of the night, all four of us were glowing with pride.  







 sidenote: so ants started getting to pete and sasha by the next day, so today, they were diced, peeled and boiled and made into pumpkin puree. Sounds terrible. but they will rejoin us again as either pumpkin pie or pumpkin bread.. yum.



Until next time!
na



1 comment:

  1. good pictures na! I'm glad to see that you guys faithfully take advantage of random toilets...who would of thought that it would provide entertainment for Ryan and also for all of us visiting this lovely sight:)

    ps the toilet is on your team

    ReplyDelete