Oliver picked a peck of speckled pumpkins...

On Sunday we went to a haunted train ride with the Whitney's. It was a wonderful experience for the little ones, as the train was haunted by 4H teens in costumes and braces, and was about as scary as a walk in the park.

The children were handed pieces of gold and told to guard them from thieving pirates.
Marlena and Mason were a little creeped out when one of the pirates just sat next to them and silently stared them down, but the rest of the time they maintained their deniability on the gold front.

Marlena triumphantly keeps her gold coin from thieving pirates:



Marlena even started blaming other people, happily throwing Mason to the pirates mercy with a casual "I think I saw him with some gold, go check him, or maybe some of the people down there." Lee taught her to blame another pirate, so on the next circuit she calmly told the pirate queen that she was being cheated by a member of her own party, and she should check the other pirates for gold.

Marlena sells Mason out to the pirates in an attempt to deflect suspicion from herself:



Oliver was a little over stimulated during the train ride and after handing out a few golden smiles, he settled into the crook of my neck and snuggled for the rest of the ride.

Oliver thwarts pirates with a golden smile, successfully distracting them from their hunt for treasure:



After our haunted train ride we went to a roadside pumpkin patch. We had intended to go to a patch with Morgan and Amy, but there were a whole lot of wasps around that pumpkin patch (and I don't mean White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, I mean yellow jackets!) so we chose to leave. We attempted the roadside stop after leaving to try and make up for the missed pumpkin patching.

It was magical. It was one of those moments when the "make up" treat is imminiently better than the real thing. There was no line, no itchy hay, no bugs to bite us or sun to beat down on our heads. The woman who ran the stand cheerfully offered pumpkin pie advice, treated Marlena's search for the perfect pumpkin with the utmost seriousness, told us to "plant" the baby in the apples and gourds for pictures, and was so pleasant we didn't miss the patching at all.

We show Oliver his first pumpkins:





Marlena takes her time choosing her pumpkin, only to lobby for two:




At the end of the day we left a happy family, with bright orange pumpkins for Jackety lanterns, cheese pumpkins for pie, and fresh picked apples and apple butter. Everyone was happy, everyone was pumpkined, all in all, I would call the day a success!