Halloween Logistics

At my house Halloween begins with the trip to the mountains for pumpkins. Going to the pumpkin patch has always been a family tradition for us. We took the first boy when he was weeks old, strapped on to my chest with a baby carrier, and listened to the old farmer tell us about brown fat which we thought was an old wives tale but is apparently true.

When I lived in Indiana, the pumpkin patch was a trip to a big flat open place under more sky than I can properly verbalize. I miss the big flat land and all that sky, but it wasn't that pretty. It was functional, as most things in Indiana are. In Kentucky it was a folksy farm, sort of similar to the farms of Indiana.  In Florida it was really just an imitation pumpkin patch I'm not even sure you can grow pumpkins in that soil. The boy scouts would lay out pumpkins like a field and we'd go run around them and pick out our winners.
But in Georgia, in Georgia it's magical.

There is a hayride with inclines so steep you feel like you're gonna fall out. You go through a stream and there are talking pumpkins that tell you about how God gave us pumpkins. I SWEAR I LOVE THAT PART.

There are huge swaths of pumpkins to run and play and to choose exactly what you want. No reason to choose just a plain old orange pumpkin when they have red and blue and white too!

A friend on plurk asked me the other day how I find the energy to do all the stuff we do with our kids. I've thought about that a lot. It's not about energy. I don't have ANY of that.  It's about willpower. You have to have the willpower, despite being tired and having the cranky, go get four kids dressed and get out of the house.

Because they won't ever be 9, 7, 7 and 18 months old again. When I'm long dead, I want them to tell their grandkids about how their Mom and Dad used to take them to the mountains to get pumpkins. And how we ate fried pies and went on hay rides and everyone got their own pumpkin.

My children are my immortality. I'm making sure mine is a good one.