Fun at the Farm

The kids have fall break this week so yesterday we drove out to Meridianville to play at Tate Farms and pick our Halloween pumpkins. We went to the farm last year and had a great time so we were all excited about making the trip again. There were cotton and corn cribs to jump in, a hay maze, a playground with slides and swings and such, a barn where you could jump out into a big haystack, a petting zoo, a tractor tire mountain to climb, and of course, a hayride out the the fields to cut your own pumpkins right off the vines. Watching the kids jump and climb and run and play I was a little surprised that we didn't have to sign some kind of waiver to get in because this place seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen. (Not that I think they should change a thing. Playgrounds have become too sterile in my opinion.) This was good old-fashioned play--the kind with just a bit of risk and a lot of dirt involved.


The biggest hit at the farm this year were the bunnies. I don't know how old they were but they were tiny. The bunnies last year were not nearly as small. I think Emily spent at least an hour cuddling those soft little things. There were about 6 little bunnies in the pen and, by the time we left, the kids had named them all. As fun as they were to cuddle, I couldn't help but feel a little sorry for the poor things. The bunnies spend 4 hours a day being pimped out to kids of all sizes. If they survive pumpkin picking season, I'm sure they carry the emotional scars of their time in 'the pens' for the rest of their rabbit lives.

We also had a fun time playing in the corn cribs. They are like giant sandboxes but filled with dry feed corn instead of sand. For the rest of the day the kids were finding corn in their socks, ears, pockets, shirts and etc.


After we had our fill of all the other entertainments, we loaded a hay wagon and had about a 10 minute ride out into the fields to pick our pumpkins. The rule was that you had to be able to carry your pumpkin from the field to the wagon by yourself in order to take it. Natalie really pushed the envelope this year. She wanted a really big pumpkin and she worked hard to get it. Her pumpkin ended up weighing just over 30lbs. The other kids were a little less ambitious. Their pumpkins weighed in around 10-15lbs a piece. We were all very dirty and a little scraped up when we finally got home, but it was worth it. We had a blast.