The great pumpkins

We've made an annual tradition of going to the "pumpkin patch" (i.e. a bunch of pumpkins lined up near the parking lot) at a church. The pumpkins are probably a little more expensive than buying them at the farmers market or grocery store, but they have cool shapes, lots of sizes and the money goes to their youth group's mission trip. And I feel like we need to stick with our traditional spot.

The first year, Sawyer was about 10 months old. He crawled all over the pumpkins and even tried to taste a few, but he mostly sat like a bump wherever we put him. I got adorable pictures of him. Like this one ...

Last year, he had very little interest in the pumpkins. All he wanted to do was run around.

Getting him to "sit" with the pumpkins required a quick finger on the shutter button because it lasted for about three seconds. You'll find many pictures of him running here.

This year, we had talked about it for days. We planned to go a few times and things didn't work out. We talked about how I wanted a white pumpkin and Sawyer wanted orange. So by the time we went, Sawyer was beyond eager to visit the pumpkin patch.

When we got there, he saw all the pumpkins and said, "Wow!" He had to pick up the first one we passed. By the stem. I could envision having to pay for a dozen broken pumpkins.



My main goal, besides getting some pumpkins for our porch, was to get a few good pictures. That's becoming increasingly hard to do as Sawyer is almost as averse to having his picture taken as his dad.

So most of our time there was spent trying to convince Sawyer to do what I wanted without making it sound like I was bossing him around, a sure way to get him to do the opposite. To try to get him to actually look at the camera, I asked him to hide and play peek-a-boo.





Then I tried to get him to look at the camera by asking him how many fingers I was holding up. He did look at the camera, but this was not quite the look I was going for.



So I just gave up and let him explore. 





A couple amusing things happened while we were there. They had a section near a brick wall with the tiniest pumpkins. Someone had started putting them in the holes in the wall. As soon as Sawyer looked at it, he started picking pumpkins up and filling in the holes. I tried to get him to come on , but he would NOT leave until he'd filled the four empty slots.





Sawyer posed in the Halloween sign again. But he really liked looking in from the front, like there was something inside the hole.



Then when it was time to actually pick out our pumpkins, he decided it was time to pitch a fit. He didn't WANT to pick out one of the smaller pumpkins. So he did his classic flop.



We hauled our pumpkins to the car. I had told him we could go get pumpkin frozen yogurt afterward, so I didn't think he'd be sad to leave. But we got in the car and he burst into tears. I asked him what was wrong and through sobs, he said, "We didn't get you a white one."

 

Sadly, this year, there were none of my favorites ... the white kind.