PhilosYphia

7th October 2008

My Lil’ Pumpkin

On Saturday, we went to the Franklin County Historical Society’s Fall Festival, which was essentially a glorified reason to get your kid out of doors, coming face to face with animals, games, and fall harvest items, including pumpkins. It was not, however, quite as horrific as that sounds at first blush, as the weather was nice, there wasn’t a ton of people out there (although there were more than I would originally think), and Keston had a great time trying his new-found walking skills outside.

There was a jack-o-lantern contest for the youngin’s, although my son didn’t participate because he’d probably try to ingest the innards of a pumpkin rather than discard them and make something artistic. That and writing on the back, “Nathan, 30″ for my name and age seemed rather out of place in all of the, “Kayden, 5″ and “Elsie, 3″ ones that were already there.

Being Iowa, there was, of course, a lot of corn.

And what better to do with that corn than to teach the kiddos how to run an old-fashioned hand-cranked corn sheller.

A garden nearby sported these double D-cup beets. I suspect that they’re going to be a bit…uh…woody.

If you can imagine, there was a flatrack with shitloads of pumpkins there. Then again, about this time of year, there are any number of a billion flatracks sporting orange vine fruit, so this isn’t a unique occurrence.

Everyone got a hayride, either behind a tractor or behind a team of horses. My son, having been properly indoctrinated by his grandfather, was only truly interested in the tractor itself.

We met a lot of friendly animals, because that’s what you do with small children. Here a cow and Keston are eyeing each other, but not necessarily making friends.

The baby pigs were more successful — Keston actually tried to reach for them, but couldn’t actually hit them.

With the baby chicken, Kes tried to be extra friendly and would whap the poor bugger on the head like he was beating a drum till Daddy took hold and made him pet it nicely. I don’t think it was nearly as amusing to either Keston or Daddy, but the chicken certainly appreciated my intervention.

We hung out some, just sitting around on the grass and enjoying a nice Iowa fall day.

Keston decided that the big green carpet needed exploring and headed off for a good crawl.

He had actually tried walking everywhere, but the unevenness of the surface made him approximate a stone gathering no moss on more than one occasion, so for this outing, he did mostly an all-fours mode.

We met up at this activity with Yolanda’s mother’s group, which is a group of kids and parents around the area that were all born approximately in the same time frame. As per typical, we got them all together for a group photo and, per typical, they all acted up when we tried to do so. This was the best of the lot.

One of the little boys, Brody, worked with Keston to try to extract the pumpkinds from underneath the pram.

We did, of course, come home with a bunch of pumpkins, and let Keston pick out his own. Here he is concentrating heavily, trying to feel out for the best pumpkin. Either that or he is trying to fart, we’re not positive.

But once he claimed a pumpkin, it was HIS, by golly.

We got a few smaller pumpkins, too, which are both more suitable for little hands and his mother’s decorating style.

You have the world by the tail if you just have a bunch of fall fruit around you.

Endless entertainment opportunities await even the smallest of ye — as long as you have a green stem and are of the orangeish skin coloring.

I shall HAVE them! Yes, I shall!

Aw, a perfectly flawed family photo, but at least 2 of the 3 weren’t cut off.