Ahhh, fall is in full swing and winter is nipping at us from right around the corner. It’s the season of annual family traditions and cozy memory making!
After four long years of planning for a family, you collect lots of ideas and come up with even more ideals. I’m in love with the idea of annual family traditions. I’ll tell you about how our annual Christmas tree tradition has already morphed from its ideal sometime later…Today, we’re taking about how we did the pumpkin patch thing.
In all honesty, it was incredibly underwhelming. Here’s the thing. I had never been to a pumpkin patch before. Now that we’re a small family of three, I figured we’re justified to add this to our list of traditions. So I Googled farms with pumpkin patches that were close to or within our city and about five popped up. I could hardly contain my excitement!
I had grand expectations that we would be visiting a real and rugged pumpkin patch. You know…a place where the pumpkins are actually growing out of the ground, and you walk through the fields and harvest the pumpkins you desire directly from the vine? While doing this, you educate your kids on how pumpkins grow and are harvested, what you can make from them and how important it is to buy and support local. You guys smelling “ideal” yet?
I guess the above description is not really what “pumpkin patch” means in real life around these parts. Which is pretty odd because I live in the region folks would call the Canadian Prairies, which, right or wrong, I 100% attribute to farming produce.
In real life, the pumpkin patches around here are farms filled with old farm equipment cleverly turned into play structures for children age 3-12. You can also pet and feed farm animals and there’s a giant corn or sunflower maze to get lost in.
Cool cool. Cool cool cool. This is all very cool!
But what about the pumpkin patch part? Well, the “patch” in this case consists of imported pumpkins beautifully displayed amongst stacked straw bales and old tractors for adorable photo ops. And adorable they were, so you bet we took advantage of those!
But I must admit, I couldn’t help that feeling in my chest of “womp womp”. Unfortunately, this experience was all too commercialized and disingenuous to add to our list of family traditions.
On the drive home, I spent the entire time searching online for real pumpkin patches. I was giving up hope when I decided to expand my search radius.
Low and behold I think I found a REAL pumpkin patch! It’s an hour and a half drive from our place, so that’s a bit of a bummer, but we’ll check it out next year anyways! I haven’t told the husband yet. Best to let him know how far the drive really is the night before. 😉
Hopefully it will be worth the drive and we can commit it to the Badau Family Annual Traditions list. I’ll report next year!
2 Comments
When I have my own family, I’ll definitely be making my own family traditions. Those memories last a lifetime ! I’m glad you are enjoying yours with your little one!
I like eating pumpkins very much, seeing these big and round pumpkins, I really want to go to the pumpkin patch once.