How Big is Your Pumpkin?

Day 21

I know I’m lucky to stay home to raise my kids.  (I try and remind myself of this on days the boys are doing everything in their power to make me slowly lose my mind.) 

While I don’t collect a paycheck, staying home has its own “corporate perks”.  Let me name a few. 

Weekday errands take half the time as anything attempted on a Saturday or Sunday.

I can surprise my kids by baking up a batch of cookies and time it so they are warm when they get off the bus. 

I can wear my pajamas all day long. 

Another favorite thing that staying home allows me is the flexibility to volunteer at my kids’ school. 

Of all the opportunities to volunteer (and there are HUNDREDS), I live for field trips.  I mean I really, really like them.  Learning about how the Indians lived?  Oh, yeah.  Visiting a farm?  I’m there.

Yesterday, I joined a handful of other parents and chaperoned the kindergarten trip to Iron’s Fruit Farm.  Twenty kids and a handful of parents piled onto a wagon filled with hay bales.  We bumped along until we reached a back pumpkin patch filled with a rich harvest of a dozen different shapes and colors.

A. jumped off the back of the wagon and headed straight towards the largest pumpkin in the patch. 

“Ten bucks he picks that one,” I said to a friend. 

The pumpkin came past his knees. 

“Can you lift it?  Mrs. H says you have to be able to carry it.”  I admit to playing the teacher card to convince and cajole. 

A. grabbed the pumpkin’s stem and attempted to heave it up.  Nothing.  That orange giant didn't move an inch. 

“Hum.  Tough.”  I said. 

Not one to give up easily, he took a deep breath and threw his little legs into it. 

Nothing. 

“What do you think?”  I asked. 

“I think I should let Kyle have this one.”  That’s my boy.     

I tried to get a photo of as many kids whose parents couldn’t attend as I could.  Picking a pumpkin.  Petting the goat.  Smiling on the hayride.  Emailing the pictures seems an easy pumpkin to carry.