pumpkin hunting

Last Saturday we spent the morning with my mom, working on clearing out all her leaves, and then looking through pumpkins at the huge pumpkin patch. It was fun to play in all the leaves at her house. Our trees are still too small to produce real, jump-worthy piles, but that's not the problem at my mom's house at all! Even Natalie was able to lend a hand with her little pink rake.
But it was just as fun throwing her in the piles to work her way out.
Though she did accumulate an uncomfortable number of leaves in the diaper area.
After bagging all the leave, (another job Natalie was very helpful at), we headed over to the pumpkin zoo... I mean patch. It was a little crazy, with policemen stationed at the entrance to regulate traffic, but the large farm has this down to a science, so they were pretty good at moving people through.

There are multiple fields to choose from, and they are each so large. We picked a spot and started searching. Because of the recent snows and frosts, it was actually pretty tough to find pumpkins that were sound. Most of them had frozen and were soft - if not all over, then in spots - so each pumpkin had to be thoroughly checked over. Many of them looked like this:

But even the ones that looked good were mostly soft. We managed to find a few that we wanted to take home.

And once we got our pumpkins loaded into the car, we just had to find our way out of the fields and back to the gate.

We stopped on the way out and checked out the little farm zoo they had. These goats were pretty cool, and Natalie saw her first pig in person as well.
We also had to stick our faces in a few holes. This little pumpking was just the right size for our little one.
And every trip to Broomfield that ends around lunchtime had to include a stop for noodles at our favorite pho place, Pho Duy!
Natalie loves her noodles!