Day at the pumpkin patch with MOPS

Forget the pumpkin patch, Mom, check out the inflatable slide!!! We went to the patch with our MOPS group but actually ended up doing nothing related to pumpkins....and paying nothing either, which is right up my alley. Gavin could have slid down this thing all day long!!!
Gavin loved looking at the animals and trying to touch them.
How cute is our son with the tiny pony?!
Here's Gavin with his best bud, Aiden Turner. The boys quickly discovered that you could tip the pumpkins over the edge of the hay bales, and you can just about imagine how much fun they had doing that, much to our chagrin.
Here's Gavin with the ornamental corn that he said we should leave for the birds. So I guess we did do something with pumpkins because they had this perfect little picture-taking operation set up near the slide (the main attraction for our son), complete with hay, pumpkins, scare crows, wagon wheels and ornamental corn.

Gavin being Gavin

This is our son in his adorable, hand-me-down argyle sweater vest....being a lion I guess?

Picking pumpkins...

I can honestly say that, prior to this day, I had never actually chosen my pumpkin from a real pumpkin patch and cut it from the vine. It was fun, and Gavin chose a good one for us.
What a fun experience! We had to laugh later, though, when we realized that we had simply parked at the first sight of pumpkins, failing to realize that the more orange, mature, pretty :) pumpkins were actually further down the road....and that's why all the cars were parked there when we were leaving. Yeah, come to think of it, there was more green in our area than orange. How did we miss the sea of orange ahead? Oh well, Gavin didn't know the difference.
Here's Daddy and Gavin cutting our pumpkin off of the vine.
Are they cute or what?
I can't remember what, exactly, Gavin was pointing to here. A tractor? The inflatable slide that he could see from the pumpkin patch? The better pumpkins that we had missed driving in? Surely not.

Free day at the zoo? Never again!!!

Remind me to NEVER, EVER return to the zoo on a free day! I didn't realize that that was today, but something should have given me a clue when the parking lot was full and you had to park in Kansas to walk to the zoo entrance. It was SO crowded, and I feel like we didn't really get to see lots of animals today because I had to factor in the HIKE back to the car after weaving through the crowds for the duration of our crazy visit. A free day is truly the definition of a total zoo!