*WARNING: Lots of spooky, scary pictures in the following blog post*
Halloween is a fun but totally exhausting holiday. It is a great holiday if you are into cheap thrills, jump scares, the supernatural, and playing make-believe. It's also fun to help your kids pick out and design their costumes, go trick-or-treating, and (of course) eat lots of yummy candy. However, Halloween has seemed to balloon in both importance and in retail dominance with every passing year. I can't go through any store (starting in September!) without being bombarded by some Halloween product or another. And when you have multiple kids, and they each have a Halloween party (or two, or three) to attend, it all gets to be a bit much.
We started celebrating Halloween approximately a week early, when we took a family trip to the Reid Park Zoo. Sadly, this was to be our last trip as members of the zoo; we've been members for nine years! However, with all our kids in school, and with busier lives, we decided that we didn't need a regular membership any more; an occasional trip (once a year or so) will have to satisfy us from now on.
However, this zoo trip also featured lots of Halloween decorations. The zoo throws a large evening Halloween party every year, and we happened to show up on the morning before the big night, so all the decorations were up everywhere...and we didn't have to pay extra to see any of it.
The Halloween decorations ended up fascinating my children even more than the animals during this trip...
...except for feeding the giraffes! This is always one of their favorite things to do.
The kids were also lucky enough to ride on the zoo's brand-new carousel as part of our trip. The carousel had just opened the week before, so they were glad we were able to "sneak it in" on our last member visit to the zoo.
Of course, there were skeletons riding the carousel along with my children; gotta keep that Halloween motif going.
The rest of that week was filled up with the other usual Halloween miscellany. I had to put finishing touches on Lorelai's costume...
This year, my beautiful kind oldest child wanted to be an axe murderer. I never thought I'd have to try and simulate a realistic blood-spatter pattern for a Halloween costume; you learn something new every day, I guess.
For the last two years, the girls' Halloween costumes have ended up costing us a pretty penny. Two years ago, I bought two of the three costumes from the store. Last year, I thought I would "save money" by making the girls' costumes myself. And then they all decided to go as Ninja Turtles characters, and it resulted in several trips to clothing and craft stores, plus lots of time putting it all together. Ugh. This year, I vowed we'd have a "thrift-store"-style Halloween; I told the girls it was up to them to choose their costumes, based on the parts we had laying around the house. I'd be willing to buy makeup and a few cheap accessories, but that was it!
Here's what they came up with: Lorelai the axe murderer...
Celeste the pirate (yay! Now allthree of my girls have been pirates)...
Aurora the fairy queen (not princess, as she constantly reminded me)...
Overall, I thought the outfits all worked out pretty well. Best yet, they were all pretty comfortable, and the girls had no problem wearing them frequently throughout the week.
They first tested their costumes out at our LDS ward's trunk or treat, which was way too overcrowded (we combined the activity with another ward; there were hundreds of people roaming around. It was pretty awful). After the trunk or treat (and hopped up on sugar), we returned home to carve our pumpkins.
This year, the girls helped out more than they had at any previous year. It was nice to see them getting into the action (and it was nice to not have to do it all myself...Nathan is a Halloween grinch and hates carving pumpkins).
Then came Friday, October 30th, the day of our school's Halloween parade. Everybody had a great time showing off their costumes and goofing off with friends.
The parade ended with all the elementary school kids gathering together on the field to entertain the parents with a flash mob set to Michael Jackson's "Thriller." It was so cute to see everyone strutting their zombie stuff out there in the chilly air. (For the record, this was the coldest Halloween I've yet experienced in Arizona; it rained that Friday, and it was cool and breezy all weekend.)
Aurora also had a Halloween class party that day, complete with a ton of sweet treats.
The fun continued at our house right after school; since I apparently can't help myself, I threw a Halloween "luncheon" (I was too cowardly to call it a "party," since I hadn't planned any games). I whipped up some bread sticks with dipping sauce, "witches' brooms" (really string cheese attached to a pretzel), and some bubbling "witches' brew" punch, thanks to a little dry ice:
It was a pretty free-form get together; families showed up, kids played around together or watched a movie, adults visited with one another, and ultimately everyone went home.
When everyone finally left, I was exhausted but not overwhelmed. The clean-up didn't even take that long! I don't think I will do another Halloween get together next year; but having the holiday on a weekend seems to bring out the hostess in me, since I did a similar party last year.
However, there was another party that night...a Halloween party for adults only! Nathan and I hadn't been to one of these for quite some time. Several years ago, a family in our ward held huge, elaborate adult Halloween parties...but those parties were very crowded, had loud music, and involved party games that included public humiliation. If you know my husband, you'll know he is not too into those kinds of parties, so he wasn't too keen on going to any more Halloween parties ever again.
But this Halloween party was being thrown by close friends of ours, who are also a little more introverted than the previous hosts. They promised us all we had to do was come, bring a treat, and visit with friends. We thought that sounded safe enough...but what could we wear? Or specifically, what could I get Nathan to wear?
In then end, we decided to dress up as characters from one of our favorite shows: Parks And Recreation, a comedy about employees of a quirky Midwestern town's parks and recreation department. The show finished up its seven-season run last spring, but I thought (with Election Day nearing) it would still be a reasonably timely costume choice.
I ended up dressing up as Leslie Knope, the over-achieving, excessively perky parks employee who would eventually run for higher public office.
I even made myself a bunch of campaign signs, and ordered some "Knope 2016" pins from Etsy to wear too (in the show, it was hinted that Leslie eventually ran for some national-level position. Congressman? President? Who knows?).
Nathan went as Ron Swanson, Leslie's uber-libertarian, taciturn, forever mustachioed co-worker and friend. It was one of the easiest costumes he's ever had to do. All he had to do was grow a mustache, carry a mug around, and wear my campaign pin. Occasionally, he would spout Ron Swanson "words of wisdom" (most of which involve manly pursuits like steak, hunting, and woodwork). It was the perfect costume for him.
We had a lot of fun at the party; our friends had decorated their whole house to look like Hogwarts a few weeks previously, because their oldest daughter had held a Harry Potter-themed birthday. They had put so much work into their costumes and decorations that they decided to leave it all up and invite all the adults over to show it off a second time!
Sadly, I didn't get any pictures of the party; the lighting was too dark for my dying camera. But we did bring along treats that were "in character" for our costumes. Leslie Knope loves waffles more than any food in the world, so I trussed up a bunch of Eggo mini-waffles for a snack!
We also brought lots of bacon, Ron Swanson's favorite food. Our hosts had provided a chocolate fountain for the party, and most of the bacon ended up dipped in chocolate. Yuck! I preferred it in its unadulterated greasy glory. But I suppose many of the men at the party just couldn't resist.
We were totally pooped after the party that night. But our Halloween celebrating wasn't over yet! The following morning was the White Elephant Parade, a long-running tradition in our community. The parade is hosted by the local White Elephant thrift store, and over one hundred local organizations and schools take part in it. Normally, the parade falls on one of the last Saturdays in October; since Halloween was the last Saturday in October this year, the whole parade was very Halloween-themed.
We'd gone to watch the White Elephant Parade last year (and mostly enjoyed it), but this year for the first time, one of our family members was participating! Now that Lorelai is a member of her school's advanced jazz band, she was to be included in the parade. The advanced band rides on a large moving platform and plays as they go. The band kids all had lots of fun dressing up as "zombies," decorating their float, and playing "Thriller" and "Ghostbusters" for the cheering crowds. I was very proud of her and happy for her effort!
After that, all that remained in our Halloween was the "main event": trick or treating! We warmed up for it by watching The Nightmare Before Christmas(one of our holiday favorites), and after a restful afternoon, we put on our shoes and headed out.
Perhaps due to the parade earlier in the day (and perhaps because our neighborhood was more abandoned than usual this year), the kids got tired of trick or treating a little earlier than they did the year before. That meant it was time to drop Aurora off at home and take the older kids around to the "spooked-out" houses throughout the community.
This year, we picked up a friend of Celeste's, along with the foreign-exchange student currently living at her house, to join us. The student, named Julia, was from Taiwan, and as such was fascinated by Halloween, since it is barely celebrated in her country. She had so much fun going from house to house, checking out each new horrific detail, and laughing with delight at each scary costume and flashing decoration. We went to a handful of "haunted" houses, some of which were quite professional looking (and more than a little scary to a wimp like me; one of them even had a chainsaw-wielding maniac running through it!). The kids often ran from these houses screaming (or in one case, crying), but they always wanted to go back for more. My kids are definitely fearless, and have a taste for the macabre.
After a long night filled with spooks, scares, and candy, we came home. Nathan and I tossed the kids into bed and crashed on the couch, eating a lot of candy and watching Zombieland (our current Halloween movie of choice). The very next morning (early Sunday!), I staggered out of bed, pulled out my storage bins from the garage, and took down all the Halloween decorations! The kids even came out to help me; they even threw away their jack o'lanterns without a second thought. I guess we were all ready for Halloween to be over this year. It was fun, but bring on Thanksgiving and Christmas!
Saturday, October 17th, 2015 was a very special day for our community. It was the day the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints held the official groundbreaking ceremony for the Tucson Temple. It's something that many local members of the church have been waiting for for decades. The Barretts haven't been here for "decades" (yet??), but this groundbreaking was still a long-awaited event for us.
Photo courtesy of Kali Hoenes
Our family has lived in the Tucson area for more than twelve years now; over time, we had resigned ourselves to the fact that we'd never live close to an LDS temple while in Arizona. True, there are several other temples in Arizona. We are part of the Mesa Arizona temple district and have visited it many times (here's a blog post about one of those visits). And in the last year, twonew temples have been completed in the Phoenix area as well; that has opened up some of our temple attendance options! But it has often felt as if Tucson was a part of Arizona "forgotten" by the church, despite its many faithful members.
It was sometimes hard not to get jealous of Phoenix. When the Gilbert temple was announced (and when we realized it would be located less than ten miles away from the Mesa temple), I was furious. Nathan and I have struggled to attend the temple regularly over the last several years...mostly due to the huge time commitment required combined with caring for our three young children. A temple trip to Mesa takes a minimum of seven hours; that's a long time for small children to be away from home! And as our children have gotten older, it's been hard to find a Saturday that wasn't too busy for a trip to the Phoenix area. Perhaps it sounds like I'm making excuses...maybe I am. However, balancing everything in our busy lives hasn't gotten easier over the years, and (for better or worse) the inconvenience of temple trips has made it a lesser priority at certain times in our lives.
But then, a few years ago, we saw a brilliant ray of hope. During the October 2012 session of the LDS Church's General Conference, Thomas S. Monson, the president of the church, announced that a temple was being planned for the Tucson area. Our family was overjoyed by the news; it felt like we'd finally been "noticed" as a region. We knew our prayers (and the prayers of many wonderful, faithful saints in the area) had finally been answered!
Of course, since this is Tucson/Pima County we're talking about, we knew that the actual answer to the prayer (the temple's completion) would take more time. Nathan's job puts him in contact with many county, municipal, and other government officials; within hours of the announcement, he correctly predicted (via a simple Internet search for local land owned by the LDS Church) exactly where the temple would be built. Truthfully, most members in the Tucson area figured it out pretty quickly; but we all knew the church wouldn't announce the official site until all the legal miscellany was completely taken care of. Unfortunately, due to Nathan's many years working with the aforementioned government officials, he also predicted that it would take several years for the temple groundbreaking, never mind the actual dedication of the building.
The optimistic side of me brushed off his warnings, but my husband turned out to be right; it was just over three years between the General Conference announcement and the temple groundbreaking! Many of the delays were typical Pima County red tape (it takes forever for things to go through the government here). A big problem was getting the temple's architectural design approved by the city. Tucson has a lot of "dark skies" ordinances (mostly due to the close proximity of a number of major astronomical observatories). This could easily cause complications when building a temple, as the church often likes to illuminate the buildings at night. Add to that the county's strict zoning laws, and it doubtless meant more than one headache for the church's temple department, as they struggled to come up with a design that would work.
*Note: the next paragraph is filled with rampant speculation, so take all this with a grain of salt!*
Rendering by Kerry Niesen
I am not privy to all the details, but from what I heard, the church submitted an initial design for the temple in 2013 that included a 95-foot spire; not uncommon for an LDS temple, but difficult to get approval for in Pima County. In the neighborhood where the temple was expected to be built, the building height limit was only 44 feet, plus a dome. In order to approve the taller spire, the church would have to get an exemption from the county's Board of Adjustments, which had the potential to be a long, grueling process. In addition, the spire would likely need to be lit from the inside, not the outside, to be in accordance with the city's "dark skies" ordinances. Besides the height and lighting issues, I also heard (this is all rumor, mind you!) that certain city/county officials were worried the temple's initial design made it too similar to the well-known San Xavier del Bac Mission, located on the south side of town.
So it seems the church went back to the drawing board with their design..for at least a year! Finally, in 2015, this was the conceptual drawing that was released to the public, along with an announcement of the temple groundbreaking on October 17th:
At first, the design startled me: the rounded dome atop the temple is fairly unique among LDS temples; there are certainly no other temples in Arizona that look like this! The shape actually reminded me of a Muslim mosque...but with an angel Moroni on top to confuse random passers-by. However, the more I looked at the drawing, the more I started to fall in love with the idea. Many of the newer LDS temples are very same-y in design and construction. I loved the idea that our temple will have a distinctive, memorable look that will make people curious to study it and learn more about it. I love that even though we have waited a long time for a temple, we will be blessed to have a unique, special building that is custom designed for our great community.
This was our view of the groundbreaking; pretty exciting, right??
The day of the groundbreaking was cold, windy, and even a little rainy. For those lucky enough to attend the groundbreaking in person, this was likely a bit uncomfortable. But for our family (who got to watch the proceedings live via satellite broadcast in our local stake center), the weather didn't bother us one bit!
Of course, our comfortable seats were but a small reward; we were pretty jealous of the people who got to attend the ceremony live! I mean, they got to meet Dieter Uchtdorf, for crying out loud. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity for those present, and while I am happy for them, I am also bummed we didn't get the same chance. Oh well; maybe we can finangle our way into the open house or the dedication in a few years!
DIETER UCHTDORF! Photo by Kali Hoenes
During the broadcast, we saw many many familiar faces; a few friends of ours sang in the multi-stake choir, and our old bishop in the Tucson East Stake (now president of the East Stake!) was one of the first to hoist those golden shovels!
Besides the joy of seeing work on the temple begin, it was wonderful to spend the whole broadcast scanning the crowd for people we knew. It was also nice afterwards to see my Facebook feed blow up with so many pictures from the event. Many of the pictures were taken by Sahuarita friends...but in the background of those pictures, I would see friends from our years in Tucson as well.
The whole experience filled me with a happiness that is hard to describe. I was so happy to see so many people we loved get the chance to participate in a little history. I was happy to see the joy on everyone's faces as they mingled with General Authorities. Most of all, I was happy to see the fruition of so many people's hopes and dreams ever since we moved to this part of the country. We know so many wonderful people in the Tucson area, including many amazing Latter-day Saints. This new temple will bring so many blessings to our region, and will be the means of bringing many people closer to Jesus Christ.
My friend Tabatha shaking the hand of Uchtdorf, an Apostle of the Lord. Photo by Spencer Boerup
I am thankful this blessing will be extended to so many people we personally know and love, and I am also thankful for the many more people I don't even know whose lives will be positively affected by this building. I know the temple is God's house on the earth, and I know the things we learn in temples help us both in our everyday, "mortal" lives, and in preparation for our eternity as well.
Now we just have to wait until the building is done. We'll be watching its progress with great interest! We are hoping to take the girls up to the future temple site several times over the next many months, so they can watch the construction process. I hope they too will appreciate what a great blessing this temple will be to our home here in southern Arizona.
Fall is such a wonderful time to get into the kitchen and prepare delicious, sweet-smelling foods. I know these blog posts probably start to sound repetitive year after year, but I can't help it; certain recipes have become ingrained holiday traditions in our home, and we wouldn't have it any other way. For the last several years, my fall projects have become like clockwork: home canning in September and October; pumpkin bread and Thanksgiving savories in November; and holiday cookies and treats in December.
But of course, we haven't quite gotten to November and December yet, so let's take a look at some of the October goodies I cooked up, and the occasion behind each!
My home canning adventures continued throughout the month of October, whenever I could fit them in. I'd already done quite a bit of canning back in late August and early September, as I rushed to preserve our Apple Annie's fruits and vegetables. This year, I already had two different kinds of salsas, peaches, pears, and jam under my belt, thanks to Apple Annie's. But the one thing I hadn't canned yet was applesauce (ironic, given how many apples we brought home from Apple Annie's!). Applesauce is my family's favorite home-canned food, so I couldn't skip out on it.
I waited through September and part of October for a really good sale on apples at our local Sprouts store. Then Fall Break got really busy and I almost forgot to keep checking the sale flyers. Luckily, I noticed a big sale on Jonagold apples near the end of the month. I'd never canned Jonagolds before; however, Jonathan apples are my favorite apples to use in applesauce, and I reasoned that Jonagolds would have a similar flavor.
This year, I invited a couple of friends over to help slice up the apples and see how the canning was done. One of them was a canning "newbie" who wants to try canning but hasn't yet worked up the courage. It was fun to chat with them while working, and with their help I was able to get three batches of applesauce done that day, using up the majority of my Jonagolds.
The end result wasn't quite what I'd hoped for, but still pretty tasty. The applesauce had a nice rosy color, similar to my Jonathan applesauce, but the taste was much sweeter than what I was expecting. That was mildly disappointing, as I really like my applesauce a bit tart. However, I'm sure the family will still enjoy it when it comes time to crack these jars open.
Oh, yeah, and I made some apple butter too! I will likely give most of these jars away as gifts this holiday season...but we have still reserved a little for ourselves. The kids are finally getting a taste for apple butter as their taste buds get more sophisticated; Lorelai has been asking for it on her toast for the last several breakfasts.
At the same time I bought the apples, I also bought a bunch of plums to can. I'd canned a few jars a couple of years ago, and at the time the girls raved non-stop about how delicious they were. I'd always loved canned plums as a kid, myself, so I thought it was time to make more! So of course, after canning several jars, none of the kids ever want to have any. Grr. Oh well, at least the plums aren't going to spoil any time soon; hopefully the kids' taste buds will rediscover their love for plums in the future.
There was one Activity Days event at my home in October, and cookie decorating was involved. Lots of cookie decorating.
My partner, Rosemary, baked a few dozen spice cookies. Then I made a bunch of pumpkin-colored icing and bought some candy to make jack o'lantern faces, and voila! The girls had a lot of fun making a huge variety of faces.
I made one batch of the cookies myself, and thought they were delicious! I'd expected them to be boring sugar cookies, but they had a nice rich spicy flavor, and they were not too crumbly either. I saved the recipe and will definitely make them again sometime.
This was a busy Activity Day! We also made these cute little plaques that featured a quote from the LDS Proclamation to the Family. They will be great for hanging in each girl's home.
Last but not least, I made each of the girls a caramel apple to take home that night.
I was being a huge over-achiever! I had better pace myself, so I don't burn out on Activity Days too soon.
As many of you probably know, my birthday is in late October; since my kids have started school, I have always had to fight for my birthday to get attention, since it falls right in the midst of all the Halloween craziness. This year, my birthday fell on a weekend, so we went up to Tucson as a family and went out to lunch at one of my favorite restaurants.
US Fries specializes in poutine, a delicious Canadian dish that is basically fries smothered in gravy and cheese curds. US Fries takes that base recipe and modifies it in a few dozen ways, mostly by adding different combinations of meat and/or vegetables to the top of the fries. It might sound sloppy and disgusting and highly caloric...and it is! But darned if it isn't delicious, too.
After stuffing myself on French fries, I decided to go all in on my birthday weekend and eat obscene amounts of birthday cake...
Pumpkin shown for scale, not to indicate cake flavor...it's carrot cake, guys! Really!
I was feeling ambitious this year, and made a carrot cake with a white-chocolate/cream cheese frosting. It was very fancy and delicious. I didn't have a formal birthday party (perhaps that can wait until next year, when I turn the big 4-0), but I did invite several friends over to have some cake. It was nice to sit and visit for a few minutes with people I don't get to see as often as I used to.
My gorging wasn't done yet, though! Halloween week had plenty of cooking adventures. For our ward's trunk or treat, I cooked up a huge pot of chili (not pictured) and cornbread (also not pictured; it was pretty dark at that trunk or treat, you know!). Then, after school let out on Friday the 30th, I invited several families over for a Halloween luncheon. It wasn't a "party" like the one I put together last year; it was just an opportunity for people to come over and hang out and eat food that wasn't candy!
Everyone who came brought lots of yummy treats. I made the bubbling witches' brew (thanks to some dry ice I'd purchased on the way home!), and I also made some bread sticks with marinara sauce as dip. Everyone got very full on all the goodies. The kids put in a movie, the adults hung out and talked...it was all very relaxed and free-form. My kind of get-together!
Then, of course, there was Halloween itself...but that's a blog post for another day.
Our Fall Break was a little longer than usual this year. Strangely enough, it ended up feeling shorter at the same time. We missed the last day of school before Fall Break to go watch Wicked in Phoenix; not long after that, we headed south of the border for a camping trip in Rocky Point. We arrived home from that adventure on Tuesday, October 6th. Fall Break still had several days left, right? No sweat!
However, those days flew by; there was less time to get done our "essential tasks" than usual, due to our being out of town so much in the early part of the break. Before we knew it, Fall Break was over. We had one more crazy weekend of fun, and then it was back to school...and work...and seminary...and volunteer work...and all that other stuff. I barely had time to get our camping laundry done before it was back to the daily grind!
And yet, somehow our family managed to fit in a little more partying before heading back to reality. Here are some of the highlights:
On Friday, October 9th, our family went out to lunch at Tucson Meet Yourself, the city's cultural festival that is celebrated downtown every fall. This has become an annualfamilyevent for us; visiting is super easy because we can park the car in Nathan's office building, then all walk over together. This year was the first time Grandma Barrett came along for the fun, and we were glad to have her!
As in years past, we liked to travel from booth to booth to sample a large variety of cuisines. Here are the foods (most of these we shared with one another):
We started with a bunch of egg rolls and a chicken satay from one of the Thai food booths.
No trip to Tucson Meet Yourself would be complete without the girls trying these steamed BBQ pork buns. They are their all-time favorite snack at this event. Nathan and I enjoy the buns; Sandy tried one and didn't much care for it; but the girls' affection for these cute little treats only seems to grow every year.
I convinced everyone to try some Russian blini this year! They are very similar to French crepes, but perhaps a little heavier. We tried two blini...one was stuffed with cream and strawberry jam, the other with chicken, mushrooms and cheese. Both were tasty.
At the Polish booth, we tried out several pirogis, as well as some potato pancakes with applesauce.
We must have been in an eastern European mood this year! This plate came courtesy of the Swedish booth; it contained several meatballs, lingonberry sauce, pickled cucumbers, pickled cabbage, and rye bread.
Everybody tried out a meatball, and I devoured the rest. Nobody loves pickled food more than me, it seems! Also, nobody else wanted rye bread either. Oh well, I was grateful to have it.
The last food item on the list was this Turkish meat pie. It was really delicious, but by now I was pretty full, so I only had one bite.
We washed all our food down with several aguas frescas. We got a few watermelon-flavored drinks; in the picture is a mango drink and a glass of horchata (a rice/cinnamon/milk concoction that is really very tasty and refreshing).
It was so fun to have Grandma Barrett (aka Sandy) come with us this year. It was fun to show off the festival to a first-time visitor, and it made choosing our food a more interesting experience as well. Hopefully we can do it all together next year!
After stuffing ourselves silly, Nathan took the afternoon off and we headed for home. But our weekend wasn't done yet; Buckelew Farms was waiting for us the following morning!
Going to the pumpkin patch was a decision we made at almost the last minute. We had talked about it in an abstract sense way back in September. However, as October approached, and as we were calendaring one night just after arriving home from Rocky Point, we realized that the upcoming Saturday (October 10th) was the only Saturday of the month that wasn't already booked solid. We had no choice but to head to the pumpkin patch that very weekend. I briefly considered going to the large pumpkin patch/fall festival in Marana, since I'd heard so many good things about it. As it turned out, though, Nathan had several 50% off coupons for Buckelew Farms...so that made up our minds for us. The Marana festival would have to wait another year!
We always have fun taking the kids to a pumpkin patch; however, sometimes we don't know which kids are going on field trips to pumpkin patches in school, and which kids aren't. As it turned out, Celeste was the only one of our kids to visit a pumpkin patch this season, so we feel retroactively justified in going. Also, when we arrived at Buckelew, it was nice to see that they'd been adding more activities for kids at the farm. It's nice to see them providing additional things to do; they've been slowly stepping up their game over the last several years (they probably have to, what with the Marana festival impinging on their turf).
Buckelew also has a haunted corn maze on their farm; I imagine most of their fall profits come from that attraction, and not the half-hearted carnival rides they are setting up. Of course, my scare-loving daughters wanted to stick around and try out the Terror In The Corn that night, and of course, Daddy and I shot them down. This is as close as they got to the Terror:
We did get to try out their daytime corn maze, though!
It wasn't too large, but it was a nice shady walk on a hot afternoon. We may have accidentally taken a wrong turn and gotten out of the maze prematurely, but at least we didn't damage anything. Overall, though, I much preferred Apple Annie's corn mazes that we visited a couple of years ago.
The pumpkin patch, however, did not disappoint...there was a good selection of large, healthy pumpkins on hand. It's nice that the girls are getting old enough that they can pick and carry their own pumpkins with greater ease than in years past. Celeste ended up being unusually choosy this year, however...she took a really long time deciding just which pumpkin was "the one" meant for her. She took so long, in fact, that the rest of the family (save myself) climbed back on the tractor and headed back to the farm without her!
At long last, however, she found a pumpkin that satisfied her.
After paying for our pumpkins, we took a little time to goof off and check out some of the other attractions at the farm. They had their "big chair" and their wooden "photo-op" mock-ups, as in years past...
...but this year, they farm management had added other things, like a petting zoo, a small pedal-cart track, a pumpkin-painting station, a zombie-themed paintball game, a rubber ducky race track (via some repurposed drainage pipes) and a few inflatable slides.
Buckelew Farms may not be as close to town (or as elaborate) as the Marana farm; however, it still makes for an enjoyable afternoon out. We are very happy with the pumpkins we bought there; we know they are going to make excellent jack o'lanterns! And with that, our bustling busy Fall Break came to an end. We hoped we could survive the rest of the month!
