Kicking Off Decorative Gourd Season

It's decorative gourd season y'all! To celebrate our beautiful 90-degree fall weekend (well, fall in Texas), we voluntarily drove to Dallas to enjoy the fabulous pumpkin village at the Dallas Arboretum.

I coaxed Landon into a handsome shirt (thanks to school uniforms, his t-shirt wearing weekends are precious), Claire jumped at the chance to march around town in her current favorite dress and boots, and Cora was lovingly tucked into her festive Gymboree pumpkin outfit. Because this is her first Halloween and first holidays are important.

WTF am I doing amongst all these decorative gourds?

I only got one good picture of all three kids, and the angle on it is a little weird, but I had promised a morning of handsome-shirt-wearing-fun, so the camera mostly stayed in the backpack.

Mostly.

Not having it.

Except for Cora. The big kids are big enough to run around with only half-hearted-supervision (they were racing through the hay bale maze as I took the below), so Cora got to be an only child for ten minutes of pumpkin-loving picture-snapping goodtimes.

Hard to believe I was one million days pregnant when we came last year. We hadn't even met our little peanut yet and now here she is in a 12-18 month outfit and hands coordinated enough to remove any attempts at a retroactive pumpkin hat.

I tried to get a good picture of Cora and JP, but she was much too busy flapping her hands at him and giving him hugs. So I captured that instead.

We found the big kids again and JP took his traditional nontraditional picture with them.

And then we left the masses to explore the rest of the garden. If you live anywhere near DFW, you really should go. There's a special Children's Garden now that is just awesome. Again, the camera mostly stayed put up, but I couldn't help taking a few. Like the family exiting the tiny tree maze.

And Cora sliding down after losing a battle trying to climb up a tiny playscape.

Or Landon probably violating a safety rule.

And Cora watching from afar, desperately wishing she could flaunt safety codes too.

There was a lot of running and learning and getting a little wet in the hydroelectric power lab. The big kids got to play with water guns and Landon was so excited to hit his target while Claire was disappointed the designers had cleverly keep the water guns' range juuuust short of the people on other side.

All in all, it was an excellent morning, capped off by pizza and a beer at our favorite pizza place, lots of yard work and grocery shopping, and then the world's largest salad for dinner. With baked squash on the side because of course. It's decorative gourd season!