Fall Festival

Happy Monday! Well, okay. Monday.

This weekend our family went to a fall festival.

Mom-E absolutely LOVES fall, and the words "hayride and marshmallow roast" (okay, even just 'marshmallow roast') are enough to get small men out of jammies and into actual clothes.

So, this was a recipe for good old-fashioned family fun.

The website said the festival was from 5-10 pm.

That was a good thing for us, because despite the excitement, it was one of those days that it took us ALL DAY to get everyone clean, fed, and clothed.

(Bab-E Brother took a long afternoon nap.

Then we decided to fix a "quick dinner": squash casserole.

And by "quick", I mean it took about 4 hours to cut up and saute all of the squash and onions. And then another 4 hours for it to bake. And then 4 hours to clean up the after-dinner mess"

So, about 6:30 am pm, we set off for the fall festival.

30 minutes later we arrive. As we're getting out of the van, we can see a fire truck (cool), a bonfire (really cool), a tractor pulling folks on the hay ride (fun), and the music is jammin' (cue Little Brother boppin').

And then the fun begins.

Turns, out, there's a schedule posted that did not appear on the website.

Apparently, marshmallow roasting was from 5-6:30.

WHAT?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

You gotta be kiddin' me. You've got a bonfire roaring (and the fire department standing by).

Are you telling me that the marshmallows have to go to bed by 6:30?!?!?!?!?!?!

Oh well, at least there's still a hayride.

Oops. It's 7:15 pm, and they proceed to tell us that the next available hayride tickets are for 8:45 pm. That'd work great, if Bab-E Brother's bedtime wasn't 7 pm. Did the other 10 people at the festival each buy 5 round-trip tickets? (Okay, so there were quite a few people there).

That's okay (the boys didn't know yet), at least they have sno-cones.

So we proceed to wait in line for about 10 minutes...only to get to the front of the line to learn that they're out of sno-cones. Priceless.

Fortunately, they have not run out of lemonade, which kept the tears over no sno-cones to a minimum.

But despite these setbacks, we still managed to find stuff to do.

They had a storyteller, which Big Brother really got into.

They also had a bean bag toss game, and the prize--whether or not you actually made a basket--was a bag of cheeze-its. Jackpot!

And in between these events, I got to take the boys on the 1-mile hike (in the dark) from the festival site to the bathroom. (That's what you get for giving someone with a 4-ounce bladder, 32 ounces of lemonade.)

We had enough fun that it was almost 8:45, and so we tried to again score hayride tickets. Only to find out that now the next hayride was now 9:45! Ouch.

So at that point, we called it a night and headed home.

But not before taking pause to look up and get an amazing view of the stars "out in the country."

It may not have been the most well-organized fall festival, but we still managed to have a good time together.

Have a good week,
Busy-Dad-E