Archive retrieval....

My title is simply because everything I'm about to blog about happened waaaaay back in October. Before Halloween even. Yes. I've turned into a sporadic blogger. I no longer think in blog. Sad. But. It also means I'm fulfilled in other ways lately. Which isn't a bad thing. For my journaling, yes. But not for life in general. Moving on....

My little sister (only now she's grown up and married) came to visit. She is known as Aunt Kate in these parts. And boy is she loved. We only had one day together before I was flying off to meet Shawn in San Francisco (another post). I wanted to make the best of it. We started out the morning by attending the local Universities homecoming parade. We parked for a quick get-a-way and arrived just in time to start collecting candy.

After the parade we headed a few miles out of town. We stopped at Burger King for lunch, then headed to a pumpkin patch/corn maze. It turned out to be on the pricey side, but when you've been driving for awhile, you just do it anyway. There were quite a few activities for the kids to enjoy. This little "ride" pulled by a tractor was mostly enjoyed by the 3 little ones

while Ethan and Kennedy tried out the zip-line.

All the kids enjoyed the "corn box". A giant sandbox full of corn kernels. Burying each other is apparently fun stuff.

Jumping off hay bales proved to be exciting. You can actually see what the sky was starting to look like at this point. A little bit on the scary side. It was warm outside. When the sky looks like that and it's warm it's prime for a tornado. Or a really nasty thunderstorm.

Regardless, we kept playing. We attempted the corn maze, only to lose Landon and scramble out really quick to find him. Once we were all gathered, we decided to rest on a tractor pulled hayride.

I learned something 5 minutes in. When the sky looks like it did, don't position you and your small children in a situation that "traps" you in one location. Without covering. Exactly 30 seconds after I snapped the above pictures, the sky opened up. Torrential downpour. Like nothing I've ever seen before. Well. By seen I mean been outside in. The tractor took a detour through the corn maze and deposited us at the entrance where we'd parked our stroller. Kate ran ahead with the boys while I held Presley. Kennedy's job was to push the stroller. The wind was blowing so hard this wasn't an easy task. And the rain. It felt like hail. It was coming hard and fast. And it hurt. We finally made it to the car and scrambled inside. I started to laugh. Looking at my wet little monkeys, and looking myself like I'd jumped in the shower with my clothes on, I couldn't help it. We kind of sat for a few minutes not knowing what to do. Then it stopped raining as quickly as it started and the sun was shining like nothing ever happened. Only. We were way too wet to venture back out and enjoy ourselves. Kate volunteered to go back to the entrance and see about getting us a refund. Which she did. She used her sweet little charm and they refunded every single penny. Best of both worlds. We played for a little over an hour.........for free. Perfect day. Even if we did look like drowned rats.