Forever 25: Dallas Arboretum Pumpkin Patch

A few weeks ago, I bought a Groupon to the Arboretum. On Monday, October 10th, I was off from school for “Fair Day” as it used to be called, and Mitch took a work from home day so that we could go on a family outing. We loaded up and headed out to the pumpkin patch at the Dallas Arboretum for the second year in a row. We didn’t anticipate the traffic from the fair though, nor did we anticipate the number of kids that would be at the arboretum that day. I figured that with all of the free fair tickets that had been passed out for that day, everyone would be there, and we’d have the run of the place. I guess everyone else felt the same way. When we got there, their tiny parking lot was completely full. We ended up having to park about 3 miles away in an abandoned shopping center. On the plus side, they offered a free shuttle from the parking lot to the front gate, so we ended up not having to pay for parking.

Once we got there, we stopped at the photography booth to get Witten’s picture taken by a professional. Her pictures were fine, but I don’t think she edited them at all, so they are all really dark. His huge bruise is also showing from when he hit his head at daycare the Friday before. (I edited the bruise out of most of my photographs.) Needless to say, we won’t be buying any of those!

Next, we went to the Tom Thumb pumpkin patch to get some cute pictures.

Most of Witten’s pictures ended up looking like this.

I guess maybe I brought it upon myself. Remember these from last year?!? He may be scarred for life!

After some tickling though, we came out with some pretty cute ones of him.

Daddy throwing him up in the air helped too I think.

The fairy tale pumpkin village was really cute, but it was hard to get pictures of with all of the other people around, so we only got a few this year. I guess it’s ok though because it looks pretty much like it did last year!

We waited in line to get our picture taken on Cinderella’s carriage. Unfortunately, the volunteer who took our picture didn’t understand the directions, so the only part of the topiary horse that you can see is his butt.

On the way out, we decided to cut through this little circle area before we got some food. I’m SOOO glad that we did because I think that we got our best pictures of the day there. They had these cute steps that were flanked by two stone walls, lined with pumpkins, they had beautiful ironwork, at flowers at the top.

By the time we were done there, Witten was tapped out.

We stopped at the café for lunch. ($27 for 3 people!) It was good. I got a wonderful chicken salad sandwich with chips, Mitch got some kind of turkey something or other, and Witten ate his entire grilled cheese and all of his fruit but the pineapple. I guess since it’s the only money we spent that day, and it filled our tummies so that we didn’t have a screaming toddler all the way home like we did when we went to the fair, it was worth it.
Witten liked to look out the window when we were driving home. He never gets to see too much from his car seat, so this was a real treat for him.