Pumpkin Patch

One of our friends from Steph's mom's book club organized a group get together to the pumpkin patch at Uesugi Farms this weekend, so we bundled the whole family plus grandparents (my dad came out for the weekend to meet Alex and fly home with my mom) into two cars (yup, with two car seats there's not really room in the Outback for one extra adult, let alone two) and headed down to Morgan Hill for the day.

Once we got there (which took longer than it really needed to owing to a disagreement between me and the GPS) the first thing we had to do was ride the train:

Grandma consented to skip the train ride to watch Alex sleep in his stroller, and to take pictures.  Fortunately the train wasn't very long so she hardly had to wait for our return but it was adequate to quiet Evan's demands for a tractor ride (he really wanted to take a tractor ride, but I'm not sure that the hay ride they offered would have been any closer to what he was thinking of than the train).  We spent the rest of the time before lunch looking around at the pumpkins (it is, after all, a pumpkin patch):

Evan got to choose his own pumpkin, as well as a pumpkin for his brother.  He immediately gravitated to this one with the broken stem and wouldn't be dissuaded from his choice (not that we tried that hard since it was an otherwise exemplary pumpkin).  I couldn't decide which of these pictures I liked better, the not-quite-posed:

or the mistimed smile:

so I decided to include both of them.

After choosing pumpkins we met the group in the snack shack/picnic area for lunch, where we were serenaded by a mariachi band that Evan thought was wonderful:

He was doing this for close to half an hour in a corn dog-fueled haze, but that was the best video I got.