Pumpkins Can Make You Happy

I'm very happy. Oliver brought home a pumpkin today. I had asked him to stop by the store on the way home for lunch (it doesn't open until 1100) and see if we could still get one. We were originally going to get one on Saturday when the PTA here was selling them at the annual Fall Fest. However, we were a little late due to Owen's nap and getting dinner.

Apparently, that isn't a good idea around here. Most of the action was over, it seemed, so we were milling around debating what there was to do. They had advertised they were doing hay rides, so when a tractor pulling a trailer full of kids arrived about then we decided to get on for a ride with the boys before we bought our pumpkins. On getting in, we discovered that around here, a "hay" ride is actually a "coconut frond" ride, which I thought was funny.

 I love that this tractor read "John Deere/ Navy Tractor" on it.

 Daddy and Oscar enjoying the ride.

Looking out the back of the tractor. The roads are actually unpaved here. 

Andros is mostly rock, so the unpaved roads have the feel of a road that was once paved years ago, 

but is now breaking down. It's not as bad as a straight-up dirt road.

This coconut frond ride ended up taking almost an hour. I guess they do two rides, a shorter one for the little kids, then a long one for the older ones. The long one took us around the perimeter of the base on dirt roads. The base seems quite small until you ride around it at 10 miles per hour. By the end of the ride, half the kids were begging to get off, and the other half were busy decimating the coconut fronds and attacking each other with them. We were in the former camp, and jumped out to see everyone else cleaning up.

I no longer saw the pile of pumpkins, so I asked someone where they had gone. Sadly, they had all been sold while we were on our trip around the base. Someone offered us use of their golf cart to get one from the store the next morning before they were all sold off. We walked off thinking we would do that.

However, we woke up yesterday realizing it was Sunday. It was a really hard decision to not buy one. On the one hand, I didn't want to not be able to get one, but on the other, I didn't want to set a poor example to both our sons and the people we live with here, none of which are LDS. We decided the latter trumped the former, and we waited until today to try to get ours.

I'm grateful it worked out all right, but I was willing to go without. It would have been worth it to do the right thing. I know that will last longer than the pumpkin.