Very Fall-ish Things

In addition to going to the pumpkin patch a week or two ago, we've been able to do some other fall-ish things recently too... like going to the NC State Fair and a corn maze!

NC State Fair:
Going to the fair is a special tradition if you live in Raleigh... lots of people even take a day off work to be able to go spend a whole day there with their families! This year, Matt and I planned our afternoon at the fair around two Christian bands that came that night, Tenth Avenue North and Jeremy Camp. Grandaddy and Nana B. agreed to keep Kenna while we went so that our afternoon was relaxed with no time pressures! It sounds silly, but just having no diapers to stop and change all day was such a treat!

One of my favorite things is collecting all the stickers and wear them with pride... we brought extras of all of them home for Kenna this year too.
Every year we ride the Ferris Wheel together and take a picture at the top. Our picture this year was a little awkward since we weren't actually sitting next to each other. The little door to get in and out of the ride was right between us! Luckily we didn't fall out. It's beautiful to see the entire fair from the top of the ride.
Mercilessly, we didn't take photos of all the ridiculous amounts of fair junk food we ate... which honestly is why everybody goes to the fair. My favorites this year were the NCSU ice cream (which somehow I had never had before! Delicious!) and the awesome apple cider slushies (I had three and literally could have eaten dozens more. They were incredible!). Matt's favorite was the ice cream too, McBride's polish sausages, and the elephant ears (he loves the elephant ears, and I love the funnel cakes!)

For a fun comparison, here is the one we took on top of the ferris wheel in 2006, right after our second anniversary! I remember being bitter that my sunglasses had just broken and it was so sunshiney that day! Isn't Matt's smile is adorable? We look so much younger!


The Corn Maze:

We went to a corn maze in Morrisville with our Sunday School class, and we had a great time even though it was a little chilly and tried to rain on us a few times! There were a couple of fun things besides the corn maze (which was extremely detailed and partially shaped like a picture of Kay Yow from above) such as a corn kernel sandbox, a "cow truck" (a tractor pulling sideways barrels on wheels that were decorated to look like cows... they looked like an awesome, bumpy ride!), a hayride, and my favorite... a corn husk chucker gun. I'm sure that's not the official name, but imagine those "guns" they use to shoot out tshirts at football games, then imagine shoving a corn husk into it and shooting it out into a field, trying to hit a round hay bale with a target painted on it. Awesome! We all shot it a couple of times.

They also had duck races (our class is competitive!):
We were laughing that Kenna has already been on two hayrides in her short life! She was turned around looking at another little girl who was screaming bloody murder... apparently not so much a fan of the hayride. Kenna loved it! They started playing music over a speaker right after this, and she started clapping along and laughing.
We tried to get Kenna to crawl through the hay tunnel, but she wasn't so sure about it, and I started wondering how we would get her out if she crawled into the middle and then stopped! But it made for a cool picture:
We ate a great lunch at Smithfield's barbeque before calling it a day, and all the kids left with balloons with a bag of cookies tied to the string. We love our Sunday school class and have had such a great time getting to know these incredible families! Hayride, corn chucker, barbeque, and balloons... if that's not a successful day, I don't know what is!