Adventuring Abroad: Pumpkin Patch & Halloween

In mid-October, we drove north to Peterborough to visit a local pumpkin patch! It was located at Hill's Farm, which appears to grow various types of pick-your-own produce throughout the year; we will hopefully go back in the summertime to see what other goodies we can find.

Autumn is a rainy season in England, and the pumpkin patch was extremely muddy -- not the kind of mud that easily rinses off either. It's very thick and glue-like, and the boot scrapers located near the parking lot didn't do much to refresh our footwear after our pumpkin hunt! Luckily Charlotte had her striped wellie boots on -- Paul and I need to invest in some good wellies for our remaining 2 years here. The cheap plasticky ones I bought last January aren't cutting it for the English mud!

We walked along the edge of a couple of out of season fields before reaching the patch. Charlotte was interested in the different colors and shapes of the pumpkins, calling the smaller ones "babies" and the bigger ones "mommies." After we had picked out a "baby" and a "mommy" pumpkin, we loaded them into our borrowed wheelbarrow to head back to the shop at the parking lot. Like any good British attraction (no matter how tiny), there was a cafe -- I ordered a hot cocoa to warm up from the windy and chilly day. There was also a small playground, although Charlotte enjoyed stomping in the puddles more than the actual equipment!

I found it interesting that rather than weighing your pumpkin, they have a large plywood board set up on short stilts with various sized circles cut into it. You fit your pumpkin to the hole that matches up best (the one it can still fit through without getting stuck), and the price is written next to the hole. Unique to England??

"Ghosts" in the trees

This isn't really Halloween, but C is wearing her Halloween shirt and I love that she likes to unload the silverware drawer from the dishwasher. She doesn't really understand why we have to wait until they are clean before putting them away (luckily no yucky mishaps yet), but she can usually match up the child utensils and adult forks, spoons, and (non-sharp) knives to almost 100% accuracy. Sometimes she says "dis goes here..." as she starts to put a fork in the spoon area, then looks at me to see if I'm paying attention/going to correct her. Time to put her to work!

For Halloween, we decided to dress Charlotte as one of her current favorite characters, Madeline. We already had everything necessary except the straw hat and red ribbon, so it came together pretty quickly with a little help from Amazon. We were able to Skype with many family members before heading out to trick-or-treat on base.

Halloween is definitely not as big of a holiday in England as it is in the States. We heard a statistic that the UK only spends about 20% of what Americans spend on Halloween, although I'm not sure if that was a per capita statistic or not (so probably not very helpful). We did hear that if you want trick-or-treaters to come to your door, you need to have a pumpkin outside. (But we did not want them, as we went up to the Trunk-or-Treat on base that night, so we don't know how many kids would have shown up at our house). We saw a few local children out and dressed up, but not large groups at all.

The air force base does a nice job putting on the Trunk-or-Treat for the kids, and the military members in base housing also welcome trick-or-treaters at their doors. We had a great time watching little "Madeline" learn how to say "Trick or treat" and how to take only one piece of candy. She was very determined to get to the door to perform these tricks at each house, so we had to talk about waiting our turn if other children were already there in front of her. She was on a mission! We walked around with our friends Monica and Tim and their 2 girls, who were dressed as a rainbow and Dorothy from "The Wizard of Oz." They are always so sweet to Charlotte.