Winner Winner Chicken Dinner!

We had Saturday morning free from soccer games, drama classes and everything and anything else that seems to take up our time. It was a brisk fall morning so we decided to pack up the kids and head up north to the annual pumpkin roll.

I don't know how or why this pumpkin roll tradition got started. This is only the second year that we have ever attended. Basically you bring a pumpkin (or buy one there for a dollar) and you pay a couple of dollars to register your pumpkin with a number. You carry your pumpkin to the top of a hill and you fling it down the hill in hopes that yours will be the first one to the bottom. They break the rolling down into age groups with the youngest children going first all the way up to adults. Each age group is also broken down into smaller groups of twenty to twenty five or so. I bet they have close to a thousand pumpkins that go barreling down that hill on the day of the roll.

It is hard to get a photo of the pumpkins actually coming down the hill because you will get hit by a pumpkin if you are in the road. And believe me...they hit HARD!

Spencer picked out a pumpkin to roll, but Evan and Hailey didn't want to roll theirs. They wanted to paint them instead. Trent and Spencer trudged up the hill to wait for their turn to roll while Hailey, Evan and I waited at the bottom to watch them come down.

About forty five minutes later, I finally spotted Spencer running down the hill looking for his pumpkin in his huge orange puffy jacket with one hand trying to keep his too big in the waist jeans from coming down. If only the boy would listen to me when I tell him to put a belt on!

For some reason I had a feeling that Spencer's pumpkin would be first in his heat to the bottom and my intuition was right on. He inherited the Dan-O luck. Of course he won! And what you ask does the winner of the pumpkin roll get? A nice blue ribbon and a free cup of hot cocoa! Whoo Hoo!

We headed back to the pumpkin painting table so my patient little co-cheerleaders could paint their non-prize winning, non-rolling pumpkins and they had already packed up the paints. They were bummed but were easily cheered up by cotton candy and caramel corn and the promise that we could paint them at home later.

All in all a good day at the pumpkin fest!