A Day at the Pumpkin Patch With My Boo

I have four children, and my youngest is Meagan, a little bundle of fire we call “Boo”.  The reason for this is because she was a surprise baby and the name just stuck.  I love her very much, and I draw much inspiration from her personality which is spunky, brimming with a weird sense of humor and is always loves first and asks strange questions later.

I missed going to the pumpkin patch with my other three children, as my wife Kristie took this task upon herself.  I was always caught in the middle of giving a mid-term or some other job related task.  This year I made it a point to go with her, and she was visibly and audibly excited about the trip that she told me so every day for two weeks up until our arrival at TG Farms in Newcastle, Oklahoma.

After listening to a representative of the farm tell us about the many types of pumpkins we wandered the farm where we held tiny baby piglets, fed pygmy goats, and played on a huge slide with a stack of hay bails as a ladder.  There was a hay ride, a pumpkin patch where we could choose our own pumpkin to take home and a hay maze which was quite easy to navigate (if one walked around the outside, there was a path that led directly out).

The most important thing, however, was the joy on my youngest daughter’s face who often feels left out in my family because she is so small.  She has no reason to feel this way other than what she makes up in her mind, for we include her in everything.  It is simply part of growing up as the smallest child in the family.  I wanted to have this day out with her for some time and we indeed spent the entire day together, just the two of us.  We later went to run some errands together but I made sure to take her to Braum’s for a cone of her favorite birthday cake flavored ice cream and also made a visit to Toys R Us to help her “figure out what she wanted for Christmas.”

I will only have a few more years of these childhood moments of hers, and I plan to drink them all in, cherishing every moment I have.  She’s seven years old, and as I have found out with my other children, will soon be knocking on the door of her teen years like my oldest are doing right now.  My children will never look back on their childhood and wonder where their father went.  They will have plenty of good memories to tell their children about, and hopefully make some of their own with those children.