Today was the school field trip to the Cox Farms pumpkin patch. So of course it was freezing this morning. Once again there was a nice layer of frost over everything.
Quinn was still pretty bummed that he wasn't going to get to go to the pumpkin patch, but he did a pretty good job of not letting it upset him too much. So after I took Quinn to school I headed back home and we got Catherine ready to go and meet up with everyone at the farm. We didn't actually get there at opening time though and we ended up being about half an hour late (because Catherine did nothing but stall all morning refusing to eat her breakfast). Once we eventually got to the farm it was warming up a bit, but it still wasn't what I would call warm yet. I did decide to ditch my jacket in the car before we went in since I was convinced it was going to warm up some later (which turned out to be the right call). Catherine meanwhile was initially in several layers of clothes and multiple coats. She eventually ended up ditching the vest.
The farm was crowded. I mean really crowded. I mean I know it's been crowded the last couple of years when we've gone, but this was ridiculous. There must have been about 50 to 100 school buses out in the parking lot. So all the lines for the rides were incredibly long. We ended up not doing the hayride just because of the amount of time we would have been waiting in line. And it only got worse. By the time we left the hayride line was stretching about five times as long as it was when we originally decided not to do it.
All this meant we did very little slides since all the lines were so long. And I couldn't believe how rude most of the kids were. Poor Catherine is pretty laid back, so kids were continually butting in front of her. Ginger and I had a minor scare at one point because of that. Ginger had walked Catherine up to one of the lines and once Catherine went into the house before the slide Ginger came around down to the bottom to wait and watch Catherine come down with me. At this point I could see Catherine inside the house, but all the other kids were butting in front of her. After several more minutes of her not coming down and me not being able to see her, I went into the house myself (I was going to put the hammer down and force the kids to form a line and not cut in front of one another), so imagine my surprise when I go in and Catherine isn't there. And I look down to where Ginger is and Catherine isn't there either. I had a mild one minute of complete and utter panic before Catherine ran up and found me. Turns out so many kids had butted in front of her she had just left and went on another slide (without bothering to tell her parents of her plan). The weird thing was that analytically I knew there was no valid reason to panic, but even though I knew that it didn't prevent me from accessing the situation and starting to panic anyway.
And as rude as the kids were, some of the teachers were even worse. As I said, there were a ton of buses there, which meant there were a lot of classes there all being chaperoned by teachers. So some teachers with a couple of kids would get in line on a slide, then later all the other kids from the class would show up and the teachers would just let them in line in front of everyone behind them. I mean I know why they did it since they're just trying to keep their class together, it just seems rude to do that to everyone behind them (can you tell it happened to us?). I liked the place better a couple years ago when it wasn't as popular or crowded.
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