For Anthony’s day off and our FRIDAY we planned a little family outing to Linder Farms; get on the hay ride, find a pumpkin, eat some yummy food, grab a few adorable pictures of the fam and just enjoy this fall activity.

Does anyone ever have that image in your mind of how fun something is going to be? How well planned out it will be? But somehow, five minutes into the trip you are pulling your hair out and the entire thing is just a disaster? I see these cute instagram pics that I Love and they look so put together, and so perfect, their children are angels with zero wrinkles in their clothes, no food on their face, no dust covering their shoes, and somehow my trip just didn’t flow that way!

So its 90 degrees when we get to the pumpkin patch. I’m sweating before we even get through the admission line. I keep getting a whiff of something smelly but don’t realize for a few minutes that it is my son that is the smelly one. He’s already got a runny nose… and now he’s got the smelly diaper too so back to the car we go. Anthony and Tay stay behind and I rush my tantrum child back to the car, change the diaper as quickly as possible, and rush back to them. We get there just in time to get on the hay ride. Perfect, lets ride to the first stop, grab some pumpkins, and head back. Well, Benson can’t/won’t hold still and he tries to walk right off of the tractor ride. RIGHT OFF THE MOVING TRACTOR. So I stand and reach for him and in doing so, my phone slips right between my legs, right between a 2×4 and into the dirt pathway behind us. Anthony hops off the ride and starts looking for my phone and the kids and I continued until the first stop and got off and headed back toward Anthony. When we get there, he can’t find my phone. So this is fantastic. My phone is on silent (as it always is when it is missing and you need it to ring loudly enough for you to find it)  So Tay, Anthony, and I continue to search for it for AN HOUR. and Finally after we are knee deep covered in powdery dust because the dirt is literally powder we find it buried deeply but thankfully we found it.

So. I am in tears, filthy, sweating, and ready to go home. There was no time to find a pumpkin because we were so busy trying to find my phone. I was so frustrated by the chaos of the entire event that I just couldn’t even think about being there any longer, so sadly and quietly we headed back to the car and drove home.

We arrived home pumpkin less, photo less, and almost phone less. But Benson wasn’t walking away empty handed and as the kids were about to jump in the bath this is what we found…our only photo of the family outing to the pumpkin patch.

Benson can be the one to cause my tears and he can also be the one to bring laughter to those tears. Finding the corn that he couldn’t stop playing in made me realize that although the family outing didn’t go as planned it isn’t the end of the world. Life is NOT perfect and sometimes one great photo on someone’s instagram is one great photo out of a hundred others that might have been just as disastrous as our pumpkin patch experience.