Alex's Pumpkin Festival

In reviewing my photos, I realized I never posted about the pumpkin festival we went to with Alex on Saturday, October 10th. Alex's summer and weekend respite camp holds an annual festival one day every fall. The camp is located in Los Altos. He is a veteran camper here at least one week in the summer and several weekends throughout the fall and spring months.



The event typically has a haunted house, a petting zoo, a pumpkin patch, a games and crafts area, and also hosts a barbecue lunch. There is usually a cotton candy booth and a face painting booth as well but these do not interest Alex. The fall festival is a fund-raising effort for the camp for special needs kids and adults that is sponsored and run by Via Services.

Alex, as usual, is more interested in the animals than the pumpkins. His favorite part is the petting zoo and, in particular, the bunnies. Here he is with two of them. If I had posted sooner I would have remembered the names of all four bunnies. Alex had to hold every... single... one... multiple... times.

Alex is wearing the shirt we bought him when Frank and I went to see the musical Lion King in San Jose. Hmm, that is another post I never wrote.

We did persuade Alex to at least give a perfunctory pat to one of the goats before we moved on to other activities.



The lunch was great with hot dogs and chicken and salads and chips. Afterward, in the games area, Alex liked the bean bag toss game and throwing the basket ball. He liked picking up the floating yellow plastic ducks using a net and often captured two at once! Seeing a Disney princess, in this case Jasmine, was also a treat for Alex.

Alex really got into pouring colored sand through a funnel to make his own sand striated piece of artwork. Then we circled back to the pumpkin patch, detouring a bit to pass through the petting zoo again, and picked up the pumpkin Alex had previously selected.

We spent a good three hours at the fall festival and Alex was happy the entire time. Alex did carry his pumpkin home and all around St. Denis in the following days. It sat on his table by him as he did his puzzles. We may have put mileage on the car (120 miles round trip) but he got mileage out of that pumpkin.

With three pumpkin festivals in just over two weeks, it is no wonder I nearly forgot about the one in the middle with Alex. I'd blogged about a pumpkin festival we went to in SoCal with Dan and his family on Sunday, October 4th (my 10/13/15 post) and one we went to in Oklahoma with Robin and her family on Monday, October 19th (my 10/27/15 post) and now, with Alex's pumpkin festival, my collection is complete. I am "pumpkined" out but we had a good time at all three.