Pumpkin-Patching It With My Daughter

Yesterday, I returned to the souped-up pumpkin patch, this time with my daughter. And let me just say that it was most interesting to note the difference in approach between a preschool-aged girl and a first grade boy.

For starters, I never noticed it at the time, but at the maize-grinding station, my son ground that corn into an almost sand-like substance. My daughter, on the other hand, hit the corn with the rocks in a rhythmic one-two, one-two pattern that looked cute but left the corn virtually untouched.

When we got to the John Deere tractor tricycle track, my daughter was completely disinterested in the racing aspect of it. She just took a leisurely spin halfway around the track, and then proclaimed herself finished, unlike my son who took great joy in pumping his little legs with all the force and speed they could muster, quickly outlapping the other first graders on the track.

At the cow-milking station, my son produced some serious results, although he did admit that it was difficult. My daughter, on the other hand, was most delicate in her approach, thus producing much of nothing, and ensuring that I will discourage her from checking off the milkmaid category on her career interest sheet in high school someday.

With all of the animals, she loved to gently pet them, and was only frustrated when some of the animals stayed too far away for her to reach. Last week, I had to reprimand my son, on the other hand, for trying to shake the cages of the bunnies. When I asked him what he was doing, he explained that he thought he could shake the cages really hard and make the water dispensers squirt out water at the bunnies, which he thought would be like a shower for them. Honestly, he really thought he was helping the bunnies. I didn’t bother with the argument of, “You really think, if you were a bunny, you’d like your house to be violently shaken by some big kid?” Because, while this exercise in putting oneself in another’s shoes works for my other two children, it typically backfires with my younger son. Undoubtedly, something to the effect of, “Yeah, Mom, that’d be so cool, it’d be like a ride!” or, “What if a giant came and did that to our house? That’d be so awesome!” would be his response, thus making a point counter to the point I would be trying to make. In fact, I started laughing when a preschooler from another school walked up to a cage in front of my daughter and started lightly shaking it. My daughter stared at her, slightly shocked, while the teacher scolded the girl. I can’t imagine what her reaction would be if she had seen what I stopped her own brother from doing last week.

The drama of the day came mid-morning when the bouncy house suddenly collapsed with several small children inside it. I was walking toward the bouncy house at the time, and several of us ran to hold up the sides while some preschool teacher, who was not unlike what I’d picture MacGyver to be if he had focused more on gymnastics, dove into the bouncy house and began handing out children to their waiting parents and teachers. A couple of employees quickly got the bouncy house inflated again, but I noticed several of the moms, myself included, repeatedly checking the insides for any stray children, despite MacGyver’s repeated yelling, “I got them all. They’re all out.”

Later, as we boarded the hayride to head for the pumpkin patch, I remembered I never did get my travel-sized can of girlie-girl pink spray paint, so I wondered about how the pumpkin selection would go. My daughter did mention the lack of pink pumpkins when we first got to the patch, but fortunately, she quickly sidetracked herself in her quest for a perfectly round pumpkin.

So, I thought we were safe. And we were, until we walked by the spot where the pink pumpkin had been last week

(she had seen the picture, remember) and saw this:

I tried to keep walking, but she saw it, said, “Huh?” and stared for a minute, and then asked where the pink pumpkin was. I hemmed and hawed for a moment, unconvincingly apparently, because she interrupted me by stomping one foot on the ground, and then mumbled something about “dumb” and “pink pumpkins.” I tried not to laugh, but she’s so small. And so, well, passionate sometimes. I turned away for a moment, searching for a distraction.

Instead, she found her own distraction, in the form of some water pumps connected to long narrow water troughs, with little yellow and, get this, pink rubber duckies to race up and down the troughs. And so we were saved by pink appearing in duck form, as it is, every once in a blue moon, wont to do.