Aplin Farms

As a follow-up to our infamous "Candy Shot" last Halloween, the girls and I were eager to find another fantastic photo op to celebrate the Fall season and, if necessary, Halloween. We emailed for weeks about possible ideas, and finally someone (I think it was Mary) came up with the idea of Aplin Farms (frequently called Alpin during our online conversations). Aplin Farms is a farm/pumpkin patch about 10 miles west of Dothan. Though several members of our usual group couldn't make it, we managed to make pretty good use of our free Saturday morning.

We arrived at Aplin Farms around 10:00 a.m. and made plans to do just about everything. After checking out the boxes of produce at the front of the farm . . .

. . . we began studying the various activities we could do. The farm offered a train ride, hay ride, corn maze, sunflower picking, petting zoo, jumparoo . . . basically anything that would get you either looking or smelling dirty. Thankfully, the people running the farm knew better than we did. Instead of paying for everything up front, we got a little yellow ticket. As we went to each activity, we had the person in charge stamp our ticket. When we had done everything we wanted to do, we simply returned the card to the cashier and paid for those activities in which we participated. Remember how I said we were going to do everything? By the end of the morning, our ticket had only 1 stamp!

The Train Ride. And it was completely worth it.

Canon absolutely loved it. He spent most of the ride just like this, looking out the "window."

After that, we just kind of wandered around the farm. We did visit the Petting Zoo, but thankfully Canon was as interested in that as I was, so we left fairly quickly. I think the animals made him a little nervous. They made me a little nauseas.

Canon found a pig made out of a hay bale, and they quickly became friends. We ignored the sign saying "Please do not touch or ride pigs." I don't think they really meant to put those there. How can you expect a one year-old not to touch a big pink hay bale? Surely they meant for us not to touch or ride the live pigs that were wandering around the farm somewhere but that we never saw.

As you can imagine, it was then time for a snack. This is one of my favorite pictures of Canon and me together.

Before leaving, we had to take advantage of some photo opps. I managed to get one of Canon and Ava before the Yates' family headed home.

She's already playing hard-to-get.

And here's the rest of the Farm Crew: Colt, Julia, Alex, and Canon. Not bad for three one-year-olds and a big brother!