A Favorite Fall Tradition

Many fall traditions make me smile: jumping in the leaves, trick or treating around the neighborhood with the boys, and eating chili dogs on Halloween. Yet, the one event I look forward to every fall does not involve any of those things. It is the annual trip to the corn maze with my mom and dad.

Mom and dad visited about a month ago. (I know I am slow on getting updates. ..) We filled one cold, fall afternoon with many activities including the corn maze. First, we raced mom and dad to one town to watch Brendan play soccer, then we immediately followed this with a 30 minute trek to watch Andrew play football. After the football game, we decided to go to the Corn Maze. For the past three years, we have journeyed to the same maze: Treinen's Farm. They are reputed to have the largest corn maze in Wisconsin. And we love it.

The maze was crowded, but we still managed to have a great time. The basic concept of this maze is that you look for a series of mailboxes in order. When you find a mailbox, you find a piece of the maze that you paste on your map that guides you to the next clue/ mailbox.

With our master maze finders, we never struggle with the basic finding of the mailbox.

We always challenge ourselves with one of the mazes fun traditions-- the hole punches. They hide eight hole punches hidden on metal poles scattered throughout the entire maze. Most of the time these hole punches are much off "the beaten path" and therefore have to be scoured for. This is where our group's fun really begins. If you look carefully in the picture below, you can see the metal pole we have to look for.
This year, we added the challenge of also "finding Grandpa." Grandpa got left behind in the second puzzle piece of the maze. He looked down to study his map, and the boys went running on the paths they wanted to pursue. The adults quickly followed out of fear of losing the little guys, so when Grandpa looked up, we were gone. And, we didn't find him for at least 45 minutes. We tried cell phones, but it is hard to get a signal buried in a corn maze.
Eventually, we found grandpa meandering down the path. (Much to Brendan's relief. He had been fretting over grandpa's disappearance, thinking that we would never find him.)
For our maze navigating and hole punch finding prowess, we were all rewarded with a proud Maze Master certificate! (Yes, Brendan is crossing his eyes in the below picture. I can't ever get him to be serious for a picture. )
On our way out of the farm, we stopped and let the boys each shoot pumpkins from a slingshot into the pond. Andrew and Brendan are both still sporting uniforms-- if you were wondering why they had an affinity for purple. . .


If you can believe it, we even had enough energy to follow all of this with a trip out to eat for dinner and a round of "boo"ing our neighbors before we collapsed.

Another amazing fall tradition. Can't wait for next year!