Fall Harvest Festival at the Arboretum

Towards the end of September every year, the Arboretum hosts it's annual Fall Harvest Festival- a signature community event, with a scarecrow contest, corn maze, food vendors, shopping village and children's activities! This year, Kelly volunteered to be the Chair of the Children's Activities Committee- in charge of organizing all the children's events for this year's Fall Harvest Festival. It ended up being a little bit more work than one might expect- but we pulled it off, and it paid off! We had bounce houses, clowns, rock painting, a live bug display, bean bag toss, high school madrigal singers, duck game, paint splatter, petting zoo, juggler, caterpillar hoop house, Kindermusik performers, fishing game, Dance studio performers, and face painting! We promoted our local community by handing out free reusable shopping bags to the first 300 families (donated by local businesses), performances by local children's venues, and gave the kids coupons which were donated by local restaurants to hand out as prizes! The theme was Green Space, Your Place-- very fitting for the Arboretum and it's goal to be a community garden! The most amazing part of the whole operation: it's all run and organized by volunteers! Only 2 people at the Arboretum are paid staff- the rest of us just do it for love!



Arguably Renee's favorite activity at the Fall Harvest Festival: the petting zoo! And with cuddly baby animals like this little goat, it's easy to see why!



I heard that Renee spent 30 minutes just in the petting zoo -chasing, petting, feeding- non stop fun!



I think we missed getting a picture of Renee trying to give one of the animals a "bath" in a tub of drinking water for the animals!



Renee snuggles her Daddy and her *prize* -a piece of corn she picked in the corn maze!



Who doesn't love a corn maze?



Now it's a red-headed scarecrow!



Lots of yummy food! Grammie found a sticky delicious caramel apple! Apparently some of the crew sampled an uber-caramel-apple which was served on a plate with whipped cream and caramel! WOW!



More of the many activities Kelly organized for the Festival! One of my committee members made the bean bag game herself!



In the Children's Garden we have a track for model trains, and the local train hobby club came out to show off their "toys". What a treat for the kids and the "kids at heart"!



Here you can really see how big this train is!



They had a scarecrow "wedding" in the rose garden with a "Wizard of Arb" theme! Renee is holding hands with the Good Witch scarecrow!



Uncle Mike and Renee get an up close look at some of the scarecrows in the scarecrow contest!



Renee really wanted to go into the big bounce house, but the lines were way too long, so she helped herself to the little one instead!



This is my favorite picture from our recent Labor Day trip to Yankton, SD! Renee snuggles Grammie while showing off the fun helmet!