Fall Fest at the Crater

 While visiting Grandma's house this weekend, we found out that one of our favorite places, the Crater, was having it's Fall Fest that Saturday and decided to make an appearance.

The Crater is already 20% cooler because Aunt Julie works there so putting on a festival while we were visiting just raised it even higher in the ranks.

The first thing we saw when we passed through the doors was the giant blow-up slide. Chick graciously volunteered to climb up with Rugrat and go for a slide. My aching knees thank her profusely.

One of the benefits of volunteering is that you are allowed to hide your face behind your little sister while the owner of the aching knees snaps a picture.

The price of admission (a tiny $3 each -- who can beat that) provided for 5 tickets to play games. Unfortunately, Rugrat was the only one young enough to play the games on this first fall fest (that may change next year though -- guess we'll have to check it out and see). That meant she got all 7 sets of 5 tickets. That was way more than she needed though so we shared some before leaving.

When the older kids realized they couldn't really play any games, they headed out to search for diamonds. And Rugrat, Grandma, Baba, and I all hit the games (multiple times).

She went fishing...

 And caught the elusive and rare rainbow lollipop trout.

She did some coin dropping in the tank.

  And some treasure hunting... the treasure being candy and toys. I know chocolate is my favorite treasure!

 She also tried (unsuccessfully) to ring some ducks.

And then she came across this intriguing fellow...

Never seen anything like him but he seemed amiable enough.

She also had a new experience. She got her face painted. I really didn't think she would go for this. Maybe it helped that is was the local high school band who was doing the painting. I'm not sure. But after checking with me that she wasn't being forced to sit still for the doctor (yes, she really asked me that), she cooperated very well.

 Every time the girl brought the brush near her face though, you could see her little eye follow the movement.

But she was pretty happy with the end result.

 In fact, when I later took her to the restroom, I made sure to stand her up on the counter so she could see her rainbow in the mirror. After that, every time she got near a mirror, she wanted to see it. And she was disturbed when bath time came and it had to "go home."

She even asked if she could get another one later.

We went back to the games then.

Going for the gold...

Throne, that is.

Grandma helped her do a little golfing.

Somehow, I missed getting a picture of her doing the duck pond though. I think that might have been her favorite game. She went back to it four or five times.

When everyone had finally gathered together, it was just about time for Aunt Julie to get off work. So we headed back to Grandma's house for some home made pizza.

And since Grandma had been disappointed to find that the funnel cake vendor didn't show, Aunt Tiawana even made us some funnel cakes for dessert.

How cool was that!