Sunflower Maze

Happy Monday!  Hope you had a great weekend.  We had some sickness, some fun and lots of sunshine this weekend.  Hoping for a happy, healthy last full week of Summer this week.

This was our third year visiting L&A Family Farms in Paris, IL for their sunflower maze.  It's the most beautiful thing to see fields FULL of sunflowers.  They're so tall and so much fun to see in person.  Olive, Kevin and I look forward to this outing every Summer.  Up until this year, Fletcher has always had a hard time enjoying it.  He doesn't love the heat, he gets car sick on the curvy country roads and it's not been a highlight of his Summer... until this year.

He really enjoyed himself!  He was laughing, smiling and running his way through the maze.  What  a fun turn of events!  He also napped on the road trip there (slept through the curvy roads) and the family farm sold snow cones this year.  It was the perfect motivator and way to cool us all off.

It was definitely our best maze visit yet!  It didn't hurt that it was in the 80s in late July. 

A few sunflower maze tips:
Bring hats, sunnies and wear sunscreen. 
Sign any waivers ahead of time on-line to shorten the length of time you're waiting in line. 
Bring cash.
Bring water bottles and snacks for everyone in your group.
Check out the forecast and pick the coolest day of the week.
Buy the snow cones :)

Now on to an overload of sunny sunflower pictures.  If you can believe it, the maze is even more gorgeous in person!  We loved the tractor ride, the maze and the abundance of butterflies!  They're everywhere so look closely for them!

Wagon ride down to the sunflower maze.  Spontaneous hand holding!

"Look, Mom!  A Fletcher sized sunflower!"

Olive asked to hold hands with her sunflower :)  She also insisted on wearing her butterfly dress to show butterflies that she was friendly.  Ha!

I wasn't kidding about the RUNNING!

So many smiles this time!  I only had to carry Fletcher on the last stretch (which is much better than the entire maze last year!)

Sunflower hugger!

Our fearless leader!

We were getting HOT as we finished up the maze.

An Olive sized sunflower.

We made it all the way through!!

Saying goodbye to this beautiful view while we waiting for the tractor to come back and pick us up.

Yes!!!  Snow cones to cool us all off.  We didn't buy any sunflowers to take home with us this year, but we'd highly recommend it if you can.  My anniversary roses were still looking gorgeous so we opted out of sunflowers.  They're just $1.50 each for giant sunflowers on the farm.  That's so much cheaper than the grocery stores.  I will say that they are HUGE.  You've got to get at least 3-4 to balance out a very large vase.

Have you ever been to a sunflower maze??  You should check to see if there's on in your area.  Here's the link to L&A Family Farms where we go in Illinois.