Fossil Rim’s Amber Wiedeman created the Children’s Animal Center Halloween Spooktacular Extravaganza years ago, and each October it keeps growing and advancing. After the conclusion of the event’s seventh installment on Oct. 27, Wiedeman talked about how it went.
We grew both in terms of guests who attended and the number of volunteers. I think everybody stepped up again and we handled it well. From what I heard, everyone had a great time.
We were just going to make the Hay Maze a burlap sack race, but we ended up keeping the regular maze for the little kids to walk through and added the sack race in the same area to accommodate the bigger kids. Because I was anticipating more guests, we added a few more games like Ladder Golf, Ring Toss, etc. Also, it seemed like the kids really enjoyed that we put candy in the piñatas.
It is great to have the larger selection of ambassador animals that we do now, especially for large guest events like this. There were a lot of things going on at Fossil Rim this same weekend, but we knew we’d have plenty of critters for everyone to see.
Everything has come together for the Spooktacular over the years. We seem to have all the planning down. (CAC Supervisor) Kristina (Borgstrom) and the CAC interns did a fantastic job making our two giant piñatas this year.
We raised approximately $1,335 through this event. When people visit us now, they’ll see we have a video monitor to help us do more educating. If we get tied up with a program, we don’t want guests to stop learning. We’ll look at the best way to use these funds for the CAC.
It seemed to me that the people who volunteered were having just as much fun as the guests. I’m grateful for the people who come to enjoy the event, but also when our volunteers are enjoying themselves it makes the event better for the guests.
Thanks to all of you that makes the Halloween party happen! Our daughter lives there and we’ve came up to Glen Rose the last four years for Halloween and the kids look forward to coming. Y’all do a GREAT JOB thank you.