It is the last weekend of September and the trees are starting to turn but this weekend the weather felt more like mid-August and we pulled shorts and t-shirts back out and spent a lot of the weekend outside. Or at least the kids and I did because Joe had a lot of work commitments.
Saturday we met up with a bunch of the families from Elizabeth's daycare at an apple orchard. We hung out with them at the playground eating apple cider doughnuts and playing for about an hour and then took a hayride to the orchard together, where we then split up to do our own picking. What that looked like for our family was that Nicholas picked all our apples . . .
Elizabeth "picked" apples by crawling around on the ground and grabbing them . . .
. . . and I took pictures.
We then made applesauce when we got home, because that is what we do with freshly picked Macintosh apples. And this year Nicholas was able to explain the whole reason why this is important to me. I don't know if he actually gets it or is just repeating what I have said in the past, but he knows that making the applesauce reminds me of the applesauce we always had at my grandparents' house when I was a kid and is a way to remember my grandma. My grandpa would say (teasingly) that it isn't the same because these aren't Vermont Macs, but I think the fact that the Vermont border is all of 50 miles north of where we were picking means that they were close enough. And this year I finally got close to replicating what Grandma's tasted like. It still wasn't perfect, but close enough that every bite transported me back.
And, just for fun, a few pictures from the playground:
Then this afternoon I took the kids to the park. Nicholas played with 2 friends from his old preschool who randomly were there, Elizabeth went on the swing and then just hung out watching the big kids, and I took pictures. Are you sensing a theme? But we were all happy!
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