Nothing quite says fall to me like picking apples. The cool air, the bright sunshine, and the bees all work together to bring me to a happy place. Luckily it was breezy yesterday and this year's mosquitoes weren't as ferocious as they have been.
We go to a place in Malta, near DeKalb, called Jonamac Orchard. Even though they spray their apples, it's such a nice experience that we forgive the chemicals. They have a lot of different varieties, a nice barnyard play area that you don't have to pay to enter during the week, the use of wagons to lug your children and/or your apples, a picnic area and lots of trees. We've been coming back for about 5 years now.
Unfortunately, I have a bit of a cold and it has deadened a number of brain cells. We got pretty lost on the way there due to a missing street sign. The intersection was being re-worked and was completely torn up. I imagine the enormous new housing development caused the need to widen the road, but that's a poor excuse for not labeling the street. We drove several miles in the wrong direction. When we stopped to ask and were directed back to the intersection, my children growled and blamed George Bush. No comment.
We picked a bushel of apples, eating a number of them in the process, played in the corn bin and the hay bale maze and headed home. Here's where we got lost again, very close to home, picking up our weekly vegetable box from Angelic Organics. As the sun was blazing directly in my eyes, and as I had been complaining about it for 5 or 10 minutes, I have no explanation for why I believed myself to be driving east.
Later that evening, we went to the Office Depot to get two spiral bound copies made of handwriting practice sheets I had done at home. We've never really focused on handwriting before, but it's become necessary. The kids are done with their Handwriting Without Tears workbooks, but I'm not willing to let them move on to cursive when I can't read their printing. So, I made up about 40 pages of animal idioms for them to copy. Here's an example: "When my brother left the toilet seat up this morning, it was the straw that broke the camel's back. My mother turned him into a toad."
Of course, after a lengthy discussion with the nice woman at Office Depot to determine that kind of binding, I failed to tell her that I needed two copies. She made one beautiful workbook from my original and then had to take it apart to make the two copies I should have asked for in the first place. My three monkeys, meanwhile, were trying out every last sharpie in the bin. They got very excited and actually fought hard over the left over bits of coil from the spiral binding.
I put myself to be early last night and had an extra cup of coffee today. I'm hoping for an improvement.
2 comments:
Awwww, that looks like so much fun! So Nate can just lie in a vat of corn and not have asthma overload like we do? I'm sort of afraid to go back to the farm, since our last experience was traumatic. But I want apples enough to try.
No asthma from the corn. But the eczema seems to be a little worse. The corn wasn't dusty, though. The hay bales can cause some serious wet sneezes!
Whenever the kids ask for something to eat, I tell them "Well, we might have some apples." And they roll their eyes.
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