Fun Fall Things!!

I have said this before but I really hate to see summer leave.  I love the hot weather, I love being outside, and I love getting to go on vacation.  So as sad as I am to see fall start I do enjoy a few things about fall.  One of those things is apple picking.  This year we went apple picking twice!! 

The first was with the Bitel’s! We went early in the season and we went to a local farm (Weber’s).  Their apple orchard was very small but because we went so early they also had peaches still in season (it was the last weekend) and they had a sparse supply of blackberries!!  Those are my second favorite!  We picked enough berries to make 2 peach blackberry cobblers and froze 1-2 cups so I could make it again later in the winter when I am in need of some summer flavor.  Then we had 35+ pounds of apples and peaches.  It was so fun picking with Sarah and Stephan; Sarah kept Elisha for me while we dug through the blackberry bushes to get the last few that we on the bushes.  It was a fun afternoon!  (Side note later in the week after this picking experience we found out that you can blanch peaches, slice them and freeze them so I went to the Weber’s farm stand and I picked up an additional 17 pounds of peaches.  Which we then froze and we have been using them for baking and baby food.)  This first apple picking experience also yielded Elisha’s first food.  We made baby apple sauce in the crock pot after picking apples and he loved them!! To this day apples are still his favorite food!

He loved touching the leaves. 

Elisha helped Daddy pick peaches!

Fun adventures with the Bitel's

Elisha and Sarah hung out while we picked berries.  The shade was much cooler!

Later in October Andrew and I went to Maize Quest Fun Park/Maple Lawn Farm, in Fawn Grove PA with Heather Consla and the Brutus family on our day off from school.  Heather has been friends with Andrew for many years.  Angela Brutus teaches at Bel Air with Andrew and she and I were in Pre-natal yoga together last year before the babies were born.  Her daughter Eva is 2 ½ weeks younger than Elisha. We made the most of our day off.  We started with lunch at the park, then we took a tractor ride to the pumpkin patch and picked our own pumpkins.  I loved that pumpkin patch and I can’t wait until next year to take Elisha because he’ll be toddling around all over the pumpkins!  

Tractor rides with friends.

Mommy I want this one! 

Daddy I found it!

This feels really cool.

Eva loved the pumpkins too!

Then, we went over the apple orchard and picked apples.  This was the most amazing apple orchard Andrew and I had ever seen!  Seriously, it was so large you had to drive into the orchard and park next to the rows of apples you wanted to pick.  Each apple type was clearly marked with a sign that was complete with a QR code giving information about that apple including recipes that would be good for that variety.  This was both Heather and Christian’s first apple picking experience.  It was fun to see them be so excited.  Christian wanted to try all the different types of apples and he loved the taste testing part of the process most.  He tried over 10 varieties apples that day!  Once we had our apples and pumpkins we came home and made apple pies and apple sauce! We made 7 pies that day and multiple batches of apple sauce.  All in all it was a great fall day!

He loves apples!!

Eva and Elisha had a great time!

A perfect fall day!!