Since this fall we'll actually have real fall weather with leaves changing color and everything I am determined to do all the fall things we possibly can, including but not limited to: apple picking, pumpkin picking, attending as many fall festivals as humanly possible, jumping in leaf piles and generally strolling through the crisp autumn breeze. In a sweater.
This weekend, though not exactly fall, we started off the season a mite early with apple picking because the Honeycrisps were ripe, and why bother eating an apple if it's not a Honeycrisp apple? Am I right? And they were such a good deal--a dollar a pound. For comparison sake, they were four dollars a pound at the commissary. I know this because I let David pick out the apples once and he put twenty in a bag to be funny (which I didn't mind since we go through so many apples anyway) but when I got home and looked at the receipt I realized we spent forty dollars on apples. Forty dollars. We forgave them for being so expensive though, after all, they were delicious. These appels were equally delicious as could be verified by all the slightly nibbled ones we found as we unpacked them.
None of us have ever been apple picking before so it was kind of an exciting endeavor. Since it's the very beginning of the season, there were still plenty of apples within any child's reach but that didn't stop the biggest attraction of the day from being the apple picking sticks. Clearly the best apples are the ones on the tip top of the tree that require real ingenuity to acquire, not the paltry ones within easy grasp that require no effort whatsoever to gather up.
Never let it be said that children of mine choose the easy way.
They actually always choose the hard way. Always. I blame their father.
Well, they eventually lost their apple picking stick privileges because they kept dropping the apples on their way down and then complaining that they couldn't tell which was their apple amidst all the apples on the ground. While I'm not an apple picking expert by any means, I'm pretty sure the top two rules are not to eat apples that have been laying on the ground and don't waste the fruit. So back to the non-exciting arms reach apples it was.
After we gathered our peck of apples and sang a few rousing choruses of "A Bushel and a Peck" (much to the children's chagrin) we headed off to have a picnic at a nearby state park. It was really a wonderful day and I can't wait to do it all over again with actual fall temperatures and forest colors. The summer humidity is already gone so I'm sure the crisp autumn air is just around the corner. I can almost feel it. Almost.