Uncle Denis called and said that he has plenty of apples this year! He called several weeks later this year than he usually does and I was starting to think that maybe there just wasn’t any fruit this year either (that is what happened last year). So we decided to make a trip to Mt Pleasant today to go pick some apples.
Uncle Denis wasn’t there when we got there, but that is ok, because he is almost never at home when we go to pick apples, and he knew we were coming so he left the ladders out for us. Uncle Aaron and Aunt Linda happened to come out to pick some apples too, so we had a little extra adult supervision. 🙂 Because it was later, than usual when we got there to pick apples, so many apples had fallen from the trees. We were smooshing apples with our feet with every step we took. Uncle Denis usually just leaves the fallen apples on the floor of the orchard for the deer to eat through the winter. He says that they dig through the snow with their noses to find the apples so they can eat them.
The bigger kids helped pick some of the apples this year, which was nice. I think something like picking apples can be a lot of work, but it can be fun too. Aunt Linda had brought a couple of quilts to lay on the ground around a tree, then she would shake it to get the apples to fall off onto the quilt. The kids thought this was an awesome way to “pick” apples, so when they didn’t get to be the one on the ladder to pick apples they went to go help shake trees. 🙂 We took a break in the middle of the day to go have a lunch snack and some ice cream at a local restaurant with Uncle Aaron and Aunt Linda. When we finished there we headed back to Uncle Denis’ house and there we said goodbye to Uncle Aaron and Aunt Linda because they had enough apples and were ready to leave.
Lydia and Adam didn’t do much picking, but they did a lot of munching on apples. 😉
Uncle Denis and Aunt Marti came home in the evening. They brought a couple of pizzas with them in case we were still there picking apples. So when it got too dark to pick any more, we went inside and had dinner. When everyone had eaten their fill, we asked Uncle Denis if he would talk to Ethan and Tyra about photography stuff. Ethan was working on the photography pin for cub scouts and Tyra was working on the digital photographer badge for girl scouts. So Uncle Denis took us down the hall of marbles (the hall walls are both lined with loads of marbles) to his studio. The kids got a bit side tracked by the marbles. The boys especially liked checking them out, but they went to the studio anyway to learn about photography.
It’s was funny to read some of the requirements of the pin and have Uncle Denis say that cameras don’t even do that any more. So much of it seems obsolete now, like digital photography is so different than photography when film was involved. When we were done talking about photography, we made the kids make a final trip to the bathroom so that their bladders would be ready for the long trip home and we started loading the kids up. Uncle Denis showed the boys his collection of Batman stuff while they waited for their turns in the bathroom. And we came home with loads of apples! 😀
