A Day at the Orchard

Last weekend was one of the very rare times where we had nothing going on. NOTHING. For us, weekends like these are like unicorns. We’re not sure they even exist and when they do come around, we just spend the whole day looking at each other, asking “Is this real life?”. 🙂 For my job, I have off on Fridays and Saturdays and I work on Sundays. Mitch has off on regular weekends like most of the world. Because a lot of my programming happens on the weekends and nights (when the kids are not in school), we inevitably spend a lot of our Saturdays “working”. Hence the unicorn weekends.

But last weekend… last weekend was gloriously free of any plans. So we made some, of course. 🙂 With an open Saturday, Mitch and I decided to do a fall activity that we’ve never actually done before (which is surprising, as fall is my favorite time of year)… apple picking! We called up some friends of ours spontaneously to see if they were interested and the four of us, plus their adorable daughter headed to the orchard for the day!

Highland Orchard is conveniently close to our house and we all packed a picnic lunch and met there for some apple picking. The morning was slightly overcast and cool… a perfect first day to break out a pair of jeans and a flannel. On that note, let me just say this about maternity jeans… I don’t think I’m ever going back to regular denim after this. I mean, WHAT COULD BE BETTER than a very forgiving stretchy elastic waist band, as opposed to all the nonsense of buttons and zippers?! Plus the fact that you can’t even tell maternity pants from regular pants anymore because they are just as stylish… yep, I’m sold. I might be wearing maternity pants for the rest of my life.

Anyway, back to the apples… we chose to split a half bushel between our two families and that ended up being plenty. After we got our empty bag, we hitched a wagon ride over to the fields to pick! On the ride over, we all gave our best guess as to how many apples we would end up being able to fit in the bag. My guess was 50. Everyone thought that was way too optimistic…

As we walked through the trees picking apples, I just kept thinking “this is how life is meant to be lived”. Not always rushing places. Not always having to have an agenda. Having random weekends where you do something fun just because there is time to do it and friends to do it with. How do we create more of those moments? This is the question I always ask myself in the midst of moments like that. If anyone has the answer, I’m all ears. 🙂

I made a point to bring our camera along because I want to practice my photography. There are so few chances to just go out and take pictures of things for practice, so I figured this would be a good time to play around with settings and continue to get to know the camera better.

Our friends have the cutest little girl… Haya. She’s nine months old and her and Baby Thomas will be almost exactly one year apart when our girl gets here. She was due on December 24th last year and Baby T is due on December 20th this year. It has been so much fun watching her grow and change, not to mention very helpful as we try and imagine what our babe will be like at various stages of her life. We’ve already found ourselves saying while clothes shopping, “Do you think she’ll fit in this at 6 months? Oh yeah, Haya has one of those! Put it in the cart”. And so on. 🙂

Also, walking around enjoying seasonal fun with a baby is a SURE FIRE way to come down with serious baby fever. We are so very excited for our little bug to come and I can only imagine that the excitement will grow as the holidays get closer. To think that next year, we could be doing this same trip with our own nine month old and her almost two-year-old best buddy is just wild.

Mitch and Redmond, hard at work getting only the best apples for our half bushel…

Christina happened to snap this picture of Mitch, looking like quite the GQ apple picking model. I married a real hunk. 🙂 Between the two of us, we don’t think our kid has a snowball’s chance of ending up with thin, straight, blonde hair. Our bets are on thick, curly, and dark locks for Baby Thomas!

After apple picking, our friends came back to our house and we just hung around, being lazy for the rest of the day. We baked an apple pie, played some cornhole and dominos, ate a chili dinner, and watched a Harry Potter movie. It was a great fall day. One that I hope to remember for awhile… it’s funny, I always really enjoy looking back on these types of blog posts because they are little glimpses into our life, little snapshots of memories and moments that otherwise might fade away. Someday, I’ll be happy to remember our autumn day at the orchard. 🙂

Oh, and PS. We ended up with 46 apples in the bag. Score a point for optimism. 😉

Psst. Want some more apple fun? We filmed ourselves competing in the Apple Stacking Challenge and it is up on our YouTube Channel right now! Go check it out and while you’re there… SUBSCRIBE so you never miss a video!