Apple Picking!

Last Friday, my parents came into town and we went for our annual apple picking trip. There's a great orchard about 15 minutes from our house. It's a beautiful location, way up on a hill overlooking the Saint John River. The apples were plentiful and ripe for the picking. When we arrived, they gave us these sticks with a little cloth basket on the end. Supposedly this makes getting the high apples easier... I'm not so sure about that! Seems like what it was better for was knocking the apples off the trees onto the ground, so we could pick them up and put them in our bags! Ezekiel had a great time chasing the "grounders". Every time I turned around, he had a different apple in his mouth, munching away. I think they probably should have weighed him before he came in, as they definitely lost some money there. Elijah was my little helper, asking me to examine each apple he picked before depositing it into the bag. We did have a little lesson in proper handling of apples, as the first few were thrown like a pro ball player and got a little bit bruised. At the end of the afternoon, we had picked close to 90 lbs of apples. My parents took most of them home to store in their garage, as we don't have cold storage at our house. We are enjoying the fruits of our labour, with fresh Cortland apples in our fridge. Of course, no trip to the orchard is complete without a photo shoot! In between messing with the stupid apple picking tool, I managed to snap a few shots of the boys in action.

And last but not least, I couldn't resist snapping this photo of my sweet Ezekiel. He's been fighting a cold for a week or so and is just plum tuckered out. Apple picking was too much for him, and this is how I found him shortly after we got home!