We recently moved our web host, so you’ll notice this space had changed a little bit. It will probably change again as we have time to play around with wordpress. While we were moving, Andy wouldn’t let me post anything new. Big ole meanie.

Anya has been in school now for a few weeks, and she loves it. She’d live there if she could, I think. They’ve already had two field trips, and I was lucky to be able to arrange my schedule so I could go with her on both. The first field trip took the school to a local farm to help harvest potatoes. The kids had planted the potatoes earlier in the year as part of a farm-to-school program to help get local food into the schools. There were two bus loads of fifth graders from the local elementary school there, too, and the big kids followed the potato plow like hungry cats after an open can of tuna. The kids swarmed over the freshly-turned ground and vacuumed up all the potatoes before the little kids could get there. It was okay, though, because the little kids still got to play in lots of dirt.

On the second trip, we went to an apple orchard a few miles from our house. Turns out we’ve met the woman who owns the place when we went to pick up our milk share. When she bought the property, it was overgrown, and she’s been working very hard to get things back into shape. Alas, the little kids mostly were stuck with picking apples off the ground what with them being shorter than most of the tree branches, but they all still had a great time. This was the first time I’d seen Anya eat an apple peel!

After we picked apples, we had a little picnic in the grass and then watched some of the bigger kids use the orchard’s cider press to make fresh cider, which was (of course) fabulous. I came home with a big bag of apples and dreams of fresh apple pie. Later that afternoon, the school had a little festival to celebrate autumn’s arrival. We ate fresh applesauce made by the teachers and watched the kids race carrying apples in spoons and jump over an ever-widening river in what made me think of a horizontal version of limbo.

Inspired by the trip to the orchard, I decided to investigate our own apple trees. We have three on our property, but we’ve mostly neglected them. The apples always seemed to be puny and wormy and not worth the effort. A spring or two ago, though, my dad and I pruned the tree closest to the house, and I think it paid off this year. A few days ago we went to check out that tree and it is loaded with large and tasty yellow apples. We picked a few to add to my bag from the orchard and had plans to pick more, but then it started to rain and hasn’t stopped.

Andy has been busy on yet another home reno project. The latest is putting down hardwood floors in our kitchen/dining room area. We picked up some “rustic” red oak flooring, and Andy has been face nailing it with old-timey looking, square-headed nails. (Rustic = stuff that is all sorts of colors/doesn’t match and has worm holes and knot holes and other small flaws in it. Rustic also = a lot cheaper. Luckily, we like rustic.) Yesterday he finished the floor in the dining room area. We decided not to stain the wood and just put poly on top. It’s definitely a nice change from the purple-painted sub floor we’ve had for the last three years. I can’t wait for the peeling, dirt-colored, stick-on vinyl squares in the kitchen area to vanish, too.