Apple Picking and Real Food

We've been waiting for this day for weeks - ever since the van went kaput. We finally went apple picking. And it was worth the wait - now we have two bags filled with all of the little under ripe apples the girls could reach :)

The terrifying thing about apple picking?

Man-In-Charge-of-Apple-Orchard: Don't pick up any of the apples on the ground.

Me: Okay. Are those the ones you use to make cider?

Man-In-Charge-of-Apple-Orchard: No those are the ones that could be infected with e-coli. The deer come into the orchard at night and their droppings . . . (do I really need to finish this?)

Me (in a rather weak voice): Oh, I see.

Me (thinking): I just paid $.40 a pound for poop-apples?

Me (out loud): Girls, did you pick up ANY apples off the ground?

Girls (sweetly): Of course not, Mommy.

Do I trust them? They swear they didn't touch the apples on the ground. But my bowels tremble at the thought of what might happen. I think it might be worth the full $1.00 a pound to go to the friendly neighborhood market.

But the experience was fabulous.

Anna spent most of the time falling on the ground into apple mush. She couldn't/wouldn't slow down and watch out for the (round and slippery) apples. It was like running across a floor covered in marbles. The seat of her pants were covered in applesauce. The smell on those things was enough to curl my hair.

Elizabeth kept climbing into the trees, a major no-no that the man-in-charge-of-the-orchard forbade in a rather ominous voice (I want one of those). But those apples just past your fingertips always look so much better than the ones you can reach. (I'm one to talk - I carried around a bucket that I could stand on so I could grab the ones out of reach, which, by the way, were no better than the others.)

Jane patiently chilled in her baby carrier, enjoying being outside and watching her two crazy sisters. She has had her fill of attention this past week. We started her on REAL FOOD!! She is a week or two too young, but she has learned to use her hands well enough to try to grab stuff off of my plate. As I'm not into sharing, we decided to give her some rice cereal.

Jane's new mantra - "If you feed me, I love you." (Actually, it's my motto, but she has adopted it.) Everyone gets a smile when they feed her cereal. I'm sure she wouldn't be smiling if she knew that what we eat tastes about 1000 times better. But now that my kids steal every treat I even consider eating, I wish they were still on rice cereal.