Happy Campers & Happy Anniversary

Towards the end of September, though close to the middle, we went camping with our local church congregation--aka our "ward".  We actually thought about not going because we had been so busy/out-of-town every weekend for over a month!  When we pulled up to the campground at Todd Lake all the sites were full.  There was a capacity requirement for each site so we thought we would just head home later that night.  Lee talked to the camp host and he didn't care if there were extra people at a given site.  So we camped by our friends the Wilsons.  We had a fun time at the group camp fire and the kids had fun playing with Sawyer and Indya later that night.  What a great campground though.  It was really nice.

Playing games in a tent.


Sawyer is the same age as Shanna and Haley, but he and Cal are good buddies.  They have a great time together.  Cal is great at playing with little kids and kids younger than him.  Clark too.




Jenna brought glow sticks and was kind enough to share them.  My kids loved it.










The next morning after a delicious breakfast of breakfast burritos, hot chocolate and juice (that we ate with our church friends and didn't have to prepare!) and visiting with friends, we headed down to Todd Lake for a look. Yep, salt for leech removal.  I've never had a leech on me before, but some of my siblings have. Yuck.




We didn't get in the lake.  It was a nice day but we wanted to get back home and we wanted to avoid the leeches.


We did spend time taking pictures of the kids jumping off the wall.  It's fun seeing them frozen in mid-air.




















That Sunday was mine and Lee's 12th anniversary.  We decided a couple weeks beforehand to not do anything big. We've had a lot of fun, big trips this year and sticking around home for the anniversary sounded great. We have a tradition to eat pizza on our anniversary.  We did things slightly different this year and on a Thursday, we had an early anniversary lunch date. But we ordered pizza!  Yum! 


For our actual anniversary, Lee made an awesome lasagna.


That night I made some candies...homemade-caramel covered, chocolate dipped macadamia nuts.  So good!


Other than that, that was our anniversary!  We enjoyed our small celebrations.  Of course the best part is that we can celebrate a great marriage with our best friends-each other. We plan on doing something big for the 15th anniversary.  Not sure what though.  For our 10th we went to NYC for a day and that was SO fun!  It would be fun to travel somewhere.  Thirteen years down, eternity to go.

Apple Orchard Field Trips

Now that Elden is in Kindergarten I've been able to attend almost all of my kids' field trips!  Shanna and Haley and later Elden all visited apple orchards for their first field trip. 

For Shanna and Haley's trip we went to Carter Mountain.  They have an apple orchard on the top of a mountain...literally.








We all (even adults!) got a yummy apple cinnamon donut, apple cider and a bag of fresh picked apples!












They had a cute store.  Everything was very expensive in there.  I didn't even have my wallet so that was an easy answer to Haley and Shanna's requests to buy stuff.














A fun view of the valley.






A couple weeks later Elden and I visited a different apple orchard.  The one I went to with the girls was all geared for tourists and school groups.  The one for Elden's field trip though--Showalter's Orchard, was not.  It used to be.  A couple years ago I went on the same field trip with Shanna and Haley and it was a lot more fun.  This time around there was a self-guided tour, a little taste of apples cider and we were gone.  Oh, the kids each got one apple I think?  They definitely are moving away from school groups coming and visiting.  Not sure why.  Maybe it wasn't profitable?  Anyway, it was  a disappointment for those of us who had been there before.  Doesn't sound like the kindergarten teachers will be going back again.




I am glad some people were sorting apples that day.  I always like seeing production lines for food items...










Seeing and being near commercial grade food equipment brings back memories of my dad's jobs in the meat industry.


After Elden's field trip we stopped at a park and ate, the kids played and then we headed back.  We had a picnic lunch during Shanna and Haley's field trip too.  I am glad that I've been able to go on them!