What a great weekend! With birthday parties and days filled with friends and beautiful weather, we couldn’t have asked for more from this last weekend of September. After such a lovely, mild summer, we haven’t been able to believe our luck with the continued string of sunny, warm days. The leaves are just starting to change around here; the air is cool and crisp in the early morning and warm and sunny in the afternoon. It’s nice to ease into a season rather than getting pummeled by it!
This Saturday we celebrated our friends Brian and Jamie and their feisty red-haired almost-two-year-old daughter (and Andrew brought them his signature label hard cider from our apple tree plus the home brew from last month). We have become closer and closer to these friends over the past couple of years. They live in a beautiful wooded area with lots of room to run; needless to say, our boys love visiting. Oh, and the trampoline. Every kid’s dream come true! 
There was plenty of fun and crying (the two go hand-in-hand). So thankful for a lovely day!
And we packed in plenty of productivity this weekend. I managed to clean up our fall vegetable garden and pulled the plants that just weren’t making it (sorry tomatoes and eaten-up kale!) to make room for the lettuces and what’s left of our carrots and beets. It wasn’t as sad as I thought it would be. There’s a cathartic feeling to getting rid of the old and decayed, making room for the new; seeing the soil underneath and adding compost before everything lies dormant and covered with snow in a few months. 
Andrew volunteered nearly 4 hours to build a compost bin for the boys’ school while I watched the boys on the grounds. We explored every nook and cranny; all three were so eager to show me their stomping grounds, including the hideouts in the woods, the chicken coop and run, and the fields and playground they have made theirs. 
They fed tomatoes and berries to the chickens, marveling at the one with only one eye; a kind teacher allowed me to take three of the fresh eggs home with us. It was such a good, good day. 
And more riches from home; the apples that just keep coming. That single tree in our tiny side yard, who would have thought it would produce so much wonderful fruit? The basket above weighed in at just over 17 lbs, most of which was happily eaten up by the neighborhood children by 6pm. A bowl with a sign “Please take us home!” did the trick… now if only that would work for Halloween!
I hope your weekend was filled with happiness!
I just openly snorted over “Apple Drank”.
That school looks awesome! What a great place that your boys get to go to every day.
And that apple tree! We had an apple tree on our land when we first bought our house, and that fall, it produced ONE apple. Haha!! We figured out it was diseased and cut it down, and the entire core of the tree was this insane black goo filled with all kinds of bugs. Nightmare fuel.