Olive is Back!

Okay, so it has been a little while since the last post. I recently had a friend ask if Olive had some sort of watermelon-related disaster that caused me to stop posting. Really, it is just that my life has been crazy and the thought of editing videos and downloading pictures and thinking of witty things to say seemed a little daunting. Leanne and Olive and I went six weeks at the end of the summer without being home for a weekend. We had loads of fun, but things like mowing the lawn and dishes and laundry and blogging kind of fell by the wayside. But, Olive is back. The blog is back. I promise.

This is also a bit of a milestone for me as a novice blogger. This is my 100th post. So maybe the pressure of getting the 100th post up just got to me and I froze. Anything is possible, I suppose.

So what is up in the life of Olive? Well, lots. I'll be reviewing the end of summer activities in the coming days, but it is hard for me to figure out what happened when without a calendar and a log of gas station receipts. So let's just try to review this weekend.

Leanne and I took Olive apple picking for the first time. Actually, it was also my first time apple picking. I know, at some point, apple picking became a go-to autumn activity for New Englanders. Well, I never got around to doing it. I don't think my parents were negligent, or biased against farmers, or trying to shield us from the harsh world of tree pruning or something like that. I just think that with four kids, our fall weekends were filled with soccer or dance classes or hockey or some sort of manual labor like raking leaves or painting fence pickets or making Nike shoes. Either way, this would be the first time I had been to an apple orchard.

If you have never been, apple picking is a little like migrant farm worker fantasy camp. You pay $20 for the privilege of walking up a hill and picking apples from the tree. Why we do this, I don't know, especially considering there are bags of apples, from the very same orchard, being sold for the same price, just steps away from where you hand over your money and someone hands you an empty bag. But the kids love it. I guess.

Like other apple orchards there was also a variety of non-apple activities: farm animals, a playground, a fish pond, etc. There was also a pumpkin patch. It isn't, of course, where they actually grow the pumpkins, it is just where they take pumpkins and scatter them in a field to give you the impression that you are actually picking them. Olive decided that to properly pick a pumpkin you must both try to pick it up and, for some reason, sit on it.

Despite leaving $50 poorer after the morning, we did come away with some pumpkins, a bag of apples, and 6 apple cider donuts that I am now officially addicted to. And, yes, Olive did seem to love everything about the day.