The Apple Orchard and the Pumpkin Patch

 

Unless Will goes to our local university, this will probably be her last autumn visit to our favorite apple orchard and pumpkin patch for a while.

Time to make every moment count and then cry about it!

We did all our favorite things, including wandering around instead of picking apples--

--sitting around instead of picking apples--

--picking apples but putting them directly into our mouths instead of the bag--

--and then accidentally picking more apples than will fit in the bag and so panic eating some:

Oh, and MY personal favorite: lying on a giant blanket underneath the apple trees, working puzzles, eating and drinking delicious things, and listening to spooky podcasts:

We took our family portraits and then wandered around until a mean bee stung Luna's paw, then Matt carried her back to the car and we drove over to the orchard's pumpkin patch:

Oddly enough, Luna seemed to feel a lot better once there were elephant ears and apple fritters around, so I might be doubting that bee story of hers a little bit...

The pumpkin patch leads on to the next magical family memory that a Will at a far-away college will miss:

For the past seventeen years I've lied to myself that next year I'll really splash out and splurge on one of those fancy professional-looking pumpkin-carving kits, and every year I just dig our exact same most basic kit possible out from the back of the junk drawer. It really holds up!

I swore that I was not going to go to the trouble of roasting pumpkin seeds this year because nobody eats them but me, the kids swore that they'd eat them this year if I made them, and so I went to the trouble of separating seeds from guts, soaking them in salt water, and roasting them with spices:

So far, nobody has eaten them but me.

But the Jack-o-lanterns are epic this year!

We're looking forward to the reinstatement of of some of our out-in-public Halloween traditions this year, including declaration that yes, my 17-year-old IS going to be one of those trick-or-treating teenagers that the memes talk about:

It feels like it might just be one last season of normality before our world gets shifted on its axis again next fall, and I'm so grateful to have it.