The Saturday morning after Brian’s birthday we packed up the car for our first family outing to go apple picking. The drive was half an hour longer than we expected, 2 hours total, but the boys did well with the drive down to Marker-Miller Orchards. It was a perfect Fall day with crisp weather and it seems like many others had the same idea as us. We are still in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic so I was nervous to be around so many people, even though we were outside, but most were wearing masks, including us so it made me feel a bit less anxious.
After purchasing our pick-your-own bag, we figured we’d try to get family photos before the boys got tired, dirty or lost interest altogether. HA! Rookie mistake. The boys were more than ready to book-it up and down the rows of trees and had little interest in taking photos with G-ma and PaPa. Brian did manage to capture a few posed photos while I jumped around in an attempt to make the boys smile but the best photos were the candid we captures later on.
The front of the orchard was pretty much picked clean which meant we had to trek, literally, to the back of the orchard. Not ideal with little ones, keeping the trek back in mind but so worth the gold mine of big, ripe York apples we came across. We were able to do most of our picking on just a few trees. Lincoln was most interested in the apples that were already on the ground and kept trying to pick them up. Parker, once he got the hang of the concept had a blast and kept asking Brian to hoist him up as high as he could. The fun didn’t stop there for him though. He picked up the camera and decided he wanted to be the photographer for the day.
After a couple hours of fun in the orchard, we dropped our apples in the car and walked over to the pumpkin patch, also a part of Marker-Miller Orchard. We could have selected from pre-picked pumpkins but that would have cut our adventure short. So with our mini-photog in tow, we made our way through the pumpkin patch. It was largely picked over and not quite what I was expecting. What matters most is that the boys had fun choosing their own pumpkins and spending the day with their grandparents.
L. Bradley 