This past week has been a challenge. Baby Anne is teething and, as a result, she is not sleeping at night. That, of course, means I am not sleeping at night. I have been walking around like a zombie. Barely able to function. So very tired.
Saturday morning I had the chance to go back to bed because my husband did not have to go to work. So I slept and slept. When I woke up, I was ready for an adventure. At bedtime Friday night, we had read Michelle Knudsen's Autumn is for Apples--a seasonal favorite of ours. (Our very favorite Michelle Knudsen book is Library Lion, which I highly recommend though it has nothing to do with apples and the subject matter of this post). Meg and Clare wanted to know when we would go apple picking--something we do every Fall. I told them I would check the orchard websites. I did a little research on Friday night and, with so much energy after my Saturday morning sleep, I decided we would head to Stribling Orchard in Markham, Virginia on Saturday afternoon.
Stribling Orchard sits in the Blue Ridge Mountains and the views from the orchard are stunning. The orchard also has a fantastic history. According to its website, the land has been an orchard since the mid-eighteenth century and the family has been running the orchard for 200 years.
The girls were so excited to pick apples. As you can see from the pictures below, they dressed the part. Everyone wore their overalls and readied themselves for hard work.
Saturday morning I had the chance to go back to bed because my husband did not have to go to work. So I slept and slept. When I woke up, I was ready for an adventure. At bedtime Friday night, we had read Michelle Knudsen's Autumn is for Apples--a seasonal favorite of ours. (Our very favorite Michelle Knudsen book is Library Lion, which I highly recommend though it has nothing to do with apples and the subject matter of this post). Meg and Clare wanted to know when we would go apple picking--something we do every Fall. I told them I would check the orchard websites. I did a little research on Friday night and, with so much energy after my Saturday morning sleep, I decided we would head to Stribling Orchard in Markham, Virginia on Saturday afternoon.
Stribling Orchard sits in the Blue Ridge Mountains and the views from the orchard are stunning. The orchard also has a fantastic history. According to its website, the land has been an orchard since the mid-eighteenth century and the family has been running the orchard for 200 years.
The girls were so excited to pick apples. As you can see from the pictures below, they dressed the part. Everyone wore their overalls and readied themselves for hard work.
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 We picked quite a few apples (as you can see). So that meant we had lots of work ahead of us. Sunday afternoon we began baking. Of course, baking almost anything with apples means a lot of peeling and coring and that job was all on me. I have no idea how many apples I peeled and cored, but I did get pretty good at it by the end of the day. Meg and Clare enjoyed mixing the cut apples with cinnamon, brown sugar and nutmeg (and whatever else the recipe called for) and became quite good at that. By the end of the day we had made apple crisp, apple pie (with a pizza crust serving as the pie crust because that is what I had around the house) and applesauce. It was great fun to pack some of our homemade applesauce in Meg's school lunch today. I was also very pleased to find out Clare's class would be talking about apples all week--completely a coincidence but it should be fun for her to tell her class about picking apples and baking with them. As to the apple crisp, we exchanged some of the apple crisp we made with our neighbors who shared with us the brownies they had made on Sunday afternoon. I think that sort of baking exchange should become a neighborhood tradition. | 
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