A Trip to the Orchard

I have lots of pictures from this weekend and thought I'd post them up.  Saturday was a crazy beautiful day here in Chicago - blue skies and about 65 degrees.  I had found out about an apple orchard online last year, but with apple season mostly washed out we had to wait till this year to really get some apple picking in. This Saturday seemed like the perfect opportunity so we hopped in the car and drove about 45 miles west into the real heartland.  We spent about 2+ hours there and everyone had a great time.

We climbed up hay...

 We climbed down hay...

Just ran around and had some fun...

 Visited with some farm animals - Isla's favorite were the pigs

 There were also goats, donkeys, chickens, and a turkey.

 There were lots of places for photo ops...

 Which provided good entertainment as we waited for the tractor

 Isla liked going into the barn where the chickens were kept, and was surprisingly brave near all the animals

But next up was apples...we hopped on the tractor for a little ride to the ripe apples

We weren't sure how quickly we'd go through the apples so we went with just 1/2 peck.  Sawyer did most of the picking but we helped Isla grab a few too.  She liked to go for the low hanging fruit so we had to lift her up to get the good apples.

 Very happy about her first few picks

And of all the miracles, Sawyer will now eat whole apples.  She has made me cut off the skin on every apple and cut them in pieces, but one trip to the orchard and she's now a fan of eating them with skin on.

This weekend we picked Gala's.  There's a bunch of different kinds maturing over the next few weeks though if we want to go pick different ones

Isla was just happy to be there. She was the only one who did not eat an apple while in the orchard.

 Walking back to where the tractor will pick us up

 Next up we headed over to the raspberry patch.  It was a nice big plot and each girl got a bucket for picking.

Sawyer was quite excited and ran up and down the aisles.  Isla was the best picker though - she was very careful and surprisingly good at picking out the ripe raspberries.  She was funny though and would say "this one's smushed gotta eat it".  Despite that, she still had more berries than Sawyer.

 Before we left the field we had a few snaps near the corn...

And then we headed on over to the barn for some lunch and to buy some apple donuts.  All in all, this was a perfect little day out and one we'll have to do again.  I made an apple pie today and we still have lots of apples left so I'll have to get more creative ideas before we get more.