If you were just to look at these two pictures, would you know how they nearly drove me insane Sunday morning? I think not. I love these kids so much, and yet there are times, when the sibling squabbles and the growing pains and the emotional upheaval ~ the highs and lows of a 9 year old and 4 year old ~ put me right over the edge.

The plan on Sunday was to go see Gram at my aunt's house, and then continue on to Apple Hill and do some apple picking, some family time, and then come back and visit with Gram some more and head home.

Not included in the plan? Three meltdowns for the following, mind-numbing reasons: inability to negotiate who gets which Legos (mind you, we have over 6 billion Legos, surely they don't need to scream and cry over THESE TEN); refusal to get dressed....and stay dressed (the hell?); a crying fit ~ fit ~ by a nine year old because I FIXED the lid to his collectable card case (found on the ground, under two blankets, as I was ~ pardon me, son ~ making the beds, gathering laundry, putting away toys, and sweeping the bedroom) but didn't fix it CORRECTLY and so in his mind I purposely made it so he couldn't open the box and O.M.G. are you kidding me????

Of course, we are adults, with all our emotional faculties in tact, so the morning ended with me yelling that I don't even want to go anymore and slamming a door (I would not lie to you here, my response to a tantrum was, wait for it, a tantrum). *sigh*

Somehow we recovered and made it into the van, quiet and a bit mournful of the lost happy family trip vibe. Why go through all this trouble, if not to have fun? To make memories? I just asked Tommy (literally, I just asked him as I was writing this) if he had fun yesterday.

"Yep!"
What was fun? "Apple picking." Very matter of fact.
Was there anything that wasn't fun? No pause. "No."

Maybe it worked, after all. It was really fun! Gram is doing great, and the boys ate apple turnovers (only because they had sold out of caramel apples!) and I love love love farm ephemra.

Scotty only wanted PERFECT apples. He was the same way last weekend too! I tried to let him know that a spot or two was okay (and the price to pay for organic apples) because I would cut those out when we were cooking, but that kind of logic is quite lost on a four year old.




Tommy liked a variety. He picked golden delicious, fuji, and granny smith. It was mix and match, so he scouted out trees he liked and filled his bucket.






Here's my apple-picker-extraordinaire. At six feet tall, we relied on him quite a bit to pluck the best looking apples from the tops of the trees! I rely on him quite a bit for everything, truth be told. I thought of it a lot yesterday. He's such an amazing dad, and husband, and truly my best friend. He had a tummy ache on the way back to my aunt's house, but he drove the whole time. We had taken my aunt's hoopty mini-van because ours didn't have the third row of seats in, and my cousin's son wanted to go with us. The driver's seat is broken, and uncomfortable. The driver's window won't roll down, and the passenger side rolled down but then wouldn't roll up. So, as we were heading down Highway 50, at 65 miles per hour, with wind and rain coming into the van through the stuck window, with a pain in his back and his tummy now, I couldn't help but feel like the luckiest girl in the world. We held hands across the divide between the seats, and I remember watching my parents do the same thing in our orange van.

Of course, our orange van didn't even have a backseat at first. We sat in lawn chairs in the back for a couple of years. We'd fly ass over tea kettle every time we took off from a stop, and we'd laugh hysterically as Runt somersaulted across. When we finally got a bench seat, it didn't even have seatbelts. We mostly laid in the back, under or (in Jason's case) on top of the motorcycles.

Yesterday the three boys, one harnessed into a carseat, the others locked securely in, tied down and squirming, were such a contrast!

Tommy was fascinated by this 160 year old scale. So was I, frankly. I was even more fascinated by the fifty-two-and-a-half-pounds of apples that came home with us. Holy.





Oh, California. You don't see a lot of trees changing colors in my neighborhood, but you don't have to worry. Somewhere, some place, in California, you will find what you're looking for. Beautiful.






Old.








I wanted this. Was it a bench? Was it a table? No matter. If I could have figured out a way, it would be at my house right now. It was old and disfigured and quite dirty. Heavenly.






What's not to love?








When we got back to Aunt Barbara's, we ate pancakes for dinner with Gram. What a perfect ending to what turned out to be a perfectly wonderful day!