George's Falls

 I love the woods in the fall. 

Time for Shoveling

 We had our first real snow experience last weekend. It started Friday  when we woke up with snow on the ground and it snowed off and on throughout the day.

 The most snow fell early Sunday morning, so we woke up to about 5 inches of snow.

 Jonah, Josh, and I had our first experience shoveling snow. It was pretty exciting.

Fall Meets Winter

 It snowed again. We are supposed to get dumped on this weekend, but for now, it is enough to be pretty without causing too much trouble.

Birthday Boy

 I drove down to Visalia after work Thursday to celebrate Micah's birthday with the family. The boys enjoyed  some kite flying with Uncle Jonah and Aunt Michelle.

 We had delicious tacos for dinner, then Micah opened his presents.

 This face makes four hours of driving worth it; isn't he the cutest little guy?

 Everyone enjoyed testing out the present from Grandpa and Grandma.

 We had orange danish rolls for dessert, yum!

 Then we got to play with Legos. Jonah, Michelle, and I all got Micah Lego sets, so we each helped build the set we got him. 

Not only was it fun to do something to celebrate Micah's birthday, but it was great to have the whole family together and everyone enjoyed the time.

Apples Everywhere

Next on the list were apples. We started picking Saturday, with slightly disastrous results. An apple fell down and hit me right in the eye; it hurt. However, we pressed on. 

Benson joined us and we had a little unchoreographed apple picking ballet.

We were interrupted by work, but picked again on Monday and Tuesday. We picked from as many different trees as we could find so we would have a variety of apples.

We ended up with six 5 gallon buckets worth of apples.

We washed all the apples and sorted through them to cut out bad spots.

 Then it was time to use the press. It was the first time either of us had used it and we had a lot of fun. First, we took turns grinding the apples.

Then we pressed them.

And out came the juice! Oops, we overflowed our jug a bit because I was taking pictures instead of doing my job. We ended up with just over 6 gallons of apple juice, with a bag of apples leftover to make applesauce. Five gallons we saved to make hard cider, the rest is for drinking now.

 We put the apple peels from making applesauce in the five gallons of juice to increase the amount of natural yeast.

 Our cider ready to ferment with the airlock in place.

We left this batch of applesauce plain, just the apples and a little bit of sugar.

We ended up with four pints of applesauce.