Fall....

has fallen....here in our crazy home.

We LOVE Fall!
The cooler weather.
Pumpkins and winter squash galore.
The return of the woodstove to our lives as more than just a dust collector.


Fall also means work. Alex is as busy as ever delivering firewood because of course his customers must keep warm as well! This work is some of the hardest you can do. I had a taste of it during my PA school days. I would come to visit on the weekends or vacations, study, and to take breaks would go out and help him split, load, stack, and deliver the cord wood. It was nice as I loved the physical labor, (it helped even out all the sitting on my arse I was doing with my nose in the books....) But you tend NOT to love it anymore when you back never stops hurting, your hands are chronically creaky, and the wood seemingly continues to be harder and harder to find.
Lucky he doesn't have to cut nearly as many cords as he has had to do in years past. So the grunt work, just in a somewhat smaller scale, continues....

Fall means APPLES!
We actually got our first batch of apples in early August. Now the rest of our trees are going off. We are in the middle of rehabing them from their bear beaten days, so we really have never gotten this many apples before!


They aren't the greatest apples for eating, but they sure do make great apple sauce! Again, more work, but it is satisfying to see the jars of homemade sauce lined up.

And pumpkins....

Our little pumpkin here is checking out our harvest. We actually FINALLY have nice sized pumpkins this year. In the past they have been absolutely ginormous. This year we can actually move them without the fork lift.

This little pumpkin though is the prize winner of the patch!

He loves fall walks in his baby carrier. He doesn't seem to mind the cooler weather one bit...just is a bit more bundled than the hot summer walks. I think he's loving the season change as well!