Snow! In October!

I don't think we usually get snow this early, but here's a little video I shot tonight.  It started snowing around 7pm, and the kids were so excited that they still couldn't get to sleep an hour later.

Most of our leaves are raked and bagged, but we still have a bit more to do before we have multi-month snow cover.  We'd better get moving!

A Peek at Patrick

Patrick sometimes likes to sit and play quietly in some corner of the house.  I found him singing to himself as he stacked and arranged wooden blocks on the kitchen floor.  Turn up the volume and you can hear him, too.

(Click the four-arrow icon at the bottom right of the video frame to enlarge the video from it's very tiny size here.)

Autumn Ground

You know those two tall maple trees in our backyard?  They have a lot of leaves.  Really.  We have two leaf blowers for fall clean-up.  (It was an accident that we ended up with two, but we're not sad about it!)  The older kids love to use the leaf blowers, and the younger kids love to watch.

Autumn Sky

Our backyard maple trees and a bright, crisp autumn afternoon.

Apples!

We didn't pick our own apples this year.  Instead, a friend gave us a bounty of apples.  I don't even know what variety they are!  They were "seconds" and "drops", purchased by the pick-up truck load, so most were made into applesauce.  Another friend lent us an attachment for a Kitchen-Aid that turned cooked apple chunks (stems, seeds, peels and all) into applesauce.  It took a few hours, but with help from kids, we canned 22 quarts of applesauce.  I probably have 10 more quarts of something to make from the remaining apples, but what will it be?  Canned apple slices?  Apple butter?  Apple pies?  Hmmm...

(By the way, many thanks to Jamie and Rachel for the apples and the tool to quickly process them.  We have some wonderful friends here!)


Apples wrapped individually in newspaper and put in a cardboard box keep for a few months in our autumn-temperature mudroom.  Some of these apples were large enough and in good enough condition to store and eat raw, but most required cutting off bruised parts and cooking.

 The helpers pose behind their handiwork.  Behind the half-wall are steps going down to our garage, so we have a little height adjustment going on.  That is Anna's Very Big Smile.

Harvest Festival at the NH Farm Museum

We visited the New Hampshire Farm Museum recently for their annual harvest festival.  There are a few days of the year when they really have some fun things to do, and this day was apple cider pressing.  We haven't found a good place to press our own apple cider since we lived in Washington, so this was especially fun.


To make cider to old fashioned way, you take some apples...













...and load them into the chopper hopper....

...and turn the crank to chop up the apples in preparation for pressing.














Finally, turn the screw to compress the apples.  The bucket at the bottom catches the juice.  We got to drink what we pressed.  Yummy!

For those who were too little to press apples, there was always the family cow to milk.  It  was filled with water, and the young ones spent lots of time practicing. 

The kids pumped and carried water...

...and washed dishcloths with it, using homemade soap, a washboard and a roller.  They've never had so much fun doing laundry.

Making Stone Soup.

Catherine winning the no-hands pie-eating contest!  Woo hoo! 

Anna played with the chickens with a licked hard candy.  Nothing bad could happen, right?  (Charlie Brown in the pile of leaves with the wet sucker comes to mind)  Happily, all was well.

Now, you may be wondering, "Where was the youngest Gallaher child in the midst of all this fun?"  As it was a bit muddy, he spent most of his time on the sidelines, enjoying the sights and sounds from the safety and cleanliness of his jog stroller.  He did get out a bit, but we couldn't take photos of him because we only saw his back as he ran from one thing to the next. 

Overall, everyone had a good time, even climbing the trees.

Autumn Scenes

Our maple trees are turning colors, and the air is definitely crisp these days.  We're awash in pumpkins, which are being turned into puree, and we have four black trash bags half-full of apples that need to be sorted into "good for eating" and "good for canning -- as applesauce or apple pie filling".  So much to do!

Here are a few photos and a short video for you to enjoy.

Garden Bounty

We've had a nice garden this year.  With the exception of pole beans and cucumbers, it's done now, but earlier it looked like this:

Potato plants grown in enclosures...

 ...knocked down and dug out...

 with some mighty fine potatoes.  They were really rock hard fresh and tasty. 

 

Moving Up in the World

This summer we adjusted some sleeping arrangements.  Patrick moved out of our room and in with Thomas.  Anna, who had been in with Thomas, moved in with Catherine.  Now we have the Boys' Room and the Girls' Room.  We made the switch with much pomp and circumstance. 

Here Anna totes her belongings down the hallway to her new spiffy space where she sleeps on the bottom bunk.

 ...and she hung up her clothes in her new little-kid height closet.

 Even Patrick helped by bringing Anna's blanket.

 Thomas's room had been divided up to give him some baby-proof space, but he asked us to open up the room so he and Patrick could have more room to play.  Here the brothers are enjoying their first day together as roommates with a new open floorplan.  Patrick's crib is along the right wall out of view of this photo.