Sweet Fruit of the Earth

After a week of feeling like I was losing my mind, we were blessed with Jeremy's parents coming to stay with us for a few days. I suddenly realized this house is easy and fun to run when there's four adults in the house. Besides trying to keep all of us sickies from going under (his parents weren't feeling well either), we went off to pick more apples and berries, then today we rode a train and merry-go-round with the girls. The above picture is at one of our favorite places to pick. That dog's not Pele, his name is Max, and he's seriously the size of a horse. His shoulders fall just below my hips. I'm a sucker for animals, but especially winter dogs.
Here's Katie enjoying the produce.

Sydney's the one in stripes. They love that they get to run all over and eat whatever they get a hold of.

There's Grandma and Grandpa getting a taste of things.

Cora steals my heart in this picture.

That is the infamous Connecticut River behind them. That was one of the rivers that just below us flooded out a lot of areas. We had two shopping areas that were under up to 5 feet of mud in some places. I was blown away at the destruction that happened. I'm sure grateful we were OK through Irene and I've been amazed as I watch so many people in all of the communities here really work to help each other out.

I don't know if you can tell, but there are berries smeared on Cora's face.

And Sydney can now scowl with the best of them.

This girl loves her merry-go-round rides.

This is the very end of the train they got to ride.

And my favorite picture of Sydney.

So just to cover some of the exciting events this last week. Our fridge has been dying since July. It went out completely Wednesday morning. I couldn't be grateful enough for Vicki and Jeff who were there to help with the kids and finding a new fridge while I was also getting what we could save to the neighbor's freezer. Jeremy was able to get a Dr's apt and found out he had some pneumonia in his lower left lung. Then we also had 45 lbs of apples. Between Jeff, Vicki, Jeremy and I we did our first canning adventure and canned 14 quarts of apple sauce. It's pink because of the apples we used and it is yummy. Vicki helped me get a MEGA jump start on the quilts I was working on for the girls, and between the four of us we were able to still feed the kids and walk the dog amidst all of this.

We've felt very blessed to have the family we do, especially when they help us really just enjoy our children. There is still so much that I want to talk about, but it's time to go to bed.