Fall Fun

We have been busy this fall having some fun as a family with extended family and friends too! We are so blessed to live in an area loaded with activities to do! Early in September my husband and our oldest son went on a father son camping trip with our new church family and they had a wonderful time! On a side note, we are loving our new church body and wish we had followed the Holy Spirits promptings to leave our previous church sooner, but now that we have, what a blessing it has been to our entire family! It has a very strong mens ministry and having men prepared to lead their families and communities is so important! Anyway, while they were camping, my two sisters and brother in-law came up from NJ and went apple and raspberry picking with the two littles and I! The raspberries were amazing and while we did eat half, we froze the rest and have been adding them to whole wheat pancakes and our wheat berry muffins! We made lots of applesauce and applecrisp that week and ate a lot of apples and just like that-- poof! 20 pounds of apples were gone! We'll have to go back and pick some more soon!

http://www.weaversorchard.com/

We also have some dear friends with a wonderful little creek in their backyard and they invited us over one afternoon for some exploration! The kids had so much fun looking in the water for water creatures and getting wet. It was such a nice break in our day and a delightful experience!

We also did some corn maizing this fall. We went to two different places and both were a lot of fun! The one at Grim's http://grimsgreenhouse.com/ had an apple theme and as we went along there were apple questions to help us find our way out-- educational and fun! At http://cornstalkingusa.net/ we went through a football themed corn maize and had lots of fun! Both mazes took us about an hour to navigate our way thorugh and collect all the clues. Corn stalking USA is run by friends in our co-op and closer AND they do it at Christmas which sounds like a lot of fun!

And of course, we have been busy doing school-- we have 118 days left and my goal is to finish with room to spare before the baby joins us :) We are hoping to take a break from our traditional studies Thanksgiving week and do a Thanksgiving Unit study and a family Bible study on gratitude. Wishing you and your family a happy fall, The Gardner Gang