Orchard visit with friends

Early this month we scheduled a trip to an apple orchard in Pennsylvania with friends whose kids are the same ages as ours. This is the same orchard we took Grandma and Grandpa to the first year we lived in Delaware.

This orchard has a ton of kid-friendly activities and things to do, plus animals galore! Of course we had to start off with the farmer cutouts! Here's R as a farmer's wife with one of our friends as the farmer.

RUS has always been totally in love with D-- we used to laugh because often we would pass one another outside walking in/out of day care and RUS would literally lunge out of my arms and into hers. She says she's used to carrying both of her kids and RUS is a lot lighter than her daughter (who is R's age) so she didn't mind this at all.

The play area was a HUGE hit for both of the kids. Here's RUS crawling through a train

and finally arriving out the front. He was so tickled!

And this castle was wild. You had to climb a ladder to get to the second story (a ladder that I didn't climb because of the number of kids also trying to climb, so R had to do it by herself.) She was brave!

Here's a closer pic. She LOVED being at the top of the castle and really wanted me to climb up, but there was no way I was going to fight a sea of under-8-year-olds to try and get up there.

Then we went to where the pumpkins are and tried to get pictures of all the kids--we're only missing one in this picture!

One of the coolest parts of this orchard is that each year they have different pumpkin displays. This one was R's favorite (of course): Pumpkin Cinderella and her pumpkin coach!

And me and the two girls decided to be witches!

While wandering around the gift shop we saw this display of hay bales and tried to get a big group shot. The kids were not real into it! This is the best shot we got.

But R and her friend still wanted to pose so we accommodated them.

Before we left, we got the kids some apple cider for the ride home and R and I shared a caramel apple. YUM. Oh man. I remember as a kid my mom buying the caramel sheets for making caramel apples with. Me and my brothers LOVED those. 

As a side note, for this orchard, there's no entrance fee, but each thing you do (horse ride, face painting, play area, etc.) costs a small amount of money, which adds up. J and I tried to do the mental calculations and figure out whether we'd rather pay a flat fee for everyone to get in and then everything you do is free, or whether we'd rather pay per activity. It kind of worked out about the same for us cost-wise but I think having to pay for everything is a little bit of a pain (pulling out your wallet again and again, etc.)