Apples and Jumping and Jumping and Apples

The seasonal work I've recently undertaken is that of school tour guide at our local apple orchard/pumpkin patch/place you go to wear your kids out.  This is fairly ideal as they took my "I can only work two days a week for these very limited hours" availability and basically said, "Okey dokey."  So now I'm talking to kids about apples and pollination and pheromone traps and accepting that they really just want me to hurry up and stop talking so they can go jump in the corn pool.

I've also learned I roll my eyes a lot (note to self:  apologize to Adelaide for giving her so much grief about this habit, as she is apparently just mimicking her mother); I had to quash this urge when a four-year-old daintily informed me that she doesn't go to a preschool, it's a learning center (I also had to resist the desire to ask her, "You still can't read, right?  Then you're in preschool."), also when another little girl squealed and cried every time a bug flew, crawled, or otherwise invaded a ten-foot bubble around her.  Patient reminders that we are on a working farm did nothing to penetrate her haze of panic.

For every whimpering princess and unimpressed boy who declares he likes the farm game on his mom's phone better than the actual farm (making me want to weep for the youth of America), there were ten others excited to learn how to properly pick an apple, and taste the difference between tart and sour varieties, and look at deer fences.

Arguably the best part of the whole deal?  Our little family gets in free to the place.  So now I leave the orchard, pick the kids up from the bus stop, and drive back so they can play at least once a week.

Caedmon's running form is around a million times better than mine.  Face included.

Atticus did hardly any jumping in the corn; he mostly seemed to enjoy lying around watching other kids getting told off by their moms for throwing corn.

There are two jumping pillows to satisfy all your bouncing needs- a small one for our smaller people, and a big one for our bigger people.  To jump on the big one, you need to be bigger, yea high according the sign in front of the pillows.  This makes sense to mothers who like for their children to be safe while jumping.  It feels woefully unfair to five-year-old boys who are not tall enough to jump on the big pillow with their big siblings.

He did eventually get past his finely tuned sense of justice (or injustice, as the case was here in his mind) and had a ball with the smaller pillow all to himself, as seen in the first photo above.

My biggest challenge now is to not spend the entirety of my wages on apple cider doughnuts.  I get them at a discount!  And they're made with real apple cider!  And isn't it somehow a sin to not enjoy the more pleasurable parts of our existence- or... something...?