Appled out

I'm appled out. I'm glad this is just about over. Next week we are starting our General Conference Prep. Should I be concerned that I spend 4 weeks on apples and only 1 week on the Prophet and Apostles of the Lord? Probably.

Here were our FINAL apple activities.

Our very generous neighbor said we could pick as many of his apples as we wanted - all season long. So we went across the street and got to pick apples ourselves from an apple orchard. The kids loved it.

With those apples we made an apple crisp. (Half of which I ate for lunch that day :)

And in one of those apples we found a worm (he's in there, I promise.) This brought back a certain memory of biting into an apple and watching the frightened worm scurry back into the core before I could eat him. Gross! Why would I ever want to eat a worm? I screamed and threw the apple as fast as I could. (but being in the car it couldn't go very far). It took all the courage I had to pick up the apple again and throw it out the window. Ew. I almost bit him in half! Anyway, I knew enough this time to see that there was going to be a worm in this apple before I actually cut into it, so I had a little time to prep myself.

With a few of the Allred Orchard apples we had left, we made some apple cider - which was yummy - but not as good as, well, the good stuff.

And with the very last of that 3/4 bushel I pulled out the hand-me-down food dehydrator with no manual and no knobs or dial. Just a cord and a plug. Sounds easy enough, but I've also had past dehydrator experience, so I was cautious and didn't promise the kids too much.  We made this into a science experiment. What happens when we dry out the apple slices? What will they look like? How will they be different than the fresh apples?

He took the slicing job very seriously

the night before

the next morning

tasty little guys

And then for fun we tried to rehydrate our dried apples with the last of the apple cider. We let them soak overnight. They were pretty good. It was also a fun science experiment to hypothesize whether or not the rehydrated slices would be exactly like the fresh slices and why or why not.

before

after - they don't look much different, only slimier, but they did rehydrate a bit

We made this awful "bushel of apples" craft that could have been SO much better if I had put more than 3 seconds into planning it. There are many many things we did "wrong" and all those creative mommy minds out there are welcome to take the base idea and actually make something cute.

But this little activity/drawing was a success, I think. I like how Joshua spent a lot of time and thought into it and tried to really draw an appropriate picture for each square.

If you really want to read the captions, just click and enlarge the photo

Last but not least, Joshua has been asking for a week or so to draw/create a dinosaur with our craft supplies. So one afternoon I brought down the box and he and I just let our creative juices flow. It's good, I think, to just let him create whatever he wants sometimes, instead of dictating what he should do with all those little crafty things.

Next week, General Conference!