you can't get it back

I've been thinking about how we spent 10.10.10 yesterday.
and I also remember these smiles from about three years ago...

...and I remember them clearly!

At some point, I guess we have to accept it.
"You know they say, you can't go home again...but I just had to come back one last time."

Miranda Lambert's song says it. We have been making the trip to a pumpkin patch or apple orchard since probably around 2004 or so. And every time we do, it's somewhere in and around the 2nd weekend in October. It never occurred to me that this was something you could "outgrow" or not like anymore. I knew that I had to accept the fact that one day Brandan or Aly would say, "I'm not going trick-or-treating this year," or "Santa Claus isn't real, Mom!" ---but a trip to the orchard? This is obviously NOT cool anymore. This experience made for one sad Mommy. It is one of those things you don't realize until it slaps you in the face. Kind of like the moment you realize that you haven't picked up your son in your arms and carried him to bed when he falls asleep on the couch --- you try to wake him up and make him walk there himself. (And if you can't wake him - he sleep on the couch all night!)

So, maybe it was appropriate to find only a single apple up on the utmost branches hanging there by himself. This year's weather had hurt the crop, and the apples had to be prepicked and sold from crates at the County Line Orchard in Hobart, Indiana - good thing our hearts weren't set on picking a whole bunch. (With Momma's big freezer buried behind boxes in the garage until the renovations are complete - we knew we could come home with as many as we usually do.)

At one point, I overheard a lady tell her grandson, "Ready to go pick a bushel and a peck?" Now, I had heard my Grandma say this when I was little, and thought it was only an expression (and didn't realize until years later that it was a Doris Day song from "Guys & Dolls"), but it didn't cross my mind to turn and reflect in what she had said to her grandson. Not until now did I realize how fast time really flies and how little I was the last time I heard her say it.

Well, needless to say, Momma and Papa always enjoy the trip, but you can get a hint at the serious mug on Aly below...and at some point I don't think she was against the idea of the orchard as much as she wasn't pleased that we were trying out a new one this year.

ON A CUTE NOTE: Brandan found "Route 11" potato chips in the store, and said, "Hey! Momma got to go down Route 66 for her 66th birthday -- And I got potato chips!" We better be carfeful...he will have us making the trip from upstate New York down past Aunt Earline's in Tennessee, and all the way in to Tammy's in New Orleans -- if he figures out that Route 11 is really more than potato chips!
SO, the kids made the motions...fed the goats (who would have rather had dried leaves from the ground than the dried out old feed that was left out for them to snack on), drove the tractor,

...and searched for a pumpkin...

...in a big old patch. And maybe this was a sign, too...

...when your "pumpkins" are big enough to carry their own, you just know that you can't get those "other" days back.

I may not be able to ever get it back, but at least it will all be here (in documented picture form) for them when they are ready to REMEMBER.

{sigh}