Apple Orchard

Royal Oak Farm Orchard is a new family favorite. If you live in northern Illinois or the Chicago-land area, we highly suggest it for a fun, fall, family outing!

String Bean discovered today the joy of eating an apple straight off the tree. I am not sure we'll be able to turn her back to applesauce or yogurt with apples in it ever again. Mr. Bean mimicked what we both assume String Bean was thinking while sitting in a red wagon chomping on a fresh apple, "How come you guys never told me about apples before? This is great. I am almost 2 and you never shared this wonderful food with me. If I had only known I would have been eating them all along!"

I hope to share photos with you soon! (This orchard is a Nut family favorite, too!)

It's a Trick for us.

Halloween, that is.

As I've mentioned before, our Peanut has Prader-Willi Syndrome. (Yes, I'm going to link every time.) The biggest health risk for those with PWS is life-threatening obesity. The obesity stems from a very slow and different acting metabolism and is coupled with an insatiable appetite. In other words, people with PWS will grow morbidly obese on a normal diet and always be hungry besides. Peanut has just started to gain weight quickly and we are in the process of changing our family's nutritional outlook.

When it comes to the candy holidays, we parents already have a problem, and then comes Halloween, the worst of the candy holidays. The whole celebration revolves around candy, even the alternative events. Trick or Treat? bags of candy. Trunk or Treat? entire cars full of candy. So what are we to do? Walnut is well versed in the joys of Trick or Treating and has been talking about this Halloween since last Halloween, nearly salivating at the thought of so much candy. But, we can't have it in the house. We just can't. We can't let Walnut and Cashew have what Peanut can't have and there is only so much sneaking that we're comfortable with. Some one suggested to Filbert that we only keep a 1/4 of the candy we collect, but that is still too much for Peanut to have and we need to break the candy tradition sooner rather than later.

So to that end, we are going to an apple orchard for Halloween. Royal Oak Farm. We hope to make it a yearly tradition. Walnut, Peanut, Cashew and I went there last fall with my co-blogger Mandie, the unblossomed String Bean and our friend Fancy Aimee, who totally rocks on car trips with small children.