Big bunnies and apples

As Brendon is working for the next three days (at least each morning) we decided to let the girls look for their Easter eggs this morning. Grandpa and Nana always give money for us to buy them Easter eggs - so they had a lovely selection to hunt for. The most fun for Rachel though was when we told Dad he had to look for one hidden in our bedroom. She managed to sneak it into the house when we got back from town on her birthday and she had so much fun watching Dad look for it. He was also surprised to find such a HUGE bunny.

The girls had been counting down the days until Easter in their excitement for the chocolate - so I decided to start hiding eggs for them this during this week already. I spoke to them about what Easter is really about - Jesus Christ dying on the cross and rising again - and said I don't want the chocolate to be the most important thing for them. So Ruth has been very good this week about talking about the REAL meaning of Easter every time she gets some chocolate.

After lunch I asked Brendon if we could go apple picking. Two years ago (in our previous house) we found a wonderful road side tree down the road from us that had such lovely big apples. So we headed there today. The tree really is HUGE. Both Rachel and Brendon are within the tree picking in this photo.

Almost as big as my hand.

So many just out of our reach.

And we were not disappointed. The apples were HUGE again and this year there were a lot less with worms in. When you pick you can quickly see if there are worms in the apple and so we throw those to the ground.

This year there were only a couple that we had to discard. We came away with 175 apples. I know they will last well in a hessian bag in the cold garage through winter - but I may try and get some time to do some bottling or dehydrating too. If I do perhaps we can go pick some more. Two years ago we picked around 500 apples and had loads of fresh juice through winter (with apple and carrot as the base) not to mention the loads of bottled apple pieces and apple sauce we did. So it will be nice to do that again this year - at least in a small way.