Rambo

It may seem counterintuitive to have the words Rambo and Micah in the same post. . . but just wait till you see these pictures! 😉 Like his big sister, Micah loved apple picking too, but he experienced the orchard in a totally different way than “Mara Apple Picker” did.

When we first arrived at the orchard, Micah picked two apples right away.

Then he began eating. The whole my-parents-never-feed-me-anything style of eating, with one apple in each hand, alternating bites. I was amused because I hadn’t really expected him to eat the apples in the midst of the excitement of picking them.

Micah is going through a major “baseball bat-sword-lightsaber” stage, where he can transform anything he finds into one of those objects.

At the apple orchard, he found a wealth of sticks and branches which doubled as all these things!

One of the first things Micah did when we got to the orchard was find a huge stick and an apple. He handed me the apple, saying, “Bat! Hit ball!” Apparently I was the pitcher.

Here he is waiting for the pitch:

He kept swinging the bat, even when I wasn’t pitching, and a man passing by said, “Careful with your bat! Don’t clock Mommy!” (I think I need to use that line around the house, because everything is a “bat” and “ball” these days!)

Then he found another stick, which he used alternately as a sword and as a gun–although at one point he pretended to push an imaginary button and he said ‘turn on,’ which makes me think it may also have lightsaber features. Here’s the Rambo sequence. 😉 Of course, you have to use your imagination just a little . . .

In the next collage, you can see Micah carrying the basket of apples over his shoulder. He loved to carry the basket. “Go work!” he kept saying. And much to his sister’s chagrin, he also loved to empty the apple basket–either by completely dumping it out on the ground or by taking the apples one by one and placing them in the other basket.  The apples he found never quite met with Mara’s approval–you can see him looking intensely at a dirt-covered apple, as Mara is calling, “Mom, he has an apple with poop on it!” (It wasn’t poop, but it was pretty nasty.)

Micah and Mara would duck under the tree branches and “disappear” into the next row of trees. In the picture Micah is saying that he’ll “come right back.” It was so exciting for them to run down the paths between the apple trees. How I wished I could let them run as long and as far as they wanted to go! But I was limited with Carissa, the double stroller, the baskets of apples, I kept having to call them back to me. . . Another day, we will go just to explore–and maybe not even pick apples!

The kids saw the tractor taking people on a hayride, but I’m not willing to shell out $18 just for the hayride! (When we lived in Indiana, we went on hayrides for free at friends’ farms. We can go back in the summer, when hayrides are complimentary if you’re picking produce farther away.)

Micah loved exploring all of it. Everything–even a simple blade of grass–was exciting! And predictably, he would pluck two blades of grass–one for me, one for him–saying “Fight, mommy! Fight!” (Anything and everything can be a sword.)

Always, I find him doing things for laughs–like sitting in the apple basket!

(Thankfully, it was empty!)

The orchard provided endless fun for this city kid!

The next day before breakfast Micah said, “Someday. Go farm! Pick apples!”

My heart was touched. He loved it.

So I was telling Daniel what Micah said over the phone, and Micah looked up at me with his sweet little smile and repeated, “Someday. Someday, Mommy.”

I hope it’s someday soon.