Family Traditions and More Fall Fun

Every year over Columbus Day weekend, we travel with my parents and two sisters to Manchester, Vermont for a day trip. When I was a baby, the tradition was started when my parents sat me on a rickety wooden fence outside of the Jelly Mill, a huge gift shop and restaurant, and snapped my picture. I was about 18 or 19 months old. Now every single year since then, we have returned to the same wooden fence and taken pictures, starting with me, then with me and my sister Chelsea, and then with the two of us plus our youngest sister Ashley. In our younger days, we would also go apple-picking while in VT, so we have always referred to this day as our "apple-picking trip." We still call it that, although now a more appropriate name would be "shopping at the outlets and watching football in a bar trip." It has been so awesome continuing this tradition with my kids!

Here's Seamus on his first apple-picking trip...


And his second...
His third, and Grace's first...(could NOT get both children to look at the camera!)



And our most recent! (Kim, does Gigi's dress look familiar?) We are getting nervous because some of the fence is rotting away, so we didn't sit on it this year, we stood in front of it.

A couple family shots. Pay no attention to my hair, I attempted to trim my own bangs. Yeah, don't they teach you not to do that in like, kindergarten? Did I seriously think I was exempt from that rule??

I really wanted to scan in some of the old pics with my sisters and I, but I didn't feel it was fair to subject you to so much bad hair in one post. So I'll save that treat for another day :-)


Here's a cute video from this weekend, visiting our friends the Weissers! The kids had a blast playing in this giant pile of leaves. I feel so cool now with my video-upload skills.