Homework, dehydration, crab apples and poop spiders

1. I realized that we needed to turn our crazy "watching a couple hours of tv after school" ship around and start getting serous about our family schedule. The rule is that as long as somebody is working on homework, nobody turns on the boob tube, the life leak....the brain drain, if you will.

So everybody got in on the homework action.

Already I'm feeling better about life.

2.  I had a basket of tomatoes that was starting to get wrinkly and I knew there was no possibility of me being able to eat them. I can't bear to throw them out and they are a little small and imperfect to be giving away. So I scored a dehydrator at Aldi today for 13 bucks!!

Now I'm drying 3 trays of tomatoes, 1 tray of jalapeno halves and 1 tray of parsley. I love it!

What else can I dry??? I must scour the produce drawer!


3. Tonight we went over to the NeSmith's home to pick crab apples. Bro. NeSmith tells marvelous tales about his crab apple jelly (among other things) and I'm feeling adventurous.

Also, I thought it would be a nice way to spend a cool fall evening.

But first! The kids got a nature lesson on watching the spiders run as he sprayed the dog poop into the grass. Apparently, the spiders hang out near the poop in hopes of nabbing a fly that is in hopes of nabbing some poop.

Interesting.

And a bit horrifying.

But on to the picking!

After picking all we could reach, Brother NeSmith started cutting down the branches. He is ripping out these trees anyway in order to put in a new patio. So he figured he might as well do it now and we could get the apples.

Only, every time he would cut a branch and pull it in our direction, all the crab apples would rain down on his head. It was pretty funny.  The boys did their level best to try to convince the branches not to land in the neighbor's yard.

And we had lots of little people to gather all of the fallen apples up.

Megan and Laney set up a 6 step sorting process on the picnic table. It mostly involved putting them in one box and rolling them around and then putting them in the next box. So, in the end, our crab apples have been put through a very thorough rolling and box-transferring process.

As well they should be.

When it was dark and we had a big box of crab apples, we loaded up the van and headed home.

It was definitely better that a(nother) movie night.