Visiting Avalon Orchards

We visited Avalon Orchard this year to pick apples with Christophe (and pick up a few things at the store, including cases of their cider, which is the cider we usually drink.

Avalon Orchards is an organic apple orchard with a u-pick operation as well as organic cider which they package in glass bottles. We're pleased with the cider, and it's difficult to find organic cider in glass bottles, so it's nice to be able to buy it at all, let alone in cases. The price on-site this year was $30 for 12 bottles, which is about $2.50 per 1L bottle.

We had a good time. I think it's likely we'll return next year. I also took some pictures, of course.

Christophe was scared of the Queen Ann's Lace; this was the only time he was willing to touch it, and immediately wanted to be picked up:
Christophe, modeling his new fox hat:



Christophe loved the tractor, although the exhaust fumes were a little much:

Cupcakes

Pierrette made chocolate cupcakes with mint icing made from the rest of the spearmint from our garden (nom nom nom), and Christophe was helping:

Pillow Talk

Now that Christophe is getting older we are looking into many new things for him - one of them a pillow.

He has now had his pillow for about 1 month and sleeps on it about half the time.

When looking for a pillow you need to consider many aspects including whether or not you feel you child is ready - if you and an inclination of doubt about your toddler and pillow then wait. I had a hard time finding definitive information as to when is it appropriate to give a pillow to a child; what I found ranged from 18months to 3 years old. Christophe is on the lower end of that scale at 18 months (when he got the pillow) however he had already been climbing onto our pillow at night since he was about 12 months old. One of the key components that I found was consistence in everyones advice is - NO PILLOWS UNTIL YOUR CHILD IS OUT OF HIS CRIB.

There are thousands of types of pillows to chose out there I wont list them all, instead I will just talk about the one we ended up choosing for him. We selected a natural shredded rubber pillow and purchased it at Grassroots; it's a custom order and took about 1 1/2 months to get to us. The reason why we chose shredded rubber over cotton or wool is that we wanted something that was machine washable and hypoallergenic. Natural and organic materials were also very important to us; therefor this pillow had it all.

At the same time we ordered one standard pillow to keep in his room from me that way I did not need to drag one of my pillows in there each time he wok and wanted me to stay with him.

So far we are happy the pillows, mine is actually one of the most comfortable pillows I have ever had. Christophe seems to enjoy his he understands it's his and it matches with mine and that makes him happy.

Visiting the Zoo

A nice side-effect of contract work, is that you can shuffle your time around or simply not work and not bill, as long as that's in keeping with the terms of your contract and the expectations of your client. You may not get paid vacations, but you have the option of just taking a day off. As a result, I did just that on 30-Sep-2009, and went to the zoo with my family and friends.

I brought my camera, as I'm wont to do. I was able to shoot some pictures of a month-old baby gorilla:



I was also able to get this picture of a butterfly which I'm pretty partial to:


There were of course some other nice photos, including the kids: