Babies and Fried Apples

We're having another good week up here in Wilkesboro! The apple festival was so much fun this past weekend. It got to 75 or 80 degrees while we were at the festival; add that to hundreds of people and at least 3 mullets, and it was a toasty day. But there were so many cute crafts and the food was delicious, and I also got to see my students dance. It was a super fun day!

In the spirit of fall, the art teacher had the kids paint fall-y scenes, and she gave them to me to hang up in the classroom. They're so pretty! It's kind of hard to see, but each child painted a tree and fallen leaves and some birds. I was super impressed!

I work with a third grade student after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We were in my room this afternoon and we heard an "Awww he's adorable!" out in the hallway, so we both turned to look. One of our middle school students is a new big brother, and he was holding his baby brother in his arms, walking through the hallway outside my door. The student that I was working with put down her pencil, because babies are more exciting than fractions, and was completely enthralled by the dark-haired baby in the hallway.

"Mrs. Blair, do you have, you know, like a daughter?"
I told her, "Pastor Jared and I have only been married a little more than two months, so we don't have any kids yet!"
"Are you going to have a baby?"
"Not anytime soon, but we will sometime down the road..."
"YOU'RE GETTING A BABY?!"
(Is that how people get kids, by stealing them?)
I laughed a lot and then I said, "No. We're not getting any babies anytime soon."
That's not one we need to get circulating through the third grade! It was so cute and she said she can't wait until the day I get a baby. How sweet of her.

I came home after I was done with tutoring and some grading and I saw this scene out in the backyard:

Jared was being crafty! I always knew he had it in him...obviously, he married me! We were given a really nice bluebird house at our shower at Millers Creek, and the giver of the gift suggested that we might stain the birdhouse before hanging it. We picked out some stain last week and Jared had it basically done when I got home!

See how he's sitting in the midst of some trees? Apparently this fell on him while he was sitting there and he picked this (so calmly) off of his shirt when we got back in to the garage.

Cute little worm! I would have been flipping out, smacking myself to get it off my shirt, but Jared didn't react that way...go figure :)

And now, we are making some fried apples that smell basically amazing. We got on Google this afternoon to look for a recipe for Cracker Barrel Fried Apples (Jared's favorite!), and we found one that seemed pretty legit. We have plenty of apples from the festival on Saturday that we wanted to use, and got the spices we needed when we went grocery shopping this evening.  They're almost finished, and it's making our house smell wonderful. We used our cast iron grill skillet last night to make some hamburgers, and they were delicious, but our house has smelled kind of smoky since then. If you ever need an air freshener, make some fried apples. Seriously the best smell ever!

I hope everyone else is enjoying fall as much as we are :) Does anybody have a favorite fall recipe we should try?