Family fun: Apple-picking time at Jonamac Orchard in Malta, IL (near DeKalb)

Youngest son and I drove to Jonamac Orchard in Malta, IL (near DeKalb) on this beautiful sunny fall day, ostensibly to pick apples.  He didn't go for the giant corn maze, but instead spent the entire time running and leaping across a perilous gap in the Hay Bale Pile.  Would have done it all day, I'm pretty sure.  I happily sat on the hay bales with my face to the sun, eyes closed, listening to little kids running around - bliss.  He also had great fun firing the Apple Cannon, an impressively loud and powerful compressed-air gun that shoots apples several hundred feet into distant rows of corn.  Unfortunately, it quickly became too crowded for apple picking to be much fun, so we skipped that for another time.  We did, however, savor a fine picnic lunch of criminally good Jonathan apples, delectable apple pie, and fresh apple cider - "an apple in a bottle," he said.  Sadly, the lines for buying picked apples were also insanely long, so we came home empty-handed but not empty-headed.  Such a sweet and lovely day, and a lovely memory to put with so many others.  Days like this make me very happy.