Nighttime Orange Harvest

Jeff took the girls this morning – Addie went to daycare, and Emmie spent the day with his mom, Nana. I took myself to work, and took a big ole basket of oranges to share.

Emerson helped Nana un-decorate the Christmas stuff at their church, and their house this morning. They ran around doing a few errands, and a few returns, and had lunch at Chick-fil-A. Then as a treat, Nana took her to Urban Air for a little while this afternoon, and one of her church friends met them there to play together. They also bought a new pair of white sparkly boots with pearls on them, that she said she’d wear to a Taylor Swift concert one day 🤣

And although Jeff forgot to take sister pics this morning, I made sure to snap a couple when I picked them both up this afternoon. When I got to school, Addison was wearing her sweatshirt like this around her legs. Her teacher said she had been doing that all afternoon, pretending it was skirt and that she was a granny! 😂

When we got home, I got started making some venison chili, and on the verge of this super cold night! Uncle Keith actually shot the deer this venison came from, and he gifted some of it to us for Christmas.

While I was inside cooking (and listening to my audio book and also washing some dishes), Jeff took the girls outside to pick more oranges. We had wanted to do it while the boys were here last week, but never got around to it. But tonight, we wanted to get as many as we could before the temperature drops drastically down below freezing, and ruins them all. Emmie grabbed Jeff’s phone, and she took a few photos for me. She actually took about 30 photos and videos, but these are the best of the bunch.

The venison was so good in the chili tonight, it turned out sooo delicious!

The girls both liked the chili, but Addison specifically loved it and really ate it so well. This girl loves beans though, of all sorts and varieties, so all I had to do was show her all the beans while I was cooking it in the pot, and she was excited about it!

Daddy was showing the girls videos of the hundreds of hawks that were flying all around our house tonight when he first got home, and they just thought it was the funniest thing. (Also, I saw somewhere today that it’s supposedly bad luck to have your Christmas tree up after January 6th, so I guess that’s gonna be us this year. Because although Jeff did finally remove the last of the ornaments tonight, we still didn’t get the tree down tonight.)

We all got bundled up again after dinner, and all four of us went back to do more of our nighttime orange harvest. Usually, I love harvesting them on a nice warm, sunny day, and getting tons of pictures and videos of all the beautiful oranges and the cute girls and the sunny sunshine rays. So doing this at night, in 40-something degree weather, was quite a different experience. We still couldn’t get all the ones from the very top, center of the tree, but we did get quite a few, as you can obviously see! We also didn’t count them this year like we typically do, but I’d say we still got about 200 oranges off the tree, and there are probably still 100 more up there!

So this morning I took a basket into my office to share. Jeff is going to take a basket to his office tomorrow. We’ll take some to our church to leave there on Wednesday, and we’ll save some for all of our family members. But even with all that, we’ll still have plenty to share, so if you want some, let me know, and we can work out a pickup/drop-off time or something. These oranges aren’t the easy-peel kind, and they have quite a bit of seeds; but they are super juicy and sweet and great for actually juicing if you wanted to give that a try.

Addie’s bedtime routine went pretty well last night, and she stayed in her own bed until 4am, when she still made her way to our bed. Jeff has been working with her in her room again tonight, and hopefully we can have another good night and we can keep working on this situation. Emmie was a perfect little sweetie pie as always, and was totally asleep before I even left her room tonight, especially after a very busy, very active day today!