We just got back from our yearly trip to my parents place in Lake Chelan, Washington. We didn’t get to do our usual stuff since I was 29 weeks pregnant, but we still managed to have a lot of fun.

Fernando worked remotely for the first week at the lake. Bummer!

But he was a trooper and as soon as he was done on Friday, he helped pick cherries with us girls.

Some friends in the ward own an apple orchard with a couple of other fruit trees.  They have a pie cherry tree and a Rainier cherry tree, and since they don’t like cherries, they let us come pick as much as we’d like.

The pie cherry tree was totally loaded. It was heaven.

So we picked and picked

My sister Crystal (the cherry pie diva) 39 weeks prego.

The fruits of our labors

I think we picked for about an hour

my nieces were such great pickers

All these cherries came from one tree. And we barely made a dent.

The Rainier cherry tree had huge clusters. Sadly the birds had gotten to some of them.  The owners of the tree didn’t even know they had a Rainier tree in their yard! We were so tired of picking the pie cherries and ran out of buckets, that we only got one bowl of these babies.  They go for $8/lb in Houston. At least that’s what I paid earlier this summer.

We decided to come back on another day to pick more of these babies.

I guess you could say I over did it that day.  And suffered for it later that night with contraction after contraction. But I didn’t go into labor so it’s all good. 29 weeks here.

After picking for an hour, we spent a few more hours pitting and freezing the cherries and making a pie or two. My mom makes the best pie in town.

And for the next several days we enjoyed a few more cherry pies/crepes for breakfast. Because pie for breakfast is the best.

We picked over 50 lbs of pie cherries, plus 20 lbs or so of Rainiers. Our same cherry friends gave us a 4 gallon bucket of Bings after church on Sunday as well.  Some people ate a little too many cherries if you know what I mean, but mostly it was cherry heaven.

My good friend Brie and her family came up for a day and we boated to town and had pizza in the park for dinner. Sadly I didn’t get a picture of her family.

Does Fernando look Cuban in this picture?

We boated across the lake to Manson for a shaved ice/popsicle run

 

We spent the last few days in Seattle visiting a friend from high school, going out to eat and celebrating birthdays and hoping my sister would go into labor. She ended up giving birth to her fourth little girl three days later.

Next year (if we make it), it will be a little different with two little bambinos of our own.

 

 

For the 4th, we spent the week at my family’s place at Lake Chelan along with my entire family.

Here’s how our trip went:

Warning: picture overload