Saturday, October 8, 2011

Fritters, Cider, and Fish

We decided to take the kids out for some fun this morning and headed out to Lattin's Country Story and Cider Mill.


As we were getting Maddie's shoes back on (she always takes them off in the car), Sam found a four-leaf clover.  He was so excited.  I don't think I've ever seen one, though I remember being his age and looking for them.


Our first stop was the country store for hot apple fritters.  They were yummy, but I think I prefer fritters room temperature.  We took them outside where we found the yellowjackets were still out in force.  They were very interested in our donuts.  Josh refused to eat his because of the flying menaces.  Sam did very well; at one point he had one perched on his fritter in his hand and he didn't freak.  Josh was freaked out, but Scot talked him out of it, and we headed to his favorite part of the farm.  Between the two, he was able to calm down and enjoy the morning.


Here comes the animal train!  This is Josh's favorite thing at Lattin's.  He insisted on me coming with him.  It's very tight in those cars with an adult my size and a child his size in one car.  He chose the front car, which is the bumpiest too.  I made the mistake of lifting him up instead of getting help.  (I injured my shoulder a few days ago and doing stupid stuff like lifting 50lb kids isn't helping it heal.)


At Josh's request we headed to this building.  He knows there aren't any yellowjackets in there.  They enjoyed feeding the goats.  This one nearly got Maddie's entire bag in one swoop.


The ducklings were the cutest, I think.

After that, we headed out to say hello to the peacocks and turkeys.  Then we found the apple slingshot.  We paid for three apples and let Mika, Sam, and Scott each take a shot.  Meanwhile, Maddie and Josh were playing with the water pumps.  After visiting the little maze we went to say hello to the cows.


This cutie was in a bad mood.  She hit the fence when one of the littles got too close for her.

With it being apple festival, they had quite a lot of little games for the kids to play for the price of a $1 ticket.  We didn't want to spend a ton of money so we didn't stay long; besides, we had a lot of work to get done at home.  But before going home, we had one more stop we wanted to make.


We headed to Tumwater Falls to check on the salmon.  They had plenty in the holding tanks at the top of the falls.  These fish will be donated to the food bank.  There was a Stream Team volunteer there to talk to use about the fish.  He also had polarized glasses (like the paper 3D glasses but polarized) for us to borrow to see the fish better.

Then we headed down stream to see if we could see fish in the river.  We didn't see any jumping (darn), but we did see some below the lower falls digging their redds for their eggs and chasing off the jacks.  While we were down there, the volunteer showed up.  We borrowed his polarized glasses again.


Then he pulled out a set of tubes with salmon eggs and babies at different stages of their life cycle.


It was cool to see the stages of development up close.

After we were done watching the salmon, we headed back up to the parking lot.  We let the kids play on the cement boat play structures in the park a bit before heading back home.

It was a good morning, though it would have been cooler to see the salmon jumping up the fish ladders. 

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