When Life Gives You Lemons....

... make lemonade!
Our little lemon tree in our back yard is only a few years old (like 4 or 5) but it has produced more and more lemons over the 3 years we have lived here. There are so many lemons on it now that the branches hang down almost to the ground from the weight of the citrus. This is how it looked before the first harvest:

Then my little helper Corbin came along...


... and together we pulled about 30 lemons off the tree. (There are still about that many that we left on the tree to tree-ripen for a 2nd harvest.) Then we went inside to make lemonade! I know it seems like more of a summer activity, but we enjoyed it nonetheless... and besides, you have to pick the lemons when they're ripe and that's in December for some reason. I'm glad that Corbin realizes where our food really comes from-- not just from the grocery store. Someday, he'll put that natural green thumb to good use when we have a big garden of our own. Until then, we'll enjoy the lemons.

During our lemon harvest, Corbin discovered a few creatures hiding in the leaves:

As we were picking, suddenly I heard, "Caterpillars, mommy!" He was right, the bird-poop looking smear on that leaf was a caterpillar, and we found 3 of them. We plucked them off the tree and put them in a cup for Corbin to observe... we didn't want them to eat all the leaves or get to the juicy fruit. Ironically, caterpillars was the theme of preschool last week. How appropriate. Thank you, Mother Nature. And here is a goody of my little green-thumb! (Sorry it got cut-off suddenly at the end, someone came to the front door.)