Simple pleasures, part two

On the afternoon of the day a couple of weeks ago when we went strawberry picking Kylie decided she wanted to go blueberry picking. Our backyard used to be filled with wild blueberries which grew on little plants close to the ground. Unfortunately they all fell victim to my husband's weed wacker. He decided that the backyard would look nicer "cleaned up", that is to say, devoid of any natural growth other than grassy type stuff, so he wacked the blueberry plants. While there are still blueberries on our property they are farther away from the house and harder to find. That particular day Robbie took the kids for a bike ride. They went over to the neighborhood adjacent to ours and Kylie rode out a dirt path that goes to a huge field. It was out there that she found, in her words, "a ton of blueberries".

For the next week she begged us to take her back to the trail to pick blueberries. Finally on Saturday evening after dinner I agreed. Armed with a walkie talkie to keep in touch with Robbie who was staying home to water, bug spray, and two buckets, we set out with Kylie and Phillip on their bikes and Bella in her stroller. It only took us about five minutes to get to the trail. Kylie rode ahead of us while we parked Phillip's bike at the edge of the woods, training wheels don't work very well on a rough dirt trail. We bumped and stumbled our way out the long, dark, trail to the end where it opened up to a huge green field. Kylie was standing by her bike, motioning with great excitement at the ground around her "look Mom, look, a ton of blueberries!!". It was instantly apparent to me that Kylie's definition of "a ton" and mine were vastly different. Still, the picking was pretty good and if we all pitched in I figured we should be able to get the two cups needed for muffins.

Within a couple of minutes it was obvious that we would need the bug spray that I had brought, so I pulled it out and sprayed us all. Since Bella is too little to be sprayed I covered the cloth diaper I had brought with spray and put it on top of the stroller in hopes it would keep the bugs away. We had been picking for about five minutes when Kylie said "gee Mom, don't your knees hurt from bending down like that? Mine do." Phillip was walking around saying "there sure are a lot of blueblerries here Mom, there sure are" (no, that's not a typo, he really calls them "blueblerries"!). My mantra quickly became "less talkie, more pickie", as I deposited handful after handful of berries into each of their buckets (which were not filling at a very fast rate). I probably could have picked faster, but the kamikaze deer flies were apparently attracted by the remnants of the hairspray I had applied that morning and I had to keep stopping to wave my hands frantically around my head to dispel them. Finally in an act of sheer desperation I sprayed bug spray on my hands and ran them through my hair - if you know me at all you know I had to be desperate to do that! It worked though, the little pests stopped dive bombing my head and I was able to concentrate more on picking.

After about twenty-five minutes Bella was starting to get fussy and I had picked my fill of blueberries. I suggested we walk just a little further out into the field to see if we could pick a few more berries before heading home. Prior to doing that I had to bounce Bella for a few minutes to get her to sleep. Once she was comfortably slumbering in her stroller we moved on. Unfortunately Kylie decided it would be a good idea to hang her bucket from the handlebar of her bike, which she managed to drop when she was trying to get on it. There were twenty five minutes worth of blueberries scattered all over the dusty, sandy, trail. Poor Kylie was devastated, but fortunately we were able to salvage most of the blueberries. We did go a little deeper into the field and pick a little longer, which probably made up for the blueberries that were lost in the sand.

The whole time we were picking blueberries Kylie and Phillip kept wrapping themselves around my legs, thanking me for taking them to the blueberry field, and proclaiming me "the best Mommy in the whole world". That was sweeter than any blueberry we picked that evening. We ended up picking two cups of blueberries, just enough to make one giant batch of blueberry muffins. The muffins were yummy but were gone in a few days, the joy that my children (and because of them, I) experienced doing something as simple as picking blueberries (or "blueblerries", depending on the child!) will last much longer than that.

(Stay tuned for "Simple pleasures, part three - adventures in apple picking" no doubt to be published in a blog near you sometime in September...)