Kerplunk

Do you know the book Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey? We love books in our house and I particularly love reading my children the books that I heard over and over as a child. I guess those could be considered classics. Books by Robert McCloskey fall into that category. Blueberries for Sal and Make Way for Ducklings are probably our favorites.

Yesterday, I felt a little like Sal's mother. Fortunately, there were no bears ~ just my children dropping berries into their buckets to hear the kerplunk and then gobbling them up equally as quickly.

My mother and I took the children to my Uncle Tres' house to pick blueberries. This is just another example of how blessed I am ~ my uncle has what might be considered an orchard of blueberry bushes. They are enormous {more like trees than bushes} and organic, and they yield amazing quantities of blueberries. Each summer I try to make one trip to his home to stock my freezer for the year. With each trip I am secretly dreaming of picking enough to make blueberry preserves ~ something my grandmother did each year when I was a child. Most homemade preserves are delicious ~ how can they not be with so much sugar ~ but I am a complete sucker for homemade blueberry and fig preserves! They taste of my childhood and the hours those that went before me spent over a hot stove canning.

Picking blueberries is not difficult. In fact, many of these were the perfect degree of ripeness to allow them to just pop off of the bush. But as anyone who has three young children can tell you, having children adds a different element to life, and as you can imagine picking blueberries was quite interesting.

This is basically how it went... Mary Frances was quite helpful {maybe 5 is the magic age}! She picked and Walker ate while Stephen played with the piles of recently cut grass and attempted to climb the ladder.

Actually this was the most successful attempt I have had with picking berries with my children. Maybe it is because they had each other. Maybe it is because they are older. Undoubtedly it is because the weather was perfect ~ overcast and threatening making it cool and breezy. After several hours and a picnic lunch we made it back to Sagwah with two large buckets of berries.

I'm dreaming of blueberry preserves, blueberry cobbler, blueberry fruit leather, and maybe even a blueberry pound cake to take to the lake for the 4th of July. I hope this will leave us with just enough to freeze for pancakes throughout the year.

I hope to be back soon with some of the fun things we do with these berries.

For now I will leave you with this thought...

Patterson would say we had a good day!