Yesterday I took my boys plus Bryan to a local farm to pick strawberries in hopes that they would find the same simple joy in filling buckets that I had found in the task when I was young.
It almost went well.
I hadn't really taken into account that I was making this journey on my own with two one-year-olds, one three-year-old, and two school-age kids who were so anxious to fill their containers that they didn't bother to check that the berries were ripe before they plucked them from the vine. Grrr...
Add to that the babies who were stepping on the plants, taking bites out of green strawberries and then throwing them, and Drew who ... well, he pretty much did the same thing as the babes. There wasn't enough of me to keep up with them.
Then the wind kicked in and began to blow dirt into all of our eyes. My contacts were screaming in rebellion, while tears streamed down my cheeks.
I completely lost my cool and was chewing kids out for wandering off, picking unripe berries, and everything in between. I felt really bad for turning our outing into an unpleasant experience, but I decided to just fill the stinking boxes as fast as I could and get everyone back in the car before my eyes turned all that dirt to mud.
The day was not a total loss. I learned to never take toddlers to a u-pick berry farm without reinforcements, stay home if it's windy, and that no amount of squashed fruit or sticky hands is worth me becoming the uptight mom who rains on the parade. The kids still had fun, and we used those berries to make some killer smoothies.
2 comments:
This has convinced me to wait at least one more year before attempting the u-pick farms with my kids - thank you!
But I'm glad you managed to have some fun and at least the containers were small. ;)
Smoothies are the bomb. :)
You get an A for effort in the attempt to find fun things to do with your sons. Maybe one pumpkin a year at the pumpkin patch is all you should attempt alone. Maybe berry picking is a girls day out while Dad and Grandpa watch the sons!
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