Blueberries and Black Raspberries

The u-pick blueberry farm is a VERY important part of our summer.

The children's personalities really come into focus here. Sydney, whose penchants for fine clothing and hair pretties and small toy ponies might fool you into thinking her frivolous, steadily picked blueberries for two entire hours:

She ended up with three pounds of blueberries picked all by herself:

Willow, whose penchants for book work and dinosaur study and guitar practice might fool you into thinking that she's solidly industrious, picked perhaps fifteen blueberries, and then spent two hours happily floundering in various mudpits:

She collected this summer's stock of pampered tadpole babies to come live in our fish tank:

She's out on the back deck reading out loud to them right now, actually...

I forbade Willow to pick more blueberries after she got her hands so filthy in tadpole muck and refused to wash them. Fortunately, the child is a problem-solver:

We've never had the luck in our side-of-the-trail black raspberry picking that my blog friend cake has. We don't come home with many black raspberries, but this is probably a good thing since we seem to collect an equal number of chiggers as raspberries. The yearly outing does have two good things going for it, however, that our blueberry picking lacks...

Wildflowers:

And Daddy:

He's even better at collecting chiggers than the rest of us are.