booberries

For the past 3 days Beech Hill Preserve has had open picking of their blueberry fields from 8am-1pm. The first day i got there on a whim when I called my friend Cara to see if she and her daughter wanted to accompany R and I to the park. She countered with a blueberry picking invitation and i couldn't very well turn that down, could i?

If you haven't read _Blueberries for Sal_ by Robert McCloskey (who also wrote _Make Way for Ducklings_) you really must. It is a super sweet story of a little girl and her mother who go to pick blueberries at the same time a young bear and his mother go to eat up for the winter. The kids lose their moms and find the opposite moms and eventually get it all straightened out. It's a great story, and one of R's favorites. We eat blueberries off the page and feed them to Reggie. It's quite fun.

anyway, I figured R would be all excited to live out Blueberries for Sal for real, and she was for about 10 minutes. Then she wanted to wander far, far away. I managed to keep her in my reach for about an hour before the sun and my full buckets made us pack it up. That night i made a scrumptious (if i do say so myself) pie and we brought it over to my mom's to share with her and my stepdad and his older grandaughter.

note: blueberry pie and ice cream before bed do not a happy to bed toddler make.

I went back the next morning to pick alone with my friend and was quite a bit more productive. There was something incredibly calming and peaceful about sitting on the side of a hill, rolling plump blue berries off the vines and into my bucket. Kind of Zen meets Norman Rockwell....