A New Adventure

Several weeks ago, Luke and I discovered a cute toy store near his office called the Creative Toymaker. It was so cute and had all kinds of toys that your typical chain toy store doesn't have as well as all kinds of homeschooling supplies. When I told my friend Jill about it she wanted to check it out too so, we piled all of our kids into her van and headed out to Glastonbury together. Jill is rather resourceful though and what was supposed to be a short morning jaunt turned into a blueberry adventure. She had gone on-line and discovered an orchard nearby that was picking blueberries so after the toy store that's what we did. We turned up the drive, piled out of the van, grabbed our buckets and got on the tractor-pulled-wagon that would take us to the blueberries.

On our way we could look out over miles of pretty fields and hills and off in the distance we could see the whole city of Hartford. We passed by an orchard of pear trees that were absolutely loaded with the almost-in-season fruit. The kids of course were more excited about the tractor ride than the blueberries at that point but were more than happy to start picking once we got into the rows of bushes. I had never been blueberry picking before so I listened too as Jill explained to the kids which berries were the best to pick and quickly got the hang of gently pulling off bunches of the round ripe berries and dropping them into the bucket that hung from my neck. We all of course had to sample the goods and even Noah, who has never really liked them, admitted that they were sweet and tasty. He picked quite a few by himself but I ended up topping off his bucket along with my own and Lily's, well, there were more crushed and half-eaten berries in there so I emptied it and handed it off to Jill to fill since she was wishing she had gotten a bigger bucket.

Once we had gotten enough we waited for the tractor to come back to pick us up to take us back down to the stand where we paid for our hard-earned treasure. Then it was time to head back to our house where we shared a quick lunch. It really was a great day. Time spent with friends is always really special but even more so when you can do something together as novel and rewarding as picking your own fruit.

The kids: Nicolas, Sophia, Noah, Lily, and little Elias down in front

Hooray for Blueberries!