Sweet Summer

A few years ago our next door neighbor planted strawberries for us to share, and now it’s a flourishing crop. The girls love to go out and pick them. They’ll pick multiple times a day and bring in a pile each time.

If you are not fortunate enough to have strawberries growing a few steps from your backdoor, here’s the KidsOutAndAbout list of places with summer fruit picking. And if you have littles and you’ve never taken them strawberry picking before, here are my tips to make it as fun and stress-free as possible.

One thing I love about our personal patch is that the strawberries are growing and co-mingling with mint, so finding strawberries involves this amazing, very specific scent of warm strawberries and crushed fresh mint. I imagine that this will become a permanent sense memory for the girls, an immediate way to transport themselves back into their childhood. And since both strawberries and mint grow easily, it won’t be that hard to replicate when they’re grown-ups!

Speaking of summer memories, I was shopping at Target today and I had to take a pictures of one of my summer favorites.

Dude, this could be the best $10 you’ve spent in a while. They blast a satisfying stream of water without feeling at all gun-like, they’re sturdy and long-lasting, they’re soft enough that people can’t easily hurt each other. We gave these away instead of goody bags for one of M’s birthday parties, and we have others that have lasted literally years and years, and they’re still super-fun. I was just hosing them off for our next gathering. Which I’ll tell you about soon.