Raspberry Picking

J and I spent the morning picking raspberries at Indian Ladder Farm.

It was just the two of us because Cute W and M got an early start on a day-long soccer tournament. For all Cute W’s big talk about how important it is to take a break from a sport for a while (he pines for the days when sports had seasons instead of kids specializing year-round) and how he thought it was great that M was going to take some time away from soccer, M’s actually doing more than expected, including an “impromptu” soccer tournament this weekend. Well, it was impromptu for us, because M’s team wasn’t planning on participating, but when Cute W heard that the girls’ U-12 bracket was short a team, making life difficult for everyone, he managed to recruit enough of our disbanded-for-the-summer group to participate.

Meanwhile I’d already planned a raspberry picking trip because our schedule is fairly packed, and raspberries wait for no one, people. When it’s their time, it’s their time. And right now it’s the raspberries’ time. And, incidentally, the blueberries’ and cherries’ time. If you’re interested in going fruit picking, here’s a list of summer fruit picking places for KidsOutAndAbout, and here’s a post I did about tips for fruit picking with kids if this is a new experience for you. They had blueberries and black raspberries, too, but we focused on the raspberries.

We gathered many, many berries.

Then I went straight from the farm to the soccer tournament, and since I wasn’t cool and organized enough to remember to bring a cooler, and I wasn’t generous enough to want to share, I ended up stashing the raspberries under my car. I thought that leaving them in the car would stew them (I mean, dude, I’ve seen that vet-in-a-parked-car video), and while the unconventional choice carried some risk that I’d forget and ruin a couple of kitchen bowls, all the raspberries, and possibly a tire, I knew in my heart that it was safe. When my children know that there are fresh raspberries around, they cannot be forgotten. Raspberries are unforgettable.