Last Thursday, I did something with Dylan that I had been planning to do for quite some time. In the morning, I visited the web site www.pickyourown.org and located a blueberry farm in an area that I like to visit. I called the farm to make sure that their blueberries were ready and that the farm was open for picking.
We drove over a scenic mountain road, and my excited little fellow was making up songs about blueberries in the back seat as his baby brother slept soundly. On the other side of the mountain, I stopped at my favorite café and we shared lunch. I could tell he was antsy to get going so we ate fairly quickly and drove the last couple of miles to the farm.
Once we were there, he saw the rows of berry bushes all along the driveway and informed me that he was going to pick them all. I laughed, and we got out of the car and went to the farm stand to get our berry picking buckets. The farm is very child friendly, and when I mentioned to the woman that we had just eaten lunch she thanked me for being so courteous because many people apparently don’t do that and the kids come back with empty buckets and full bellies.
They even had child sized buckets, and Dylan wore his proudly as we went out to the rows of bushes. I got a little worried for the first couple of minutes because not many berries were going into Dylan’s bucket. With a few gentle reminders and a friendly challenge to see how many he could pick, the berries started going into the bucket.
We picked together and talked about blueberries, and I was very impressed that Dylan picked only the ripe, blue berries and not the purplish pink or green ones that were not ready yet. Every so often he would grab one by mistake and place it on the ground “for the birdies because blueberry not ready yet”. The cutest thing of all was that every few minutes he would pause, look contemplatively around him, and say “Dylan is so happy”. He’s generally pretty happy, but for some reason picking blueberries struck a special chord with him. Even though I have a big bag of berries in the freezer I have a feeling that we just might find ourselves in the berry patch again this summer.