What to do with a bucket of blueberries?

1. Locate canning jars.

2. Leave Mark alone for a couple hours.

3. Feed children peanut butter and jelly for dinner (it's healthy if it's homemade).

Let's Do Everything Today!

I'm not sure what got into us, but we decided to have a really big day last Sunday.  For breakfast, we went to the Friendly Toast in Cambridge.  I wish I had taken some photos there; it's very Cambridge cool (more retro than hipster, very yummy).  Oh, well, we'll just have to go back.

After breakfast, we headed north to Amesbury.  I think Mark would move to Amesbury in a heartbeat, if it made any sense at all to do so.  He loves to visit Cider Hill Farm - terrific fruit, not overcrowded, a serious farm stand...

...and wagons for the fruit/kiddies.

We missed strawberries this year, but the blueberries were gorgeous.

Kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk

There was a sign encouraging pickers not to be eaters, at least not before purchasing.  I try not to be evil, I do, but sometimes I slip up, like when my kids look cute eating freshly picked blueberries.

And in all honesty, Chandler hardly left the wagon.  (She loves her stroller at home, too, begs to get in the thing.)  In retrospect, I think her teeth were hurting her.

This was applying of sunscreen, not laying on of hands, whatever it may look like.

Good ol' Frances, pulling her little grump around.

While Frances and I tried to jolly up Chandler, Mark handled the picking.  Thank you, Mark!

Back at the farm stand, we visited the livestock and sampled the wares.

Gotta introduce 'em to cider dough nuts early.  It's our job as parents.

One last dash of sister torture.

Good-bye Cider Hill Farm!  We'll be back!

On the way back south, we stopped in at Broken Heart Reservation, for a dip in the lake.  That's Frances dead center, and Mark and Chandler over on the right.

Luckily, the lake is a mile walk from the parking lot, so we racked up some immortal soul points against the blueberry gluttony that is to come.  (Do I need to explain immortal soul points?  Every time my sisters and I had something unpleasant to do, my dad would cajole us with the promise of immortal soul points.  I think the idea is that they get you into heaven.  Dad is a works over faith kind of guy.)

What big plans you have!

I had big plans for Beka, Molly and Zak's visit.  Big plans.  We were going to visit the Children's Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts quilt show, the Swan Boats, the Arnold Arboretum, a local fabric store, an alternative ice cream store, a restaurant with excellent grilled beans, the food trucks and the sprinkler playground.  We were going to make paint stamps out of potatoes for the kids to experiment with.  We were going to go through our bins and bins of clothes so poor Zak won't freeze in Brooklyn this winter.  We were definitely going to get a picture of all four kids together.  And we were definitely going to stay up chatting after the kids went to sleep.

Not so much.  Coordinating eating, napping, school, etc. turned out to be delicate, exhausting work.

We did manage to get to the food trucks, largely to avoid cooking.  We took the three littles to the sprinkler playground, though I'm not sure anyone actually made it into the sprinklers.  And we did rummage through several clothes bins.  But mostly we hung around the house so Beka could read to the kids.

Frances is just a bit fond of Beka.*

And then around five o'clock, we'd feed the kids before they self-destructed.

And then we'd start the bedtime routine, which turns out to be complicated with four children, two of whom aren't in their native environment.

And the adults usually called it quits long before 8:30, in contrast to freshman year of college, when our bedtime was 1 a.m.

We are too old for this.

*A few days after Beka, et al., left, Frances said, "I like Molly's mom.  She's good.  I like her reading process."  High praise!

Molly moves in

My college roommate, Beka, came to visit, dragging along her two beasts, Molly and Zak.  It's somehow frightening we've been allowed to spawn.  Who's in charge here?

Anyway, the kiddos did fairly well together, all things considered.  Chandler did get a little too enthusiastic with Zak's bouncy chair, but Zak didn't seem to mind.  And she did kinda push Molly, and Molly did mind (sorry about that, Molly).  But overall, they could have done much worse.

And now the obligatory bath shots.  The kids got more than their fair share of baths, but it was a good way to fill up that fifteen minutes while one mom was making dinner.  It was either drown or stink for poor Zak, so we went with stink (meaning, he didn't make it into the bath/pictures).

I have no idea

It poured the other day, so Frances took herself to the front porch and started singing.  Wanna know what she was singing?  A little ditty she made up, that went like this:

What can I do? I love you, but I want to be alone!

At the top of her lungs.

If we listened to more pop radio, I might have a theory about how she came up with this drama, but we only stopped listening to Raffi about a week ago.  Could she get this from the Beatles?  I think I'll blame the other kids at her school [shaking head in bewilderment].  Yep, blaming four year olds seems like the way to go.

Addendum: I gave this some more thought.  Maybe this is a tribute to Elsa, who loved Anna but was afraid to have her around.  Or maybe this stems from Frances's listening to Paul Simon's "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover" over and over and over? She likes the rhymes (bus/Gus; plan/Stan - the stuff of Shakespeare).  Is Paul teaching her to be a callous cad?

Great Brook Farm

We recently discovered Great Brook Farm in Carlisle, Mass.  It's definitely my favorite new spot.  Ice cream, farm, cows, goats, sheep, pigs, pond and trails.  We've been twice in a month.

A quarter buys you a bit of food to feed the animals.  We went through a lot of quarters that day.

Once we ran out of quarters, the kids just picked food pellets off the ground to feed the goats.  Resourceful little beasties.

The farm's main attraction is a dairy barn.  Free, 35 minute tours of the barn are offered.  Mark and I thought 35 minutes might be a bit long for the kiddos, but we gave it a try and the tour turned out to be fascinating for old and young alike.  The coolest bit was their milking machine.  All of the milking is completely automated.  The milking machine recognizes each cow and adjusts to accommodate her udder.  Whenever a cow gets uncomfortable, she just walks herself over to the machine.  Each cow will visit the machine several times a day.  That makes for a lot of milk. 

The next part was a bit iffy, to this ignorant city-dweller.  The babies and mothers are separated almost as soon as the babies are born, and the babies are kept in these pens.  We were assured it was for their own safety, but one of the calves was so young, it still had it's umbilical stump.  The babies sure were cute, though, and very willing to give anyone a lick.  I tried not to think about veal.

 Some day we'll have to actually walk the trails of Great Brook Farm, but for now we were content to eat their ice cream and pat their babies.

Another JP Gem

I had heard that food trucks visited Jamaica Plain every Thursday, but we'd never visited.  I thought it would be too much rush and bother right before bed time.

Silly mama.

With some help from her mama, Frances's friend Kealakai invited us to join them at the food trucks.  It could not have been more pleasant.  Lots of kiddos, lots of beauty, no time in the kitchen required.  Perfection.

Chandler did not stop moving the whole time we were there.  I don't think she ate a bite, way too much to explore.  That's Keala and Frances behind Chandler, and Keala'a brother, Akea, is the kiddo in the red shirt.

Keala and Frances took a little while to get comfortable with each other, since they haven't had school together this summer, but they were back to normal in a jiffy.

Chandler was comfortable everywhere with everybody.

This is a heap of Keala, Chandler and Frances.  (And, yes, Keala's mother and I have discussed how much the girls may resent their names as teens.  Sorry, kiddos, but we chose those names for completely legitimate reasons you'll just have to learn to live with.  May we never do you more damage.)

Just as I was calling it a night, a terrific band started up.  Well, the kids just had to dance.

How could I break that up?  A half hour and many good-bye hugs later, I wrangled the kids back home.

Guess where I intend to spend every Thursday night for the rest of the summer?