As I write this I am suffering from a strawberry coma. Yesterday we drove south of Portland about an hour to a Strawberry Festival! It was really just a farm where you can pick your own strawberries, but this farm had all their animals out for the kids to see and feed. For Cooper, picking the strawberries was kind of a sidenote! He couldn't get enough of the animals. We finally pulled him away and walked toward the field of berries and got started. Cooper is at the perfect height for finding berries because you have to get under the green... only he couldn't quite comprehend which berries to pick. Sometimes he just tried to pick up ones from the ground that had been stepped on! He got a quick 'yucky pucky' from us for that. Once we realized that Cooper wouldn't be much help in the picking department, we had him hold the basket and just handed him our strawberries. It worked out really well until Ryan found the perfect strawberry to eat and had Cooper take a bite. Then Cooper thought he should just be eating whatever strawberries ended up in his basket!! It ended up being quite a bit more of a workout than expected, my back definitely needed a massage by the days end.
This morning we woke up and Ryan made breakfast (I know, I know, it's Father's Day, but he loves to cook). We opened up Father's Day presents and decided to take a drive north of town to a place called Sauvie Island. It's also known for it's farms as well as quite a few wildlife areas and outdoor fun. It was raining most of the day, but the drive there was quite nice. There was a lavender farm where we were going to pick our own FLOWERS... except it was closed. So, we went to the other farm we had read about and... picked more berries! What!??! That's right, we had at least a half of a flat at home and we picked another little basket worth of berries. The part I mentioned about it raining made this picking just a bit more fun. Why you ask?? Because most of the berries had been washed off by the rain. So, it was more like a strawberry for the basket and a strawberry for me and so on and so forth. We were going to pick raspberries but got waylaid by the strawberries and just ended up with those. The little basket we picked would run about $2.50 in the stores... it cost us $1.13! Sadly, the berries didn't make it home. We ate them all in the car on the way!
Then we made dinner, followed by a dessert of strawberry smoothies! Hopefully, we don't break out in hives. Happy Father's Day!
