Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey

Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey

Rating: 5 stars (of course)

This summer we are going on weekly field trips.  Field Trip Wednesdays.  Yesterday was our third field trip; we went blueberry picking.  It was the hottest day of the year but we went anyway, along with some of my very favorite people and their adventurous kids.

Ben's favorite part was definitely the tractor ride from the parking lot to the fields.  It was already 88 degrees by the time we stepped off of the trailer and followed a dude with an orange flag to our assigned bushes.  While walking to our spot in the row of bushes, we passed a mother and her two children and --gasp!-- guess what they were reading underneath the welcome shade of the tallest blueberry bushes I'd ever seen?  Blueberries for Sal!  Of course, I couldn't resist the urge to say, "We love that book, too!  We should have brought it along, too!"  Luckily, I did resist the urge to ask them to pose for a picture and then put it on this blog.  I think that might have weired them out a bit.  Proof I can bite my tongue.  Sometimes.

Anyway, we had a blast.  I didn't realize that I came with such Serious Pickers.  I was taking pictures and handing out clementines to everyone's kids while Serious Picker #1, Caitlin, and Serious Picker #2, Michele, filled an entire bucket in approximately 4.2 minutes.  The littlest Serious Picker was Lorelei; she stood there and picked blueberries for 15 minutes without tasting a single one!  Apparently she delegated that job to Ben, who pulled a Sal and sat down and just pulled berries down one handful at a time.  Lorelei turned pink within that time from that time but obediently drank when instructed, and then told me: "We need to get back to work, Mommy!  Our bucket is not full yet!"

Man!  We produced a 3 year old blueberry-picking machine!

I wish I had been trickier in combining my blog with my children's activities: I could have had them pose in pictures just like McCloskey drew or made them say "Kupink! Kuplank! Kuplunk!" (though we had a gigantic plastic buckets, not small tin pails) or looked (happily unsuccessfully) for bears, or crows, or a partridge family in the fields.  But we were having too good a time to stop for a book-related anything, which was just fine with me.

I was having another bee-bim bop moment, feeling fairly mom-of-the-day-ish.  My kids were able to:

1.  Break out of their normal cycle of activities (that includes an embarrassing number of trips to Starbucks)

2.  Experience child labor (or, tough it out in imperfect conditions)

3.  Relate a book to real life (we talked about how the fields at Butler's were so much taller than those in the book)

4.  Pick their own snack/dessert/breakfast (for the next month or two)

Oh, and by the way, I have 7 pounds of blueberries.  Good grief!  What do you do with 7 pounds of blueberries when you really don't have to can them to store up for food for the winter?!  Please let me know if you'd like any.