July 2016... written in September

Hello, faithful followers of my neglected blog. What can I say, it's been a happy, busy summer! I've been doing things like playing outside and checking Bible translations when inside, and the blog has sunk on the priority list.

For a fly-by summary of our summer, I'll try to put up a few posts to catch y'all up. First, we will go back in time to July!

This was our third summer in a row for going blueberry picking, so I think we can now call it an annual tradition. This year we had so much fun on our first trip that I took the kids again... and again. Three times (for three of us, Andrew only went on the first adventure) this summer we tromped out in the blueberry fields and picked tons of fabulous berries!

Would you believe this three-year-old picked almost two pounds of berries all by herself? Actually, she probably picked like four pounds, but only half ended up in her pail.

We all wore blue shirts in an attempt to keep stains more hidden! 

Jerod's pail is just for show. He picked plenty of berries, but none went into the pail!

Andrew and I are um, well, "slightly" competitive people. We definitely keep track of who picks more! I'm a faster picker, but he insists that he's simply more selective and picks better berries. 

Our second blueberry trip was definitely the most memorable one. It was supposed to be a cloudy, warm morning. I looked at the hourly forecast just before we left. However,, we’d only been there for about 10 minutes when suddenly it was DUMPING absolute sheets of torrential rain! Everyone was racing out of the fields shrieking. We were slow to get the van because we had to walk at Jerod’s pace, and were soaked through. Like, SOAKED. I went to go pay for our berries, but the ladies in front of me were taking forever, and after five minutes of standing there in line, the rain stopped. So I left the line and went back to the car and took the kids back to get more berries! Zarya and Jerod both had a blast and loved the whole morning, rain and wet clothes and all. Zarya told me several times that she was having fun, and we had to haul a resistant Jerod out of the berries when we left, so I think that means he was still enjoying himself, too. When we went to go pay, we had to pour the water out of our buckets before they were weighed so the rain wouldn't end up making us pay extra! We were so wet upon arrival home that I had to towel dry Zarya’s hair and change her and my underwear, because even it was drenched. I told Zarya that we were from the Pacific Northwest and no rain was going to keep us from having fun.