We were blueberry picking the other day and I turned my back for a minute and heard the sound of far more fun than can ever be had picking blueberries. They had, of course, found mud.
It obviously could have been a lot worse. They could have been up to their waists in it. They could have disappeared into the bog, only to be discovered twelve centuries later, with alien archaeologists determining they were creatures who subsisted on a diet entirely of blueberries. Who, you might ask, lets his son wear a white t-shirt while blueberry picking? Apparently I do.
The only casualties were their shoes, which I had to reach in and slurp out of where they were lodged deep inside the mud. Gross.
Once we got back to picking, we managed a sixteen-pound haul. At $1.60 a pound, that was a lot of blueberries for not a lot of money. The kids were particularly sweet about sharing blueberries with each other as we picked:
And they ate liberally from my buckets as we went along.
At home,we made about ten more jars of blueberry jam, and about ten jars of blueberries preserved whole in a simple syrup (which we'll use for pancakes all winter). The rest we ate right out of the refrigerator until they were gone.