Harvesting

My parents are beginning their wheat harvest. They've already finished harvesting their peas. My sister and my nephew are up at the farm, ready to help....my sister, at least. Matthias will help by lightening the days for Grammy and Grandpa Bob in between tractor repairs, truck repairs, radio repairs, the normal harvest events!

But we're here.

We love it here. We're doing great with our basic schedule of a relaxed breakfast, kindergarten, play time, lunch, reading time, "Mama time" (each girls' time with me individually)/quiet time (each girls' time alone), more play time, dinner, clean up, and bedtime. I'm a farm girl, though, and it's been several years since I've been home during wheat harvest.

Sooooo.....today we drove out to the farm that grows the food we get through our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) to take part in our harvest event opportunities of sweet corn, green beans, and tomatoes. As usual, I overestimated myself and thought I could feasibly do the harvesting by myself with the girls. It didn't seem like something that would really be up Mike's alley.  Fortunately, I'm married to someone smarter than myself, so Mike just shook his head at my "do-it-myself" plan! We loaded up immediately after breakfast this morning and drove the hour or so out of town to "the farm" (I made sure Sunny knew it wasn't really "THE farm").

The first pick we decided on was the tomatoes. To our surprise and delight, the girls' two little friends hopped out of their van with their daddy at the same time we were hopping out! What fun!  Each of our families were pretty happy to come away with two five gallon pails of tomatoes!

For us it was then on to the cornfield. Miss Mouse identified this pick as her absolute favorite. In her words, "I felt so 'big girl' when we picked corn because when Daddy would take the corn up to the van, he left me to keep picking, just like a grown-n-up!".  To be clear, this field consisted of a few rows of corn - long rows, but it was a narrow field, making it definitely safe to "leave" Miss Mouse in the field. Sunny, on the other hand, did not appreciate the corn pick quite as much as the tomato. With the tomatoes, she carefully and delicately placed the tomatoes I picked into the pail we shared. The corn just seemed "scratchy" to her, and she complained basically the whole time that she "could not walk in here".  Thankfully it did not take as long as it could have to pick 120 ears of corn. The enthusiasm of Miss Mouse certainly did not hurt in the speed with which the ears of corn added up!

We had a much happier Sunny when we moved onto the bean field. She refused to pick any beans, but she enjoyed picking bouquets of weeds. Miss Mouse was pooped out by the time we got to the beans, too, and ended up dumping her bucket into mine. So much for my idea of picking three of the buckets full of beans (we have "tickets" to use and could have used two tickets to pick three buckets rather than one ticket to pick two buckets...we actually could have gotten four buckets for two tickets, but I only had three buckets along...and we were already out of bags due to the massive amounts of corn and tomatoes already in the back of the van)! It turned out to be just fine, though, because by the time my bucket was 85% full, my abdominal muscles, the ones that still even exist, were screaming at me that they were completely and totally done bending over, done crawling on the ground, and definitely done having to stand back up again. Thus, we came away with two nearly-full five gallon buckets of green beans. I was thankful that we have grown purple beans in our backyard in the past so that the girls were not as enamored by the purple bean field as the rest of the children there today; my body really couldn't have taken anymore picking.

Sunny's favorite part of the day came just as we were getting ready to leave. I needed to turn in our tickets at the main farmyard garden, so I turned the girls loose on the flower field, which is a "free" pick meaning that we didn't need to use a ticket for it; they could just pick as many flowers as they wanted. While they picked their fills of flowers, Mike headed over to the free basil pick for one last hurrah for me.  All I can say is that this man must love me; he filled our remaining five gallon pail with basil for me to turn into pesto! Yep, I thought it was loving when he engineered a beautiful engagement proposal, but I couldn't have imagined he'd ever be happily picking a five gallon pail of basil for me! 

It wasn't until tonight that Sunny did confess to me that she stayed "close" to her sister "when we were picking fwowers because I was a little scared to pick them alone". She did say the flower pick was her favorite part of the day, but I was glad she was willing to identify her scared feelings (she often refuses to identify a feeling....the best way I can tell if I "hit it" correctly is that the correct feeling is the one at which she shouts, "NO!" the loudest!), even though I felt like a horribly neglectful mother leaving her to pick flowers alone if she was scared!  I did explain to her that I was watching her the entire time and was never far away, though it must have felt like it.

After all this harvesting of yummy, locally-grown, organic (I think?) goodness, where did we grab lunch on the way home? Yep, that's right. McDonald's. Ish!  What a fun day, though!  I still miss the smell of wheat and the taste of it, too, but it was ridiculously fun to harvest so much food with the Mice that we know we'll be enjoying all winter long! I couldn't stop smiling the whole way back home!