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Here is how things are in my house for most of the month of December:

Transcript:
Hey! There’s no chocolate in the house!

It’s the Christmas season. We need to have chocolate and cookies and stuff.

(make/obtain sweets)

These are yummy. It’s hard to stop eating them.

Oh good – they’re gone. Now I don’t have to worry about self-control anymore.

Specifically, things not to feed a child who is not potty trained.

Alternate title: how to make enemies in the church nursery

I don’t like potty humor, except for maybe this one case. But parenthood brings you into certain situations that you wouldn’t discuss otherwise.

Today is such a case.

It’s for a public service, though, not a cheap laugh. I know there is at least one new father who reads this blog, and there are things he might want to know so he doesn’t have to learn the hard way. In order to bring him up to speed, I am publishing this list of foods to avoid giving your child if you will be changing his diaper within the subsequent 24 hours.

• Blue Moon ice cream
• Corn
• Blueberries
• Spinach
• Chili

Apparently the color blue is not easily digested.

And I wonder why we even eat corn since it appears to not be used at all by the body. Surely there must be a better use of one’s energy than eating and attempting to digest corn. Unless maybe it is just exercise.

Parents who have gone through the diaper-changing phase:
Any other foods to avoid?

With the raspberry picking out of the way, we decided to go peach picking. I took the 3 older boys to an area farm and sprayed them well with insect repellent (the farm doesn’t use pesticides so that they can be certified as natural or organic or whatever).

I inquired at the weigh station about peaches and was told that the next group would go out in about 10 minutes. We could either wait or we could go pick raspberries until then. It didn’t matter to me, so I took a vote among the boys and it was 2-1 in favor of raspberries. So off we went.

This time, they all liked picking raspberries and did a fine job of doing so.

We had a couple of buckets, so we had some sharing issues
(3 boys – 2 buckets = 1 child complaining about not having a bucket).
(more…)

It is raspberry season, so we took our annual trip to go pick raspberries. It’s not much of a trip, since it’s only a few miles away. It’s quite convenient, in fact, especially with 3 children in tow.

The baby was sleeping, so I took the other children.
Last year, the older two did a decent job of picking the berries.
Last year, I had Gamma in a backpack carrier, so he did fine too.

This year, the older two just ran around and played in the open field.
I sent them there after too many complaints about bees and mosquitoes and thorns.

Gamma just stuck by my legs and asked to be picked up or carried or to go home the whole time.

I picked a few pints of raspberries.

The boys got to see some sandhill cranes, which apparently like to frequent the raspberry farm.

And that’s good enough for a while.
We froze about half the raspberries, so we can enjoy them throughout the year.

The temperature last week (10 days ago) reached in the 70s, with plenty of sun. We did break out the sunscreen, for me and for the kids. I had setup the trampoline, so everyone had fun outside.

With weather like that, we figured spring was here. I bought charcoal for the grill, and we were all set for good weather until October.

It snowed yesterday. Not just some-snowflakes-came-down snow, but had-to-clear-the-car-windows type of snow. We had right around an inch of accumulation.
(more…)

We did the blueberry picking thing a couple weeks ago. Now raspberries are in season, so we picked some of those.

Rather, I picked raspberries and the children just held the baskets for me.

Maybe there were too many bees buzzing around. I told the boys that they won’t sting you unless you hurt them, but they were very wary of picking after seeing all the bees. And it was very hot. We spent about a half hour picking raspberries, but it felt much, much longer.

Alpha just wanted to go home.

I had to carry Gamma the whole time because I did not want to clean squished raspberries off every surface within his reach. I did set him down at the beginning – because he did a fine job at blueberry picking – to see if he would help with raspberry picking. But it took one raspberry to see the damage he could do.

And Beta just wasn’t interested in picking berries. Worse than that, he was actively taking berries out of the basket and throwing them as far as he could.

I asked him why he was doing that, and he said he was getting rid of the squishy ones. He meant well, trying to weed out the bad berries. But, as Alpha then reminded him, all raspberries are squishy. I told him just to leave all the raspberries alone and I would sort them at home.

We finally finished, after about 20 reminders to the kids that the more berries they pick, the faster we’ll be done and the sooner we can go back home.

Did I mention it was hot?

Back home, I sorted the raspberries and found a stowaway.

I quickly disposed of him, and any raspberries that had any dark fuzzy spots. Those went in the garbage. Any raspberries that were not moldy but were just on the too-ripe side of things I also disposed of. Those went in my belly.

And now, some gratuitous close-up shots of fruit, compliments of the macro setting on my camera…

In case you’re wondering about the trends in U-pick berries: 3.25 lbs. cost $12.50, so that’s about $3.85 per lb. Last year, they cost $3.75/lb. So it looks like raspberries cost more this year, and blueberries cost less this year.

Side note: When my wife was looking up U-Pick places, we wondered what else could be U-picked. So after a little research, we found a U-pick chicken farm. They also have U-pick rabbits and U-pick fish.

I wish someone would have a drive-thru u-pick place. I would donate them some letters so they could upgrade to a drive-through you-pick place.

We went blueberry picking last weekend. Blueberries are early this year because of the heat. So we took advantage of the one nice thing about all this heat and picked a bunch of blueberries.

We had 3 buckets for the 5 of us. Yes, even Gamma picked berries. Some off the bushes, some off the ground…

It was raining when we started, but it tapered off before we were halfway through. The nice part about that was that the blueberries were then already rinsed when we picked them. But my wife rinsed them in the sink once we got home anyway. No, not actually in the sink…in the colander which was in the sink.

We wound up with 9.5 lbs. of blueberries. And the total came to $14.06. It was really more like 10 lbs. of blueberries, because there was at least half a pound in the boys’ tummies by the time we checked out.

Let’s see… $14.06 / 9.5 = $1.48 per pound. That seems to be on the better side of the average U-pick price for blueberries.

The only downside is that’s too many blueberries to eat at once. Well, we could try that, but the baby’s still in diapers and I do not want to deal with that. So we froze a few pounds of blueberries and we’ll enjoy them in the fall and winter.

Next up: raspberries! Should be ready for picking in a week or so.