Sweet Labors

Part 1

After almost 20 years of marriage, Glen and I have established many traditions in our family.  Some, like our Christmas traditions, are pretty run-of-the-mill.  On Christmas Eve, for example, we have our Christmas devotional,  then we open our pajamas, put out cookies for Santa, and send the kids to bed.  

 Other traditions, like Glen making a special crepe breakfast for everyone's birthdays and the kids making a candy bar note for Glen on Father's Day,  are a little more uniquely ours.  

I don't even remember how they started, but I'm assuming it happened once and when the next birthday or Father's Day rolled around, someone said, "That was fun! Let's do it again!"

After reflecting back, I think that's exactly how our Labor Day tradition of going raspberry picking started.  We did it one year and in future years realized that Labor Day always seems to be right in the heart of raspberry season and that it was fun not to have to wonder what fun thing we should do with Daddy at home for the day!

This year, as always, we went with grand intentions of picking enough berries to make several batches of raspberry jam afterward.  We had invited friends to join us and were immediately disappointed (and a little embarrassed) when we arrived and realized that the picking was not going to be good. 

The raspberries were very picked over... 

and what few we got tended to be a little mushy and bug-filled.  After picking in the hot sun for about 45 minutes, we barely had half a bucketful. 

After resigning myself to the fact that I wouldn't be able to make jam this year,  someone had the idea of trying out the blackberry field to see if it was any better picking.  

On the way to the blackberries, we noticed the farm workers changing where the raspberry sign pointed to.  They were opening a new field! 

We rushed and were some of the first to arrive to fields bursting with perfectly ripe and beautiful raspberries! 

Within half an hour, we had about 10x more berries than we'd collected in the other field...

 and as was immediately noticed by the kids, they were also much sweeter and juicier berries!

We were happy that it ended well and were glad to have shared the day with friends

and critters alike.  :) 

Now we are enjoying the fruits of our labors with lots of jam on homemade bread!

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Part 2: 

This isn't a tradition for us (yet), but this year we also went peach picking on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend.  We went to Charlottesville early before the BYU game and the tailgating party just so we could go to the beautiful Carter Mountain Orchards.

When my sister, H, was a law student at UVA, she introduced to this gorgeous farm situated on top of a mountain overlooking Charlottesville.  We like going there as much for the views as for the plenteous fruits!  Our peaches did not look very pretty after sitting in the hot car for an entire day, but we still managed to eat a bunch and make a batch of half-peach/half-raspberry jam!


All in all, other than BYU's disappointing loss, it was a sweet Labor Day weekend spent making memories and enjoying time with family and friends!


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Birth Order and Picture Taking

When I was a kid I loved perusing the pages of mine and my siblings' baby books.

Being the oldest in the family, mine was full of cute photos of me and  interesting tidbits from my early years. 

Did you know that Spencer W. Kimball (the modern day prophet at the time) tickled me and called me, "Angel" when I was a baby?  Although I was far too young to remember it happening, it was meaningful enough to read that it happened that we named our first son after him. 

I learned from reading my next younger brother's baby book that the first sentence he ever uttered was, "Lara did it."  While he was probably telling the truth about who did it, I used to tease him mercilessly for blaming me for everything from the moment he could talk. 

After that brother, though, the stories start getting pretty sparse.  By the time the eighth child rolled around my parents didn't go much past writing his name and birthdate in his baby book.    Baby pictures of him are few and far between.

In our family it's a bit different.  We have quite a few pictures of Spencer and Cami, then sometime before Emma was born our camera broke.  Digital cameras were still a bit on the pricy side and we didn't want another film camera, so we went without a camera at all for a couple of years.   All of the pictures we have from those first couple years of Emma's life were taken by other people. 

Eventually we got our first bottom-of-the-line digital camera and picture taking resumed again.  Baby pictures of Adam are poor quality, but plentiful.  Then I discovered blogging, got a better camera, and unlike my "baby brother",  Ellie is  by far the most photographed of all of our kids.  

So it shouldn't have surprised me too much, when we finally went raspberry picking on Labor Day when I uploaded the pictures from our Labor Day raspberry picking adventures that I found one picture of Emma with her friend Elena...

 and the rest were of Ellie.  

Perhaps I should feel guilty for not being better about photographing everyone...

but then again there's no one else who still happily and willingly poses for my pictures anymore.  

Except the raspberry jam I made yesterday afternoon...


it not only willingly submitted to me taking endless pictures of it, but it also allowed me to spread it over homemade bread for the berry best treat ever! 

And with that bit of cheesiness, I think I shall go to bed now or  I'm going to be in a real jam come tomorrow morning! 

Plan B

It's getting to be THAT time of summer. 

It's the time of summer when all semblance of productivity or creativity seems to have flown right out the window with the final vestiges of my patience.   

It's the time of summer when the kids ask for computer time or a treat or a movie and I say yes without hesitation, just because it's easier than keeping an eye on them while they play outside or making the effort to find them a healthier snack. 

  It's the time of summer when any shred of a routine would be a welcome reprieve from the sleep havoc we've been wreaking on our bodies lately with the über late nights and random wake-up times we've been keeping... if only I could roll out of bed before 8:00am to make it happen.      

 As mentioned in this recent post, I truly do enjoy having the kids home with me during the summer and I treasure the family memories we make together each summer, but there comes a day when I just have to say....

it's time for school to start.  

We've still got another week before it begins, so to assuage my guilt for being so lazy lately, I thought it would be fun to take the kids on a fun outing today.  I did the research, made the plans, bribed the kids to clean their room, packed lunches, and took them to Butler's Orchard so we could do our traditional  Labor Day weekend raspberry picking (a little early). 

Too bad I didn't read the fine print...

We'd traipsed over 30 miles to get there and it seemed too sad to just turn around and go home, so we opted for Plan B and decided to stop at a playground that happens to be not too far from the pick-your-own farm. 

The Adventure Playground at South Germantown Park is a humongous, unique playground that is fun no matter how old you are.  We've been there a few times over the years and it never fails to impress the kids.  

The younger kids ran, slid, jumped, swung, and in general had loads of fun burning off energy and exploring the humongous playland. 

It was a little toasty out there, but that did little to slow them down. 

On busier days, there's a line of kids for these super fun saucer swings, but we practically had the playground to ourselves today...

What's not to love about a swing built for a crowd?! 

Cami and her friends made the best of the unexpected detour by allowing me to snap some fun photos of them...

They only agreed though, if I promised to put them on the blog....

Which when you're as lovely--inside and out--as Cami and her friends, Katy and Ashley, it wasn't too hard to convince me to blog about them.   The three of them are great friends and it's always a delight when they hang out with our family.    In particular, I'm always impressed with how sweet and accepting they are of the younger kids.  That's an unusual trait in teens and truly my younger kids consider them to be their friends too. 

The cute guy in this picture thought the girls were pretty fun and cute as well, since he followed them around and "flirted" with them the entire time we were there.  It's a good thing he wasn't any older or Glen might have had to start shooing him away.  :)

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Now I either need to get unlazy enough try raspberry picking again later this week or I need to stop daydreaming about homemade raspberry jam on my toast!

Day 250--Labor Day

After all my sarcasm and silliness in my Labor Day post on my main blog, this one will be boring by comparison.

Basically after a lot of fun and silliness at Butler's Orchards (in Germantown, MD)...

we ended up with 5-1/2 lbs. of freshly picked raspberries in the bucket and another few pounds in our bellies.


Then we swung by our home on the way back from the farm, donned our BYU clothes, and then went and got our free sammies at Chick-fil-A!


I was going totally insane trying to get everything with the ward preschool groups up and running, so AnnaLisa came home and made us a batch of jam.
Yay for AnnaLisa!