Down on the Farm

This week I've been inspired by the fear that we may have to move to take better advantage of all the fun stuff there is to do around the Boston area. Yesterday I took the kids to Castle Island, which is hands down the best day trip with young kids in Boston, I'm convinced. There's a huge playground, a fort, a beach, a french fry and soft serve shack - and it's free! Especially on a sunny weekday when the crowds are down, it can't be beat as a way to spend the day with your kids.

Today, high off my castle island success, I decided to take the kids on a trip to Ward's Berry Farm in Sharon. Ward's is the most popular of the local pick-your-own strawberry places, and Owen seemed pretty enthusiastic about the idea of picking strawberries, so I packed up the kids and went. Unfortunately, our Ward's trip was significantly less successful than our trip to Castle Island.

To be fair, I think it would have been ok had I brought along a second adult, but it definitley was not a single parent activity. At least not without any sort of baby contaiment device (of all the times in the past 3 years to be caught without an Ergo....)

We got started right away setting the tone for the failure of the entire trip. There are three choices of receptacle for berry collection at Ward's. They had little pint containers, slightly bigger baskets, and very large cardboard trays. As I was selecting 2 baskets, one for each boy, Owen asked if we would have enough strawberries to make strawberry jam. Looking at the baskets, I realized if we wanted to make jam we'd need a lot of strawberries, and should get the big tray. This, of course, was mistake number one. What Owen knows (or cares) about making strawberry jam comes entirely from a passing reference in one of his Berenstien Bears books, and furthermore, the sheer quantity of strawberries it would take to make an acceptable quantity of jam exceeds my own attention span, not to mention that of a 3 year old and 17 month old. Nonetheless, however, I forked over $20 for the big tray, which I then set out with toward the strawberry fields.

Halfway there, the not-such-a-great-ideaness of it all started to hit me. The promised "short walk" to the fields was, in fact pretty short. To me. To Elias, it may as well have been to Athens and back. He walks just fine these days, but at his own speed, which is best described as an amble, and an amble punctuated by frequent limp-body plopping to the ground when he's decided that he's either walked far enough or (more frequently) doesn't feel like going in the direction you are going. The hot sun was beating down on us as we slowly, slowly, made our way to the fields, with me awkwardly carrying the diaper bag, their lunch bag, my purse, the empty strawberry tray, occasionally Elias, and trying to keep Owen at at least an arm's length.

For some reason, I thoght things were going to get easier once we got to the strawberry patch. But Eli proved equally difficult to redirect within the confines of the strawberry field, with the added wrinkle of a complete inability to explain the finer points of strawberry picking to him. Oh, he got the whole point of the strawberry plants allright - that child is somewhat of an expert in all things edible - but he immdiately turned into a rampaging, strawberry-hoovering monster. Ripe ones, unripe ones, hulls on, rotten ones, berries out of other people's unattended baskets and trays - he ate them all. This occupied his attention for about 14 minutes, after which he had eaten his fill and got bored of the strawberry picking experience, and converted to just regular old rampaging. Owen, for his part, was a pretty good strawberry picker for the 14 minutes Eli spent eating every strawberry he could see. Unfortunately, because he's 3 (note to self) he promptly lost interest in the whole endeavor. For those of you keeping score at home, we had one very large strawberry tray, filled with only the contents of one 3 year old's pickings for 14 minutes. So, not very many.

I started to sweat. The tray looked cavernous and I realized I had no hope of maintaining the kids' saftey and/or attention for the time it would take me to fill the damn thing. I embarked on a mad picking mission, raking my hands throught the plants while desperately trying to sing any silly song or tell any silly story to keep the kids vaguely interested and hanging out relatively near me. Owen it worked out allright for, but Elias just trampled and terrorized the strawberry patch. Luckily, at some point he decided he had room for more strawberries and spent about 10 minutes sitting in the middle of a particularly berry-laden plant eating more. I was relieved about this for awhile, because it gave me more time on the clock to fill the tray. Relieved until Owen went over to check on him and yelled "Mom, Eli's eating more rotten ones. Really Rotten ones." I called back, "Ok, honey, it's probably fine. Just show him where the good ones are." To which Owen replied "and dirt. He's also eating dirt, mama".

Strawberry picking stopped seeming like the cute family bonding activity I had envisioned and more like the exhausting, backbreaking labor it actually it is. My tray, which I had optimistically recently judged as half full now looked closer to a quarter full. I was sweating and still trying to pick berries as fast as I could. Just then, Elias made a break out of the strawberry patch, directly in front of a tractor pulling a haywagon full of families. Owen started screaming "mama! Eli's going to get run over by the tractor!" and just generally losing his bananas, during which episode he capsized our half (quarter) tray full. In truth, Eli was in no danger - the tractor was a good 40 feet away from him and going approximately 1 mile an hour, and he was caught and returned to the strawberry patch well before the tractor even passed us, but it certainly added to the, er, general ambiance.

I instructed the kids to put all the strawberries that had fallen out of the tray back into it so we could leave. I clearly didn't give very good instructions because they heard "eat as many of these spilled strawberries as you can before we go". I gathered up what berries I could save from their maws and then was faced with the return trip to the car. This time, I had all the acoutrements of the way out (diaper bag, lunch bag, purse, recalcitrant and dawdling toddler) but ALSO a tray of strawberries that had to be carried in such a way that the berries would not go flying. It took us an embarrasingly long time to go approximatly 1/4 of a mile, at the end of which we were several strawberries the lesser.

When we finally got home, Owen was still very interested in making strawberry jam. I looked at him, looked at the berries, and ALMOST pulled out a big pot. Then, I thought better of it, asked him if he wouldn't rather watch an episode of Bob the Builder, and suggested that jam-making was really an activity better suited to be done with Daddy.