Blueberries!

All my life, I've wanted to like blueberries. I remember trying a stray blueberry once when we were making muffins for Achievement Days that tasted like it came straight from heaven. Sweet and flavorful and healthy and wonderful . . .

And I could never find more like it. Every time I've gotten blueberries, I've just had to hide them in pancakes or muffins because they were just too sour or bland for my liking.

So when I learned that Michigan has farms where you can pick your own blueberries, I didn't see what the big deal was. Now strawberries, ooh, those would have been good if we had been around during the first weeks of June.

But blueberries? Meh. We buy them because they are in season and healthy, but I just never wanted to eat them plain.

Luckily for us, we heard from friends that blueberries were actually amazing when you picked them yourself. So we decided to put it to the test. We invited the Roberts, who barely got a chance to breathe after driving here from our old ward in Provo before I called them and invited them to partake in a true "Michigan experience."

And, oh, it was worth it. We found a patch down in Milan* less than 15 minutes from their place and began our adventure.

I love Michigan

The fun started as we drove up to the house. A bunny scurried past us, and chickens and little dogs surrounded our car. Our favorite was the duck that thought it was a chicken. And of course Joseph had to chase all of them around. Luckily they were the kind that ran instead of pecked.

After getting some instructions from the owner (or the owner's son? never figured that out), we drove a few hundred yards over to the blueberry patch in the middle of the woods.

We grabbed some buckets, and then for the next few hours . . . we picked blueberries!

I never knew that dark, shiny blueberries could taste so much better than the weak sauce light blue ones at the store.

Pretty sure he's dropping a stick into the bucket

Kelsie and her haul

Kevin at work

Dropping a beautiful berry in

The weather was beautiful, the company was great, the blueberries were delicious . . . everything was perfect except for one small detail -- Joseph was tired.

What kind of mean parents keep a child up through a morning nap, even if he skips it every now and then?

That said, he still was pretty pleasant through it all. However, he got mad when I wouldn't let him squish my blueberries with a stick.

Then he helped me pick for a while, but he wanted to squish all of them with another bucket and I wouldn't let him. So that was sad.

He wasn't as selective about his blueberries as the rest of us.

But we eventually found a way to keep him happy.

This trick also works at church sometimes.

Dropping sticks and grass through the cracks

Once Kevin and I had a 6-pint bucket full of blueberries and Kelsie had half a bucket full, we felt like we had accomplished enough for one morning and were ready to come home with our spoils.

Jared, Kelsie, and Kevin (and Joseph)

yummmmmmmmm

Tired boy

Jared made it a point to only pick the darkest, biggest, shiniest blueberries. This was his haul.
 

We went back to the owners' house, paid for our berries, and got to listen to a delightful 87-year-old woman reminisce about WWII for several minutes. And Joseph got to chase more chickens. And then we went home.

And that is the story of how I now love to eat blueberries plain and have done so in abundance the past few days. The end.

*For my Ann Arbor friends who read this, we recommend it. I know there's one up near Dexter that's forever away, but this one is so close and a bit cheaper and the blueberries are divine. They don't have much info online, but there is this.