My entropic life... and raspberries

Ok, so after a few phone calls and emails from people checking on me because I have not been blogging, I admit that I have been completely out of sorts for several reasons.

Our house was hit by several unnatural disasters. I had still not finished painting our popcorn free living room and my kitchen that has about 6 feet of counter space had 3 feet of painting supplies covering it. Eric put up crown molding in the living room so the garage was a disaster with tools, molding scraps and dust everywhere.

Then as if this was not enough, Eric has been working the night shift for the past three weeks. This is a HUGE deal when you are trying to keep 3 girls from death fighting over who gets the blue Polly car and playing handball on his bedroom door. How can one keep kids quiet all day. I realize it's impossible, but I still turn into physco Mom stressing out at every sound. I never realized how many tantrums Lucy and Ruby throw, and they are quite impressive. Our bedroom windows were draped with blankets to make the room dark and I moved all my stuff out of our bedroom/bathroom and into the girls bathroom. My make up in their bathroom, that's a whole different blog.

I am happy to report that Eric worked his last night shift Friday and the painting and molding in the living room is complete. The garage, kitchen, bedroom and living room are all back together again and all the children are still alive. I am starting to feel like I can handle life again.

So yesterday while Eric was sleeping, I drove up the mountain to take the girls to pick raspberries and pears. I found this great little farm (on line) and they were having a special Civil war day with performers and activities. Perfect. The girls were so excited to go that they were even willing to turn off Hanna Montana to go. That's huge because we don't have cable so Saturday is the only day they get to watch that.

When we arrived at the farm, I realized that this Civil war deal was a much bigger attraction then I had realized. The place was packed. We had to park really far away and hiked up a long dirt road. I started to feel that this was a mistake. I asked someone if they knew where we could just pick raspberries, and he told us to leave that farm (because it was so crowded) and go up the road to a different one. So we hiked back down to the parking lot and started driving up the road. The girls were all starting to complain.

We came to a raspberry/ apple picking field and parked, again kinda far away. I guess lots of other people had the same idea as us. The girls were complaining as we were waiting in the line to pay. When we got to the front I found out that they only take cash! Who ever has cash? Not me. So I explain why we need to leave this place too and my girls start into a chorus of "Can't we just go home?", "This is the worst day ever". As we got in the car I was feeling horrible and thinking that I had completely blown this trip.

We started to drive home and I saw another farm that had raspberry picking. We stopped and it was cooler then the 1st two we had stopped at, no hiking and yes they took debit cards! They gave us a box with 3 baskets (one for each girl) and I realized this was the perfect place for us. After just a few minutes of raspberry picking I heard "This is the greatest", "This is better then Hanna Montana" and "When can we do this again". We ended up having a really great time. On the drive home we talked about how sometimes you don't get what you want and you are disappointed, but then you realize that you got something better. Even though it was hard to hike to and leave two farms we all realized it was a blessing.