Decided that today was the perfect day an outing to the farm. It was awesome!
We started out at the upick section in the midst of a strawberry patch. I was expecting to be nagging the girls to pick and not eat the berries but that was not the case. Instead, each of the girls was totally in to picking. Katrine actually filled one of our baskets all by herself. She walked up and down the rows searching for “the biggest, juicest berries for my lunches”. Elspeth tried to pick a few of the berries. They were big but most were more of a white colour than red so she got put on hide and seek duty. “Okay sweetie can you find the big, red berry? It has to be hiding in this plant.” Who knew that her new found interest in hide and seek could come in handy in the middle of a field? We have a few small berry plants in our garden and the berries are small but pretty darn sweet. However, they are sour in comparison to how sweet and juicy the ones we picked this morning are. Delicious.
The farm that we were at had a stay and play section as well so once we had our fill of berry picking we headed there. What a play yard! They had this bounce pillow. I had never seen one before today but it was awesome. (It alone might warrant the drive back to Mount Albert sometime this summer) It is like a roof less and side less bouncy castle whose base is buried in the ground. You scamper up and then jump. It was funny being able to climb on and jump right along with the girls. Katrine got some serious air while Elspeth was happy to hold my hand and run from one end to the other until someone bounced her off her feet.
Then there were the animals to visit and haystacks to jump from. Crazy horse swings that moved in every direction. I know because I literally spun Katrine around in a circle. 😀  We also had to visit the playhouse, slides and spray zone before taking a ride on their train (actually a converted tractor). The ride started out well enough but I thought that it was only going to be a quick spin but it turned out to be an actual tour of their farm. Sounds interesting right? Not when you can feel your youngest begin to break down halfway through the ride. As we got off the train, I carried the screaming kicking toddler directly to the cool farm market for a slushy. Between the slushy, some fries and a sing-song show of animatronic chickens a la Muppets, peace was restored to her world. Elspeth’s ability to over heat is pretty amazing considering the daily temperatures that we encountered in Jiangxi last summer. She must take after me. 😆
We capped the day off by heading to our local splashpad to cool off. Katrine ran right in and was happily soaked in seconds. Elspeth is still puzzling the attraction of jets shooting water into the air while buckets dump it on the ground. I did manage to talk her into splashing in a puddle for about 5 minutes before she, miss “the water in my bath, while only tepid, is tooooo hot! Please add more cold.”, declared it cold. What a girl. She also refused a cooling wrap (that is the thing that looks like a balloon wrapped around my head – heavenly). She did seem to appreciate my huge hat whether it was because of the shade it offered or the fact that she could hide underneath it I don’t know. Fun.
