A Fun Day for the Brown Family

We just had the most fun day and I wanted to tell you about it. For some background, the kids have been kind of bored since we moved in. Jason and I have been unpacking, rebuilding decks, painting, and doing other odd jobs around the house, so the kids have mostly bugged each other to death for the last month. This is the last week before Jason starts school, so we decided to put off further house repairs for a while. We made a list of fun things that we could do within 30 miles of home, and we've been doing a couple of those things each day this week. We went swimming yesterday and had a movie outside with the projector last night. We've had some fun. But today was the best so far. We planned to go to a reservoir and let the kids fish (they don't have to have a fishing license because they're all under 14), which I thought wouldn't last long because fishing gets really boring really fast. We also planned to go find somewhere to pick blackberries. We'd been told they grow like weeds in Juliaetta, about 30 minutes away. I didn't think that would last long either, because it was hot and blackberry bushes are very pokery, and I didn't know if they'd like blackberries anyway. So first with the fishing. It wasn't very good off the pier. Just hot, and murky water that you couldn't see a foot into. So we went over to where we were going to cook our hot dogs for lunch, started a fire, and the kids went to play by the little stream of water that was nearby. Dylan was the first to find a bunch of little 3 to 4 inch perch all sitting in one spot. So he got out his pole, so the rest of the kids also got theirs. They didn't have to cast. The water was fairly shallow, and clear so they could look right in and see where the fish were. Mostly the fish were just eating the worms off the hooks, but Dylan hooked one of them. Yay! That's one for his merit badge. It was too small to eat, so he threw it back. The kids had so much fun just watching the fish eat their worms. So then came the berry picking part. That was awesome! The blackberry bushes really are everywhere down there. We drove to a gas station first, because I needed to make a phone call and didn't have service on the cell phone where we were. We parked at the gas station and picked from the bushes that were on the side of the road for about half an hour. Then we drove to another spot and picked for another 20 minutes or so. Most of the berries were still green, but we got almost half a gallon. Then Jason was done and was actually headed home when we found the jackpot. I've never seen anything like it! It was a relatively little patch in a field by a garage of some kind. We could have picked there for hours, but we only picked for about another 20 minutes. There were so many ripe ones. We ate at least as much as we brought home, and as you can see we brought home a full gallon bucket. We almost had to drag the kids away from there, they were having so much fun. And the berries are just beautiful. They're big and black and YUMMY. The kids want to make ice cream and syrup, freeze some for smoothies, and keep some for fresh eating, of course. I think I'll take the kids back there next week some time and get another gallon or so.