Lucky 13

Week 13 has proven to be lucky for me...knock on wood.

I am feeling significantly better. Still tired as a dog, but that I can work through. It was impossible to work through the nausea.

But I'm feeling so much better in fact, the girls and I set out to pick blueberries last Friday. A quiet afternoon, just the three of us. I was remembering last year when we went as part of a group. Gwen was in the Bjorn and Gabriella seemed so little. Just interested in the "hunt".

This time, we made an afternoon of it...I have many hours of quality mothering to make up for. The last few weeks have been slow paced and I'm sure on the boring side for the girls.

Blueberries were a sure fire way to get me back in good standing with the two little blondies. Gabs grabbed her biggest Easter basket and was ready to find some serious blueberries. When we got there, I told her to look for the "blue" berries, even the purple or black ones. She went right to work pulling and searching for the perfect blueberries. A few cranberry colored blueberries made it into the bucket, but that's okay. Gwen was busy playing Charlie Brown's christmas. She was only interested in the poor green berries that had fallen on the ground. She was focused on gathering as many of those as she could. And trying to shove them in her mouth before I noticed and would sweep them out.

After awhile, I could hear Gwen ask Gabriella the same question Gabs kept asking me, "This one okay?" And Gabs would look at it and reply with the same inflection as I had, "Mmmm, it's a little red." Gwen would find another one, off the ground I'm sure, and ask again. Gabs mostly answered that they were too red, but once in a awhile she would say, "YES! Gwen! That one's perfect." It made me smile.

We picked and picked blueberries. Time passed and I was getting hungry, no real surprise there though. So I told the girls that we needed to get ready to go. Gabriella insisted that we needed to fill the gigantic bucket to the top line. "That will take too, too long" I told her. To which she replied, "We need to try mom. Try, try, try." Does that sound like a three year old taking motherly advice and turning it back around on her very own mom or what? But I told her I was hungry and we needed to head home. She said she wished we had a picnic. I agreed that would have been a great plan. Then she squealed in my most favorite voice of hers. The voice when she just realized something, or is really excited about something. She said high-pitched and obviously pleased with her epiphany, "I know! You can eat blueberries." What a brilliant idea Gabs!

We did head home though and prepped our blueberries for muffins the next morning. Unfortunately, we ended up with the biscuit type muffins instead of the cake like muffins. Where'd I go wrong?

I replayed the afternoon to Joe later that night and couldn't help but smile about our outing. So often I find myself calling friends to join us on a nice afternoon out. I get busy visiting and chatting with the ladies, that I miss out on the pure joy my girls are experiencing. I miss out on laughing with them and talking with them and helping them learn. It was rejuvenating to be with my little munchkins, just the three of us, and enjoy every single word they spoke. These are the days that I will remember from when they were little. These perfectly, happy, days that we were together, focused on only each other. And the blueberries of course.