Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Summer Revisited

Last year this time I was pregnant and picking strawberries to freeze for the winter. The pregnancy didn't go so well, but the strawberries were delicious and we ate them through the dark winter as we took care of our new baby.

This year I am not pregnant and therefore less with The Crazy. I will not be picking 60 lbs of berries because this year there are Limits. There is also a baby which helps to curtail any overachieving on my part. So yesterday afternoon my family and Rachel went to the fields and picked berries. In 97 degree temps.

This is crazy enough but I saw a woman who was nine months pregnant out picking berries with HER family in hopes of getting labor started. I realized then that I was not the craziest pregnant woman that ever lived and that everything is a matter of perspective. She was the kind of enormously pregnant that says picking berries in Death Valley is preferable to being pregnant one more minute. I hope it worked for her. After our brief conversation I nearly bit my tongue trying to keep my advice to myself. My advice would have been to go home, have a glass of water and PUT YOUR FEET UP because you won't be able to rest after the baby comes, for Lord's sake. But she had two boys already so I figured there wasn't anything I could really say that she didn't already know. And you may speak truth to power, but there's no reasoning with The Crazy.
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I've had a few little posts percolating for a while now and they haven't really congealed into anything substantial yet. I'm working on it, though and will write something out when I get a chance. Today I'm climbing Mt. Saint Laundry and canning strawberry jam. Of course, as all mothers know, these seem like simple, mild-mannered goals for the day, but in truth it will be more difficult to meet these ends that it might first appear. I'm considering where I could draw help from, but sadly I am a Staff of One. Delegating will only be a waste of time since I'd have to assign all my tasks to my beleaguered assistants--Me, Myself, and I.

Hopefully tomorrow you can look forward to photos of the beautiful jars of red jam that I'll be canning today.