Child labor?

"Let me take you down [the street],
'cause I'm going to[o?]"

Yep, strawberry fields.

Unlike diamonds, strawberry fields aren't forever. In fact April's about the best (and almost the only) time to visit a California "u-pick" strawberry field. So today I brought Amelia and Diana out to pick some strawberries.

Amelia actually did an excellent job of picking berries. Almost every berry she picked was ripe and red. She also did not try to sample the merchandise, and I was proud of her for that.

Diana isn't quite ready for manual labor, it seems. And she wasn't very good about the sampling bit either. Funny thing was, after biting into a strawberry Diana would grimace and put the strawberry down. Amelia loved strawberries as a little girl, but I think Diana finds them a bit too flavorful for her taste.

Speaking of taste, "u-pick" strawberries have an awful lot of flavor. That's the best way I can compare them to strawberries in the grocery store. These strawberries just seem "strawberrier" somehow. Amelia ate about 10 berries when we got them home. I had about a half dozen (a couple with cake later on). Diana spit two out (the second one was in case the first dropped strawberry was an accident).

As a funny side note, Amelia asked to also pick grapes today. I have no idea where a "pick your own" grape field exists. Maybe somewhere in the San Joaquin valley, but I wouldn't bet on it. Regardless, when I told her grapes weren't in season, she still insisted on finding grapes to pick. In fact, she started wandering off to a nearby gardening shed after we got our strawberries looking for grapes.

Well, if anyone knows of a place where we can pick grapes, let me know. (I actually have it on some authority that picking grapes is hard work and not much fun at all. That may be part of the reason no one has a field of grapes open to the public anywhere.)

Lisa