"Hand Picked with Love"

09- 09- 09

What a novelty it is when the month, day and year are all the same numbers! The past 2 years I haven't done anything too spectacular when the month, day and year are the same numbers, but this year I had a perfect day on this date!!
A truly magnanimous day spent
with the Love of my Life Tracy!

Tracy and I have been LOVING that we are able to get Huckleberries so late in the season and we have felt an "urgency" to spend as much time getting Huckleberries as possible.
The health benefits alone from Huckleberries are amazing (click here), but even more so, they are FREE food and since we make SO many fruit smoothies and try to stay as healthy as possible eating Antioxidant rich foods, we are trying to get as many Huckleberries as we can.
(BTW...I just purchased $80.00 worth of Blueberries and Strawberries to freeze for our fruit smoothies).
SO, Tracy and I both took a vacation day on

09- 09- 09
and got our kids on the school bus and headed straight to the mountains in search of more "purple gold".
We drove our old Subaru wagon we keep around for bouncing down dusty mountain roads. Tracy kept joking and calling it our "huckleberry wagon".
It is quite the old beater but it helps us in making our other vehicles last longer. We spent over 7 hours together just us, the mountains and huckleberries....it was pure Bliss!
We sat on logs and picked and picked the most beautiful, succulent berries, had stimulating conversation discussing a wide array of topics, had LOTS of laughter and a romantic picnic on a log enjoying the much appreciated sunshine!!
The temperature was perfect and we enjoyed the PEACE and Serenity of being in the mountains and the only sounds we heard were crickets, birds and sometimes nothing and the occasional breeze rustling through the trees.

The day was absolutely perfect!
The only thing wrong was that it came to an end as we had to go and pick up Jade from Cross Country practice and Ethan from his after school program. We honestly could have stayed up there all day! We both had SUCH a hard time pulling ourselves away.
We kept on saying "Just let me clean off this bush and then we can go". And we would keep on saying this until we just had to pretty much just run away so we wouldn't be tempted to keep picking anymore. I can't believe how wonderful and therapeutic picking berries can be.
Yes, I was with the Love of my Life
"hand picking with Love"
Huckleberries
(I will never again complain about the price of Huckleberries or Blueberries, because every berry is picked by hand and it takes HOURS to fill up a one gallon bucket).
(This is how many berries we collected on this particular Huckleberry adventure...about 30 cups of precious berries!!)
Hoping to go out again on Saturday as a family one more time to make sure we do our part to pick the berries so they won't go to waste.
"Life is Good"!!