Wife and Mommy

This past Friday evening, I told The Husband that I wanted to take the kids strawberry picking over the weekend.  A bit of quick Googling led us to a website that lists all the Pick Your Own farms around us.  We chose one that is reasonably close, and made plans to go early the next day to avoid the predicted afternoon thunderstorms.

Well.  Let me just tell you that The Husband and I woke up Saturday morning in The Foulest Moods Ever and decided to to take them out on each another.  There was no end to the sniping and quibbling!  It was so mature of us and without a doubt, a wonderful example for us to show our offspring.  We’re pretty awesome like that.

But I digress.

The kids were excited from the moment The Husband had told them we were doing “something special” at breakfast (as a general rule, we don’t disclose specifics of what we are doing to the kids until we know it will actually happen).  The Husband and I were had reached a rocky truce, but hot emotions were still bubbling under the surface.  We finally made it to the strawberry patch.  The kids cheered as they realized we would be picking strawberries.  Bito informed me he knew how to pick strawberries as Special Agent Oso had taught him (I have a love-hate relationship with that bear) as we drove up to the farm and parked.

Clutching the buckets I’d thought to throw in the minivan, Bito, Cupcake and BabyMuffin scampered into the fields.  The Husband and I trudged along slowly behind them.  I was miserable.  In addition to the morning’s bickering which put me in an oh-so-fun simmering mood, the weather was hot and humid, which I hate.  Also, there were a zillion gnats flying about and irritating the snot out of me.  Literally.  One flew up my nostril and even after I extracted it, my nose would not stop running.

So let’s recap, shall we?  Bad mood?  Check.  Viciously hot AND humid enough to cause my head to become soaking wet in a minute flat?  Check.  Gnats swarming around in biblical plague proportions?  Check.

Oh.  And my back was hurting and I was in no mood to stoop over to look for red red strawberries (but if it had been red red wine…).  Add that to the list of reasons why I was not happy to be strawberry picking.

But you see:  it didn’t matter to the kids!  They were so happy and wanted to share that excitement.  With me, their smoldering mother.  Every single strawberry that was plucked and put into their buckets had to be shown to me!  Even if it meant running back down a row or two to find me, even if the strawberry they’d procured wasn’t quite ripe, or had been smushed by eager little hands.  I saw every.single.one  as a newly picked berry.  And I did what any mother would do:  I oohed and ahhhed and told them how wonderfully they were doing.

Eventually their gleeful moods rubbed off on me and I forgot to be  mad at The Husband.  I was able to ignore the heat, humidity, and bugs for seconds at a time!  I smiled more and made plans with the kids for what we’d do with the strawberries when we got home.

As we climbed back into the minivan, their pink-stained fingers and faces reminded me that their memories of this day would not be of humidity and gnats.

Mine shouldn’t be, either.