Blackberries at Great Country Farms

About 45 minutes west in the beautiful farm hills of Virginia, there is Great Country Farms. And blackberries, ripe for the picking.

While Mike was away in Singapore, I was happy to fill our days with anything and everything and picking blackberries sounded like a perfect day! My girlfriends, Jackie and Bridgett, and I took all of our boys on a drive through the gorgeous country up to the farm.

There is a wonderful deal for an all day pass to Great Country Farms for only $5 on certifikid HERE. It lasts through August, so go, people! Go!!! Read on to see all the reasons to make the trek yourselves!

The blackberry field was a tractor-trailer ride away. Boys love trailer rides. Moms love the cuteness overload.

It was an overcast day which was such a blessing in the middle of July. It could've been so hot. But it was nice and mild.

We had NO CLUE what to do. Clearly. My girlfriends and I were all wearing flip flops and I put my kids in JCrew outfits, and Charlie's was WHITE. Dumb. Luckily, we ran into some other ladies who seemed a bit more experienced than we with their boots and buckets. They pointed us to the best vines and told us how to pick the berries. "Pick the ones that have turned black and are so fat that they come off easily - those are the ones you want". Thanks so much, Moms-Who-Have-Done-This-Before. We appreciated it.

I really didn't expect my kids to like this. I just figured they would be terrified of the ticks that might get on them like I was and refuse to get deep into the fields. {Seriously, I pretty much just stood in one spot  cursing myself for wearing shorts and flips and wiped down my legs on repeat. I might have asked my girlfriends just a few times if they were certain the farm was fenced so the deer, and their ticks, stayed away from the fruit}

But the kids loved it. Charlie filled three pints! And they were soooo good. So much more flavor right off the vine than any you can buy at the grocery store. And so sweet!





After picking the berries, we had a picnic lunch under the shade of a big tree behind the farm store.

At that point, we were sold on the fact that GCF was amazing. Little did we know, there was SO. MUCH. MORE.

Behind the farm store, there are playgrounds, farm animals, mini golf, slides - AND A GIANT JUMPING PILLOW!!! Yup. A giant. jumping. pillow. Kid heaven.

I couldn't resist. I had to try it out too! 

After the jumping pillow, we decided to see some of the animals and feed them. A cup of feed comes with every $5 pass. Henry loves animals. For a kid who used to hate everything, we kind of eat it up when he finds something he loves. And he sure loooooves farm animals. When he sees them, he says "Hey {insert farm animal here}, you come home with me and I will pet you." He loves to have the goats eat out of his hand. Charlie does NOT. Charlie will look but will NOT touch. We all did fall in love with sweet Daisy the mini cow though. She was soooo cute.

With toddlers in tow, we finished the day at nap time - long before we got to see everything there was to do at Great Country Farms. Luckily, there is always a new crop to pick and a reason to go back. Next up - PEACHES! Can't wait.

OBX, The Part In Which I Used Princess Consuela Just Once

Having a little boy break his arm at the beach means, well, the beach loses a tad of its appeal.

Even though broken arms are "no big deal" and it wasn't painful, Charlie was still getting used to his cast during that second half of our beach vacay. He's a worrier and he takes his time getting comfortable with new things.  We had a cast cover overnighted to our beach house - thank you for being so awesome, Amazon - so no water or sand would get inside it. Technically, you can get these fiber glass casts wet -- but I just couldn't imagine how itchy it would be to have sand get down inside it or what it could do to his skin to have it stay wet in there for the length of time it would take before it would dry. Seriously, though. How would it ever dry inside there?  

After a bit of an emotionally exhausting start, we were thrilled to have my parents join us on Monday evening for the remainder of the week.

On Tuesday morning, we took Mom & D down to the water for a walk. This is the only time Princess Consuela made it out that week. Oh, well. It was midday and I was feeling uninspired. Sometimes I'm lazy and Instagram makes life so lovely and EASY with those adorable squares... ;)

It's always nice to have my mom around. She takes pictures of me. :)


How cute is this?? My dad brought a metal detector and the boys were just following him around in a line on a treasure hunt! Seriously. It was the cutest! And they found several quarters, a baseball keychain and three bangle bracelets! And then Henry threw most of the treasure into the ocean...

Photo shoot-out!

Later in the afternoon, my parents took Charlie to the movie theater and Mike and I took Henry back down to the beach. THIS is when I should have brought the big girl camera. Henry with the truck. Golden hour. It would've been lovely. Oh, well.

The next day, we all went down to the water. The cast cover had arrived but Charlie, like I said, takes a while to warm up to things and he wasn't the biggest fan of it yet. We managed to convince him to get out on the sandbar and he had some fun finally playing catch with Dad with a little ocean on his toes.


Mike and I left the boys with my parents and went to Blue Point in Duck for dinner. This has to be one of my favorite restaurants. It's on the sound side with an outdoor bar overlooking the water. We love it. I had the scallops while Mike had the crabcakes. Then, I couldn't resist the blueberry and peach crumble. The food is amazing.

Thursday was a pool day. We finally got the cast cover on C and he was instantly happier.

We had been wanting to try The Paper Canoe and decided to have a big family dinner there on Thursday night. It was delicious. I had lobster ravioli. Um. YUM.



We had a wonderful week at the beach -- but we are already looking forward to next summer when we can do it all again -- without the cast. ;)

OBX, The Part In Which Charlie Broke His Arm

Growing up in North Carolina, I saw those OBX stickers on the back of almost every single car but had never vacationed there (we were Hilton Head beach-ers)... until we moved back to VA in 2011 and were invited to go with our friends. We had so much fun together that we were beyond certain by the end of the week's vacation that we'd do it again in 2012. And every year after that for the rest of our lives. Heck, by the end of the week we were trying to figure out how to convince our hubbies to take another week's vacation and they were not objecting. Heck, by the end of the week, I was trying to scheme how to sell all the things, pack up and MOVE there. I could run a photography business in the Outer Banks, right? And spend my days catching all the freckles. I don't know what Mike would do. But there has to be oil there somewhere...

Needless to say, our vacations in the OBX are pure heaven. I always want to go and I never want to leave.

This year, however, was going to be different. Different good, but different. Our BFFs who have been our beach partners-in-crime for the last two years moved to Louisiana in June. Being the kind of people of the "more the merrier" persuasion, we invited our friends, the Millers, to drive up from Charlotte to meet us for the first half of the week and my parents to meet us for the second half.  We were really excited to enjoy our favorite place with even more of our favorite people.

Our drive down from DC on Friday July 5th still held up the tradition of stopping at Sonic for the most giant Limeade possible. Extra limes, please. Seriously, how are there no Sonics in DC?

We got to the house early, around 2pm, and Cakes and her Crew were there by 3pm and we were on the water with beers and sand buckets by 4pm.

The water was FREEZING. But the weather was perfect. It was not too hot. Not once. Not the whole week. It stayed in the 80s with a really tolerable amount of humidity. It was perfect.

Saturday morning, we were up and out to the water nice and early. Well, early according to Jenn and Mandie time. {We're not really of the rushing sort.} The kids had so much fun! They dug holes and built sand castles. They played in the waves and rode their boogie boards.

And then, around 5pm, we headed back to the house -- and the Robertsons diverted to the swimming pool for a quick rinse of chlorine since the hot water heater had broken and was being fixed. I remember the swim very vividly -- just the four of us goofing around in the pool before dinner.

I remember the pool so vividly because by 8pm, as we were running around the house trying to find shoes for all the kids so we could walk across the street for Big Bucks ice cream, I heard Charlie scream. And everything about our vacation took a 180. I rolled my eyes at first. I thought he was fighting with Mandie's daughter, Bella, again. But then, he screamed...

"MOM!!! MOM!!! I BROKE MY ARM!!!"

I've never raced down stairs so quickly in my life and when I got to the front deck where everyone was,  I saw him, already snuggled up in Mandie's arms, and then I saw his arm - dangling and bent - clearly no longer in the normal position of arms and bones... and I screamed. I don't think you're supposed to scream when you're the mom because you're supposed to hold it together for your children. But, I screamed. It was terrifying. Seeing my child's arm so clearly broken was one of the most awful things I've ever seen in my entire life.

Thank God for Mandie, Josh and Mike. I was in shock. I couldn't think. I still couldn't even believe it was real and all I wanted was for my baby to be fixed. I was almost just waiting for everything to just go back to normal. Mandie kept asking me questions of what to do and I just kind of stared at her. She stopped asking and just started telling me what to do. We got him in the the backseat of our car with his head in my lap -- and Mike and I drove him the 45 minutes south from Corolla to Nags Head to the Outer Banks hospital. He was a flippin' champ. FORTY FIVE MINUTES and he didn't cry. Not once. He just closed his eyes and zoned out. I was shaking and he was calm as a cucumber.

Bella and Charlie had been playing a game of chase while waiting for the rest of us to get ready -- and they had climbed onto the top bunk in the kid's room. Bella went to teasingly kiss Charlie and he decided to jump off the top bunk to get away {oh, how funny this will be in 7 years when getting kisses from girls will be all he can think about}. His athletic shorts caught the rail and turned him sideways as he went down. He stuck an arm out to break the fall and it snapped in half under the weight of the fall.

The hospital was amazing. The nurses and staff were just wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. Charlie is a worrier and they were kind and patient with him. I even noticed that our one nurse - a big guy with a deep voice and dry humor - was gently rubbing his hand while calming him down. He didn't have to give comfort in that way - but he did - and I found it to be so sweet. Truly caring.

After some meds, and then some more meds after barfing up the first dose, and some Xrays, they called in the Orthopedic Surgeon who showed up wearing a tan, a tshirt, board shorts and tennis shoes. This made us laugh. Dr. Matt. Wearing the board shorts. Only at a beach hospital...

Mike later asked me if I found him attractive {I did} because I wouldn't stop talking to him. But I told Mike, "Yes, I noticed he was good looking, but more importantly, I noticed he was in his beach attire... and I wasn't going to stop talking to him until I found out where he got his medical degree." :) He went to Georgetown. So, we were all good. Hot doctors with medical degrees from Georgetown may set my child's bones in board shorts.

They gave him an IV - which he screamed louder over than the actual break - and dosed him up with a drug called Ketamine, which would basically make him high as a kite for awhile so they could set the bones back in place and he'd have no memory of it.

They got him all fixed up and set in a cast and sent us home. The doctor said there was absolutely no reason to stop our vacation. Apparently, the ER in Nags Head sees broken bones constantly - and LOTS of them are bunk bed broken bones - and they didn't really think it was that big of a deal at all.

On Sunday, Charlie and Daddy stayed in the house to chill out and kind of, get over the previous day's trauma while the rest of us headed down to the beach.

We had scheduled a sitter for Sunday night so the four of us could go out without the kiddos. We decided to keep the sitter even though our big guy was feeling less-than-100%. We've had the same sitter in the OBX for three years and she's the BEST. I felt completely comfortable having her take care of my little patient.

It was really so good for the mama-soul to have an evening out to de-stress.

And on Monday morning, Charlie was feeling much better and he decided he'd get up and out at the mention of Duck Donuts and the Currituck lighthouse.

Yup, he climbed up 103 feet to the top of the lighthouse. Kids, y'all. Broken bones one day. Tops of lighthouses the next.

Then we said our sad good-byes to Mandie and the Miller clan and spent a little time at the pool that afternoon. Daddy pitched a ball to Charlie and they played left-handed catch! Papa & Blah arrived at the house around dinner time and brought a new Lego set to cheer up Charlie.

July 4th

We didn't do much to celebrate the 4th of July. Life was just too crazy. We were packing up for our trip to the OBX on the 5th so we decided to let it kind of slide by this year.

However, we got a little festive on the 3rd when our neighborhood put on a fireworks show. We grabbed a few packs of sparklers from the fireworks stand and had some sparkly fun while waiting for the show.

I should have grabbed my tripod. I knew I wanted certain shots of sparklers and I knew I'd need a slow shutter speed to get them and I knew my hand (or any hand) couldn't keep the camera steady enough at such slow speeds to avoid blur. But noooooo, I, of course, forgot the tripod.

A good trick for avoiding blur at a slow shutter speed without a tripod there to steady your camera is to brace the camera on a body part. Since I was sitting, I pulled my knees up to my chest and braced it on my knees.

Want to take similar pictures of sparkler trails? It's all about the shutter speed. I just played around with mine while we sat there. I tested longer shutter speeds and checked to see how much of the trail I captured. If it wasn't enough, I slowed the speed down some more. The longer you leave the shutter open on your camera, the more time it has to capture the image. You want your subject to stay as still as possible or else they will be blurry (Charlie was MUCH better at this than Henry) and have them just move the sparkler without moving their body.

If you want to capture the sparks of the sparkler and not the trails, then in that case you will need a fast shutter speed so it can quickly grab those fast-flying sparks!

We got lots of fun shots!

Henry was really wary of the sparklers at first. But, since his brother was doing it, he came around and wanted to do it too. His sparkler trails crack me up. Absolutely crazy, just like him.




And then it was time for the fireworks! My very favorite fireworks are the ones that look like champagne-colored chandeliers!

Charlie, my sweet worrier, was very concerned about our proximity to Dulles airport and if the fireworks show would be dangerous for the airplanes. We assured Charlie that there had to be permits and paperwork and that certainly the airport was aware of all this and that the pilots would fly much higher than our little fireworks show by the time they took off from Dulles anyway -- and very soon after calming his fears - a plane flew RIGHT by our fireworks. Ha!

Happy {belated} Birthday, America!

Baltimore B&O Museum

We have been wanting to visit the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore for quite awhile. It's a bit of a hike from NOVA but Hubster had an early flight out of Maryland on a Friday in late June, so we decided we'd drive him there and then make our way to finally see the trains.

Mike's flight was crazy early out of BWI and the museum didn't open until 10, so we decided to eat breakfast at Miss Shirleys Cafe in the Inner Harbor. Holy good lord almighty. What an amazing breakfast joint. I ordered the fried green tomatoes as an appetizer and then a giant veggie egg-white omelet with cheesy grits for the main dish. I was too stuffed to finish even a quarter of it... and there has not been a day that's passed that I have not wished I'd risked some sort of food poisoning to box it up and leave in my hot car all day so I could've finished it all. It was. That. Good.

I'm sort of twitching over the thought of going back for the Maryland Omelet with lump crab meat and dusted with Old Bay. Um, yes please.

After breakfast, we had a short drive to the museum.

Aside for the major flaw of it being in Baltimore, the museum is amazing!! Like, AMAZING! Charlie has been train-obsessed since he was two - and even though he will deny it now and brush off all his willinginess to see trains as "doing it for Henry", he just loves the heck out of them still. And this museum is literally little-boy heaven.

Pulling into the {free} parking lot, several huge trains lined the parking spaces.

How cute is this? Charlie thought up the pose and the words and insisted I instagram it! :)

The museum is basically a giant roundhouse, which for anyone who has never had a train-obsessed child, this is where the trains were housed when not in use during the old-timey days of train travel. Displayed trains are placed in a circle of chronological order from the origin of the B&O rail line with covered wagons and progresses through the civil war as they circle around the room. Side note: chronological order is my favorite order.

I was completely intrigued and interested. Unfortunately, little boys don't care much about the history, or following the order... they just want to walk through all the things {quickly} and climb on whatever is permitted for climbing.

My most favorite cars were the passenger cars. Sans kids, I could have spent a rather sizeable amount of nerdy time looking at all the details in the passenger cars, especially the ones that were used in the Civil War for the soldiers. I've always been fascinated with people so it was absolutely amazing to see what sort of accommodations were available back in the 1800s. What did people do back then?



In between some of the trains was a giant play area of Thomas toy trains. It took all my patience to convince the boys that we would get to those toys AFTER we looked at all the trains. And it took all of their patience to stick it out.

When we finally made it to the play area {which I was really avoiding because, omg, the school groups...}, Charlie was totally into it supporting his brother's interest in toy trains. I actually thought the play area was pretty amazing. They had four or five Thomas train tables so there were enough trains and tables for all the kids. They had train books and train puzzles and train dress-up outfits. But really, for my boys... it was all about the train toys.

And then, at 11:30am, it was time for our ride on a REAL train! Yup... our admission to the museum came with tickets to ride about a mile west and then back again on a MARC passenger train. Like I said, little boy flippin' heaven.

Henry's face when the train started to move, y'all. Priceless!!!

Charlie was so interested in what was being explained over the loudspeaker that he "sssh-ed" me about 15 times. He's just so adorable and nerdy-licious. I love how much he likes to learn.

That whole 20 minute ride is hard, work, huh, Henry?? :)

Returning from the ride, we walked over to the North Building which houses trains so big that they wouldn't fit in the roundhouse! Seriously, they were massive. They were diesels built in the 40s and 50s and, as the guy who worked there explained, they were terribly inefficient -- even though they were extremely beautiful machines. There were lots of guys all over the place who were extremely kind and helpful and excited to tell you all about the trains.

Also, the low light ooey-gooey photographic goodness. So. Much. Photog. Fun.

I was so pleased with the "SAVE COAL" sign. I'm sure it wasn't exactly meant to be environmentally friendly like I read it to be, but I still thought it was cute.

Hungry for lunch, and believing we had seen it all, we headed out for the day. It was only once we got into the parking lot that we noticed that we missed the platforms where several trains were open for walking through! We almost went back inside, but we always need a reason to go back! And go back, we will!!