On Sunday, we went strawberry picking. Which means for 3 hours, it was perfectly acceptable for me to:

– Blast all my favorite country songs and sing them all at the top of my lungs with the all the car windows down.

– Put my bare feet on the dash and wave both my hands out of the sunroof. (Just be happy I didn’t actually stand up and dance in the sunroof, junior prom style.)

– Buy the biggest cardboard container the farm had, even though Matt advised me not to. (He knew damn well that if I bought the biggest container, I was going to fill the biggest container…yeilding more strawberries that we would ever know what to do with and costing a lot of money that he would rather be doing every thing else with.) Happy wife = happy life.

– Get down on my hands and knees and crawl through every row on the strawberry field, and yelling various renditions of “yeaaaa buddy!” or “hellloooo beautifulllll” every time I found bright red patches of strawberry bliss.

– Eat one strawberry for every five strawberries picked. Okay, maybe every three. Or two. I thought of my mom, when she used to tell me “they’re going to weigh you on the way in and then again on the way out!” during our frequent “U-Pick” summer days. Thank goodness they didn’t.

– Beam with pride at Matt, who made it his personal mission to seek out the rows that had yet to be discovered by us wanna-be farmers. I had a feeling he was starting to like the idea of us owning a farm out in the country, sitting on a porch swing and eating baskets of just-picked fruit from our 300-acre backyard.

…until he got hungry and decided that although he had probably eaten all the strawberries he picked, that he needed Chipotle, ASAP.

– (Despite his hunger pains) Do one last walk through each row to make sure I found all the strawberries that NEEDED to be in our over-flowing container.

– Have very selective hearing as Matt yelling across the field for me. “What was that? We need MORE berries? I WOULDN’T be happy with the amount we have? The container ISN’T full? Got it – I’LL GO CHECK THE NEXT FIELD!”

– Tell Matt to stand in line and pay for the strawberries while I go check out the mason jar prices asparagus and sweet onions for sale in the barn.

– Buy one too many homemade salted caramels even though I definitely have two cavities crying for mercy in the back of my mouth. I’ll call the dentist tomorrow, swear it.

– Talk about everything I was going to make with my new strawberry treasure trove (including this, this and this. Oh and these!) but to allow no self-control while eating at least half the container of berries on the ride home.

– Split the other half later that night with a bowl full of melted chocolate & two glasses of Bully Hill wine. (New rule: this needs to be a Sunday night tradition.)

– Announce at 10 p.m. that we simply didn’t pick enough and that we would just have to go back and get more next weekend.

All in all – amazing day, at least for me. :) But while we aren’t heading back to Butler’s Orchard pick more this weekend, I am going to spend half my Saturday on a different farm! My friend Jessie (who is an old farmer soul like me) and I are volunteering at Arcadia Farm in Alexandria, and we could not be more excited. Well, I could be more excited if I could only find cute garden gloves.

On that note – Matt could also not be more excited about this Arcadia Farm volunteer work, as he finally gets a day off from dealing with me, my BFF Mother Nature and my “perfectly acceptable behavior.”

Have a great weekend!