Blueberries! Finn and I went on a Saturday adventure to another new-to-us blueberry farm, Berryfield, in Centerberg on Saturday. It was the best place yet! They were picking Elliot, so a later season more tart berry, but look at them! The bushes were big and quite plentiful. We picked more than a bucket in a fairly short amount of time. And they had “helper buckets” for kids and Finn loved it – he filled his up numerous times and dumped it into the bigger bucket. The farm only had a couple other people there and they played music you could here while picking (Nora Jones and the like). They also grow bluecrop, blueray, and coville though most of those were well picked over. We missed Daddy while he stayed home and worked on projects including cleaning out the garage – which he made great progress!
This week on my day off Finn and I went to Zoombezi for the day and met up with my college friend Kim, her three kids Audrey, Ryan, and Landon and Audrey’s friend Sara and her sitter Sydney. The older girls went off on the big slides so the boys, Kim, and I hung out and the family-oriented areas. It was super hot, the concrete burned our feet, and a great day to cool off in the water (although some of the areas the water was really pretty warm!). 
Earlier in the week we took dinner to the Howard’s. Chris’ dad has entered hospice at Kobacker so we took some yummy food and hung out with the Howard’s, Chad, and Nicole for the evening at the Howard home. Finn loved playing with their dogs and crashed with them on the couch toward the end of the night. 
Here are a few other shots from the week, including the new football Finn got at Culver’s by redeeming his “scoopie tokens”. He was super stoked. When Kevin and I have been going on date nights, he and Debbie often go to Culver’s for their “date” too 🙂 Afterward they stopped at the park to play with his new ball. 
And here are a few others from the week: sprinklers and water fun in the yard, Columbus Commons kids fun day stuffs, art work, and a few from the Sunday concert (Honey and Blue) that I failed to include last week!
I’m loving the new album “Love Remains” by Hillary Scott (of Lady Antebellum) and the Scott Family. It is a christian album with traditional hymns and original songs. It’s really a great album! 
And many thanks to Mom for splurging for me, Amy, and Mom to get our toes “beach ready” this week. We had a fun time getting our toes done and then having ice cream and fried pickles after at Graeter’s and City BBQ! Yum! 
And now I”m officially caught up on blog posts – I thought this day would never come after being more than 2 months behind. Whew. Vacation ready now!!
July 31, 2016
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Family Fun Friday night at the Bay! We began our weekend with a couple of hours at Zoombeezi and daddy came along this time! Finn loves to take Kevin to all of his favorite places. This night we spent most of our time in the lazy river and the big wave pool. 
It’s been VERY warm, like typical summer, July, hot. What a better time to plant trees, right?! We purchased a Crimson King Norway Maple, Forest Pansy (purple) Redbud, and a Rising Sun (chartreuse) Redbud over the last couple of weeks. Since Kevin is on the Design Review Committee for our neighborhood (and you are supposed to get the ok to make changes to your houses/yards/landscaping) we felt we should go through the proper process. So that took a bit of time and then we spoke with our neighbors to ensure they are ok with our new trees and the playhouse that Kevin is going to build for Finn. So…..once we got all the okays it just so happened we had two Saturday’s left before vacation to get them in the ground. So we woke up Saturday morning and headed outdoors. The first one, the Rising Sun Redbud, was really easy. A smaller tree (read as a smaller hole to dig, lol) was in pretty quick. The purple maple on the other hand went into the area where we used to have a few evergreen spruces and Kevin ran in to a lot of old and large roots. So he broke out the sawzaw and was able to get them out. The purple redbud we put near the corner of our house. We are excited to see them grow! Griffin is in many of the pictures for scale 🙂 Mom and Dad also gave us a ‘Megan’s Angel’ hosta, which we were excited to receive. We planted it inside our fence to protect it from our deer predators!
I took the photo of the Arborvitae that we planted in 2013 so I can go back and compare it to the size they were then. This year we’ve noticed the ones to the north (fence) are somewhat brown so we’ve been giving them extra water and some fertilizer spikes hoping they don’t croak!
And here are a few others from our week. 
This weekend we took in the movie Ice Age at the Dublin theater. It was a nice retreat after having been outside all day planting trees on a hot and humid day. After the movie, we headed to Mellow Mushroom with the Bethunes and met up with Sammy and Debbie. Sam has been at his dad’s for a few weeks so Finn and Sam were able to see each other for a bit.
And date night this week was dinner downtown at Nada followed by the new Ghostbusters movie. 
It’s summertime, which means blueberry picking! We headed out on Saturday morning to a new place, Blue Sky Farms, in Marysville and met up with the Bethune’s. It is a 5-acre patch in the backyard of a family’s home and the entire patch is enclosed in netting! That’s the first time I’d seen that! It was a pretty warm morning, but we were able to pick just over 5 pounds of blueberries (Chandler and Draper varieties). I had high hopes of picking like 20 pounds which wasn’t really possible there as their plants are pretty young still. Although what we did pick were super yummy and pretty big! 
Since I had high hopes of picking major quantities of blueberries, we carried on to another blueberry farm south of Columbus in South Bloomfield called Blueberry Valley. This one was entirely enclosed in netting too – and from the highway we were super excited that they would have more fruit to pick. We were sorely disappointed and didn’t pick anything! Most of the fruit wasn’t yet ripe and the workers were weeding the rows (tossing all the large weeds into the grass rows!). So we took some photos, bought a few things from the roadside veggie stand, and headed to Enon. We had a “roadtrip” on our summer bucket list, so we turned this day into that and on our way to Enon looked up other blueberry farms that we could go to en route to Grandma and Grandpa Armstrongs. It wasn’t meant to be though, as the three or four places I found were all closed to allow for ripening. Booooo!!
So we hung out with Grandma and Grandpa Armstrong and checked out the progress they are making on remodeling their new home. It’s looking great! Finn played some baseball in the driveway and we enjoyed a pizza dinner before heading to Young’s Jersey Dairy for some ice cream dessert. 
Sunday was a busy day too with a birthday party for Finn’s friend Owen, followed by a small group social day at our house. It was planned for a friends house, but she came down with a bug and rather than cancelling we just decided to host. I didn’t snap too many photos, but Kevin setup the water table, mini pool, bounce house, and tee-ball for the kiddos to play. We were exhausted by the end of the night!
During the week Finn and I headed to Zoombeezi on my day off. This time we arrived when they opened at 10:30 and were there until 7. Wowzer! We packed a lunch and got a nice chair in the shade this time so we could rest a bit. My plan was for Finn to fall asleep in the car on the way home and go right to sleep – but that didn’t work! He was a tired boy though as we had been in the sun and water all day long. 
Finn may turn into a fish – as he also got to go down to the Fountains this week downtown with Debbie. In keeping with the water theme he made “Nemo’ and a crab. Kevin and Finn also caught lightning bugs (see if you can find them in our video) and let our last two butterflies go this week. 
This week Millcreek exhibited at the Cultivate’16 Trade Show in downtown Columbus at the Convention center. It is one of the largest conventions for the Green Industry in the US. Lucky for me, the convention center is across the street from the North Market, so I was luck to meet up with Kevin for lunch. We had deliciousness from The Little Eater (http://littleeater.com), a vegetarian eatery that makes the most amazing and tasty dishes. I would eat there every day if I could…..
