We celebrated Father's Day last weekend because we will all be split up on the real Father's Day. Friday night, Allen opened his gifts -- two family games. He and I read through the rules and practiced the more complicated one before the kids sat down to play it with us the next day.
Our normal Father's Day weekend tradition is to go pick blueberries, but there weren't many ripe ones last weekend because it was cool so late into spring. Instead of picking blueberries, we headed to the Texas Blueberry Festival in Nacogdoches for the day. We had not been before and didn't know what to expect... other than blueberries. Unfortunately, a late freeze killed many of the berry bushes that would normally have ripe berries, and there weren't as many blueberries as we expected.
It was a beautiful day for an outdoor festival. We parked far from the action, then hiked into the downtown area of the oldest town in Texas. Our first stop was to get a map of the event. We wandered the brick road around the square, stopping to watch a cowboy swing his lasso (Ben even climbed under to stand up inside the rope ring), inhaling the aroma of fried foods, stopping to investigate different booths, collecting a bag and mini-lecture about railroad safety, and getting balloons from the firemen.
We tasted a few treats -- blueberry lemonade, blueberry iced tea, and, the kids' favorite, blueberry popcorn! There was a funny cowboy show inside one of the banks; the air conditioning was a welcome pleasure, and the cowboy made the kids laugh.
After we had lunch, we headed to another bank for another indoor "event". We went in to hear the story teller, but it was really a large conference room set up for kids to color while a volunteer read stories and we all could chill out -- literally... the A/C was on in there, too. A sweet lady read stories to our kiddos. There were plenty of giggles, though, since my kids tend to ask questions during stories. The first story, I forgot. The next story was about a boy and a girl who lived in the same apartment complex and were friends. Another story was a sad one about a boy whose cat died; he came up with a list of ten things he loved about his cat so he could tell everyone at the small funeral his family had. He came up with only nine until he learned that when the cat was buried in his garden it would help the flowers grow, then he added that as the tenth great thing about his cat. The next story my kids asked for was called Compost Stew -- it was an alphabet-inspired rhyming story about what you can add to the compost pile. How would YOU like to walk into a room and hear several kids asking if they could put a dead cat in a compost bin? Then they discussed how it could decompose and add fertilizer to the soil. ... yeah, that's how the public conversation went.
We left mid-afternoon and made a stop on the way home. Henderson, Texas, has a barbeque place that is on Texas Monthly's list of top 50 barbeque joints in Texas, so we stopped and got some to go. Half the kids were sound asleep by that point, and the other half passed out on the way home.
We relaxed a bit before dinner, and I went to the grocery store for some blueberries for dessert. Our Father's day dinner was BBQ and salad and dessert was angel food cake with berries. Quite yummy! We really had a fun day, but I still hope we make it out to the berry patch to pick the tasty blueberries -- they are so much better fresh from the field!
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