Kamala Corkin is great, and she has a terrific little product that is going places. Learn more about it here: www.droolmonkeyorganics.com

I have so many great sessions to blog and I’m looking forward to sharing those, but I haven’t added anything personal here lately, so I wanted to take a little break to welcome summer. I used to like occasionally blogging pictures of my garden- but since my own garden looks terrible right now, I am happy to share some photos from a recent playdate. It is a longstanding childhood fantasy of mine to pick berries and make things with them, so thanks to Gizdich Ranch in Watsonville, I get to live that out with my kids. (They also have olallieberries for the picking now and in the fall we go there for apples.) After picking we went home to make them into jam. I hadn’t tried that before and it was not as difficult or time-consuming as I had imagined. I didn’t even have to add as much sugar as the recipe called for because the berries were already so sweet. And I have to say the results are disproportionate to the effort because the jam tastes amazing. As we cooked, the whole house became filled with the aroma of fresh strawberries. Even in my wildest berry-making dreams I never imaged such a wonderful scent!

Here is Owen headed out to the strawberry field with his friends Bella and Lucas.

My other little berry, Signe who was present but didn’t really help that much.

My Big Little Girl