Sunday, August 16, 2009

Scholarship, Blackberries, Company... oh my!

We've had a busy week full of all sorts of things! Last Sunday night we went to a little BYU incoming freshman fireside where Ashley was awarded a nice little BYU-Alumni scholarship. She was pretty excited. it will hopefully cover her books!



Blackberries... yummmmm! If you are from the Pacific Northwest, most likely you LOVE blackberries. You can buy them in the store here, but they aren't nearly as good as they are up there. And I can't bring myself to pay for them since they are totally free up there! Blackberries bring back floods of childhood memories. They are a totally wild bush up in the Pacific Northwest... they grow everywhere and they are really hard to kill. Before they built houses behind the house I grew up in, we used to have some in our backyard. Somehow we made a fort in them. fun times!! They have huge thorns and you usually get tons of cuts on your hands when you go picking, but they are totally worth it. My mom was a huge blackberry fan and so is her mom. My Grandma Verhaaren always came to visit in August during blackberry season. I have tons of memories of us picking blackberries for hours and hours. We would scout out the best places and spend the whole day there. We'd each get huge buckets full. We would go home with purple fingers and my mom would make a huge pie and tons of jam! So... the reason for all this blackberry talk is because my brother Scott was up in Seattle last weekend and he went blackberry picking with Dave and Julie. He wasn't sure if they would let him carry them home on the plane, but they did!! He was kind enough to share them with me. So I went over to their house and helped Jenn make some jam. YUM!! It is so good!!! Thanks Scott!!





Friday night my brother Todd and his family spent the night on their way down to the beach. It was great to have them. Scott and Jenn came over for dinner and we had a fun visit. The kids woke up wanting to swim! Why not, it was vacation!

Cute little Charity LOVES her cousin Ashley. Todd went up to wake Charity up at about 9:00 am (she will be a great teenager, haha) and she said she was was going to get up when Ashley gets up... haha. She didn't know that Ashley could easily sleep till noon! Pretty funny.


So, Todd headed down to the beach and a few hours later our niece Sam and her husband Jake came over for a visit. She is John's sister Barbara's daughter. They were down from Draper for the weekend. Ashley made some cookie dough and I think we managed to make a few cookies out of it... not many though... we LOVE cookie dough in our house! (except John... he thinks we will all die of samonilla poisoning some day.)


Tanner had fun playing guitar hero with them! We love having visitors!!

2 comments:

Jeff and Michele said...

My parents are from Oregon, so I know all about those great blackberries. When went up for a family reunion a few years ago, the bushes were wild all over the campground, so we stocked up. I actually remember raspberries more...thats what my grandma had in her backyard (along with the bowling alley!)

email and phone numbers said...

cannot believe little ashley is at college! she will have a ball!

and the blackberry jam...ok, yum! us desert folk don't even know what a blackberry bush looks like.