I'm all fried out

Yay! Laura (Bora in my blog list) came this weekend! I made the mistake of telling Mabes about it on Thursday. I told her how we were going to go pick strawberries, eat hushpuppies, and make waffles, so that night when I decided to make waffles for dinner she yells "And Laura will come tomorrow!" Doh. Sorry, kid, one more day. But apparently she was still convinced, and when Dave got her up Friday morning, the first thing she said was "Laura's here!" He told her no, sorry, not until tomorrow. Again, she must have thought he was joking and she ran into the family room, looked around, and her face fell. Dave said she had the saddest look on her face and shook her head, "Laura's not here..."

But she forgot about the sadness by the next morning, and was thrilled to see Auntie Bora, even moreso when she pulled out a giant plush Little Einsteins Rocket. When we started talking about eating, Mabes yelled, "We eat at Jangles!" So once again, we headed to Bojangles for some biscuits, then out to pick strawberries.


I was a little nervous that I had overhyped them to Laura or that somehow they had gotten better in my memory and the day would be a sad disappointment for all of us. But no, they were fabulous.

And last week, we laughed at the people we saw eating while picking. I mean, who does that? This week, we realized that EVERYONE does that. We were the chumps just putting them in our basket. They must figure the all-you-can-eat strawberry buffet into the price of the baskets, because everyone was eating them and angry thick accented farmer waving an orange flag (pictured below) didn't mind.

Now, if you were merely thinking about setting foot in a different aisle of strawberries than the one he sent you to (even if your friends are in that other aisle) the flag is waving and he's shouting unintelligible rants at you. But stay in your aisle and eat a bunch of strawberries, and he'll just keep patrolling and picking/eating strawberries, too.

Mabes and Jonas eat strawberries. All the kids were a red mess by the end.

That night, we went to a seafood place for some fried seafood. Dave had been searching for an "authentic" Southern seafood place, something totally un-fancy with huge portions. This was it. The dirt parking lot and abundance of accents tipped us off that this was the place we had been looking for. Unfortunately, Dave didn't realize he needed to specify he only wanted strips of catfish, not the whole fish.



The rest of the weekend was spent eating a ton and just hanging out. It was great fun, though I think I'm done with fried food for a while. On Monday, we gave Laura the tour of the city and went to an ice cream shop. Even better, we ordered Mabes her very own. We ate outside, which was across the street from to the light rail tracks, so Mabes was very close to exploding from the happiness of eating ice cream and watching the trains go by.


And a special birthday shout-out to Dave. I wanted to write a great tribute to what a great guy he is, but Mabes is shouting in her room "Mommy, it's time to get up! I wake up! We need to make Daddy's birthday cake!" Silly Mabes, you can't wake up if you never went to sleep. But Dave is a great guy, and since I don't have enough room to go on and on about why I love him, I'll just say that I do and go make him calzone for dinner and his annual chocolate chip cookie cake. So happy birthday, Dave!