Actual wild turkeys

Eric pointed out that my previous wild turkeys were actually Muscovy ducks. Oops.

Then as I was driving last Thursday I came across a grazing flock of actual wild turkeys and they do look a lot more like turkeys than those ducks did.

Picking strawberries

On Saturday we went to a small farm about an hour south to pick strawberries. It was such a small operation that it sort of felt like going over to someone's house to pick berries. And pet their pig Copper and their chickens, which we did too.

The farmer was very welcoming and happy to talk about how everything works. These strawberries are grown in pots stacked vertically about 5 high, which was a welcome improvement from my image of us spending our morning hunched over row after row of earthbound strawberry plants. The strawberries are actually grown hydroponically though I didn't know that until well after we had left because it looks like they are growing in soil. The farmer asked us to use scissors to harvest only the reddest ripest berries. Emerson loved finding berries in the low pots and snipping them off with the scissors and a little help. Only once did he take off running while holding the scissors prompting the parental observation from Eric: "He's running with scissors."

The strawberries above, minus a few that got eaten along the way, turned into this much jam (plus another jar we gave away before I took this picture):

Won't you be my neighbor

Our neighborhood, The Shires, is currently embroiled in a heated referendum about whether or not to update the white, wooden mailboxes, many of which are actually green and rotted, with black metal mailboxes, which look like they were designed for mid-century central London as opposed to a Florida subdivision.

There was a neighborhood meeting about this hot topic, and some other neighborhood issues, this past week. Ethan and I went to check it out and see who our neighbors are in this funny little community.

There were about 25 people there, out of something like 235 houses in the neighborhood (which is one of 28 or so neighborhoods that make up the "master planned community" that is Westchase). The crowd was mostly older folks and I was the only "young parent" there. I was really pleased to learn about what kinds of things are happening and was particularly happy to hear some of the ideas coming up like a playground area that would be a 5 min walk instead of a 45 min walk away.

I did have to nurse Ethan part-way through the meeting, which I was able to do very discreetly. After he was done, I was getting him re-situated in my lap when he let out a resounding three-part burp any frat boy would have been proud of. I cautiously raised my eyes to find every eyeball looking my direction. Before I could say a word the guy next to me, who I had never met before, spoke up.

"That was me."

Hammock Park

We have been trying to explore the parks nearby on nice days and one outing on a recent weekend took us to Hammock Park which is about 25 min away in Dunedin.

Hammock Park is of the "intact ecosystem" variety of park as opposed to the "large lawn" type and they have trails cut through it to aid exploration. As we were walking along down the trail we noticed orange peel strewn around. "Litterbugs," I sneered. "People should know better than to leave their picnic waste lying around."

As we kept walking, we kept seeing orange peels. And whole oranges laying by the side of the trail. It quickly became clear that something else was going on.

It was Eric who first noticed it*: there were wild orange trees and wild clementine trees (or whatever the real name is for those cute teeny oranges) all along the path.

Eric picked one and we all sampled its incredibly sour taste. I guess the squirrels and the other hikers already got all the sweet ones.

*I claim "still dumb from pregnant brain" on this as well as on a lot of other stuff like not being able to remember that thing I was going to do when I came into this room.