Long Weekend!

So I am taking tomorrow and Monday off and Tuesday is the 4th, so WooHoo! I'm picking up my nieces after work and boy, do they have some weekend planned. Not having children, I often forget that kids have memories like steel traps. Do something fun once, and it becomes a tradition that must be repeated forever. So, this is the annual weekend before 4th of July extravaganza. We've been having for the last 7 years. On my nieces 'to do' list for the next three days:

• Make salads from the garden
• Help make a fruit salad
• Bake something (this year it's gonna be farmgirl fare's blueberry breakfast bars
• Drink Coke in bottles (1st time I gave it to them they asked if I was giving them beer)
• Practice picking up chickens
• Watercolors of many flowers in colored jars, at least once.
• Dig things from the garden....."Aunt Meredith, did you plant carrots this year?"
• Eat nasturtiums....seriously, they graze on the planter between the garage doors.
• The Marietta Carnival
• The Marietta Fireworks after the carnival (which I think we will be watching from the front porch this year, because they don't start until 11pm, after the fair ends, and the kids always fall asleep)
• Catch lightening bugs in mason jars, complete with sticks and leaves to simulate real lightening bug houses
• Eat breakfast at Hinkle's Pharmacy
• Go to the used book store
• Go to the antique store across from Hinkle's
• Have reading time on Sunday morning (while Aunt Meredith reads the NYT and drinks coffee)
• Watch Wallace and Grommitt at least once
• Come up with funny names for one another. For some reason I can only remember the youngest one's names. Last year it was Carny Buttpaste. 'Carny' came from the carnival and the strange people that run the rides, and Buttpaste came from a diaper rash ointment we saw at Target and thought was funny. The year before that it was Brittany Weirds, for the hour long performance she gave with the garden hose as microphone on the front porch.

And Aunt Meredith has a few things planned. It will be 'eat local' weekend, with a trip to Central market in Lancaster, picking up Daisy Flour at McGreary Organics in Lancaster, which is the only source of local organic flour I could find. It is ground at Bachman's Grist Mill, an historic grist mill in Annville, PA still in operation. Then a trip to local Shady Acres Farm to buy local chicken and some fresh milk. And all the while a discussion of why people eat local and what it means. A little organic brain washing.

And I will be exhausted at the end. But it is all so fun and worth it and I absolutely love giving them good memories.