Today was cherry picking day!

Our cherry tree is unpredictable. I think we last had a great harvest three years ago. We got almost no cherries last year, or the year before. This year’s harvest was pretty OK.

Ingrid and Adrian quickly divided up our two step ladders and got started. In fact I believe that for them, climbing on ladders is the best part of the whole cherry picking thing.

My job was to help stabilize the stepladders (especially the taller one is a bit wobbly) and to ooh and aah over all the cherries the kids got. Adrian especially loved showing off how much he had picked.

Once we started picking we noticed that the quantity may be OK this year but the quality was not so good at all. We always have to throw some out because the birds have been at them. But this year, many cherries had a different kind of damage: they had split because of the rain we’ve been having all throughout June and July. I can’t recall having seen that before.

Today I learned that commercial growers actually use helicopters to blow-dry their cherries to keep them from cracking. Luckily for us, we don’t need our cherries to look perfect or to store well, so we kept many of the cracked berries for making jam and syrup.

Here’s the cherry sorting station, where Eric sorts them into three groups: undamaged, damaged but OK, and inedible.

Cherry jam is awesome. But we still have a fair amount of jam left from three years ago, so we don’t need any more.

Cherry pie is probably the next best thing you can make out of cherries, so that’s what I did.

We went out for a walk in the woods near Hellasgården. The GPS unit died because of batteries but Hellasgården offered beginner-level orienteering maps (the easiest version had 5 control points and less than 3 km to walk) so we practised our map-reading skills instead.

The kids were fighting each other all the time and Adrian in particular was angry about everything. So what could have been a nice outing ended with everybody angry at everybody else, and we came home in a worse mood than we left.

I got to swim for the first time this summer though.

Eric, with a movie and a cookie.

We just had our vintage sewing machine serviced and a broken gear wheel replaced. Most of the machine now works better than ever, smoother and quieter. But winding the bobbin didn’t work so well. Eric investigates.

Rainy and windy and cold, but we felt like we needed at least a little bit of fresh air. So Adrian and I potted some flowers, and then we joined Eric and helped him change tyres on the car (swapping out winter tyres for summer ones).

Pretty typically, Adrian didn’t hesitate a moment when choosing between staying indoors and coming out with us, while Ingrid decided equally quickly to stay inside and read.

We had semlor.

A la carte semlor: Eric likes his as hetvägg (with hot milk); Adrian and Ingrid eat theirs without any whipped cream; I eat what I consider a “normal” semla but with less whipped cream than you get in most store-bought versions.

Eric reading, late at night.

Eric baking mince pies.

Yes, mince pies are normally a Christmas thing… but we never got around to making ours during the Christmas holidays. Rather than saving the mincemeat until next year, we’re having yummy mince pies in February.

I take so many photos of the kids and so few of Eric. This was a conscious effort to do something about it, and to capture something of the essence of Eric. Baking is one of his favourite hobbies, and Eric’s hands are my favourite part of him.