Thursday, October 23, 2008

A half-day at the farm


Actually, it was even less than half-day; it was more like an hour or so. I took Mark to the Russian school in the morning and then he slept for 3 hours. That’s what he does – during the week his naps are only about one hour long, but on weekends – 3-hour naps aren’t uncommon. And so we had a late start. The farm was pretty far away – on the other end of town. Also, the directions we got from Google weren’t exactly right and we kept driving back and forth looking for our turn. Finally we got to the farm at about 4pm. But it was a lot of fun. First we had Mark go on the hay mountain. He wasn’t very excited about it though, probably because there were too many other kids climbing, running, jumping and acting crazy. But he did crawl through a very long tunnel under the mountain.

Then we took him to the hay maze. I thought he wouldn’t be very interested in it, but it was just the opposite. He loved it and kept wanting to go back. He even went into the maze on his own! Then we went to the larger corn maze, but it really wasn’t all that. And most corn was already picked. And plus it rained the day before, so the ground was very muddy. We got out of the corn maze with only a couple of ears of corn and went to feed the animals. This farm had a small petting zoo with goats, pigs, and chickens. Except of course, you couldn’t pet the pigs because they bite. And since so many people go through and pet and feed the animals, they really couldn’t care less for our corn. They did love the dry corn stalks though. But what they liked even more was the fresh grass. All the goats and sheep ate all the grass in their little enclosure. So they were just too happy to got even the smallest blade from us. That’s how we kept them coming over. Otherwise, they would just stay away.


But pretty soon it got boring anyway and we went to pick cotton. Cotton-picking is a lot of fun when you only do it for a few minutes. The plants are very beautiful and it’s pretty amazing how much cotton can you pull out of a single flower (or whatever it is called). Mark really got into it. I guess he really liked that for once he was encouraged to pull and tear something. I decided to use the cotton that we picked for crafts, but so far we haven’t used any. Anyway, just as we were done picking cotton, we saw that the hay ride was getting ready to leave. We hurried up and jumped on a hay wagon. Of course, Mark simply loved it. We sat all the way in the front where he could see the big tractor. He thought that was the absolutely best thing ever, even better than cotton. Unfortunately, the girls that sat next to us didn’t think so; they kept throwing corn at the driver. Mean!

Finally, it was time to go to the pumpkin patch. Our admission price included picking one pumpkin per paying adult. First we went to the patch and tried to find a pumpkin still on the vine. It wasn’t that difficult, especially after we moved all the way to the back of the patch. But all the pumpkins were pretty small. So we let Mark find one and we picked it. But then we felt like getting 2 tiny pumpkins just wouldn’t be fair. Instead, we went back and picked another, larger, pumpkin from a ready-to-pick pile. Mark was getting tired and cranky; it was getting cold and dark. And there was really nothing left to do. It was clearly time to leave.