Field Trip

A few weeks ago, the boys and I went on a field trip to a local "farm" with the other preschool families. I read an article recently about agritourism and I think our visit to this "farm" illustrates agritourism at its best- or worst, depending on how you see it. It was more like an amusement park with a farm theme, but regardless of what you call it, we had lots and lots of fun!

Jackson

This giant slide was probably the highlight of our day. Jack and Cullen wanted to do it over and over and over. I finally had to put a stop to it because it was getting late, we'd been there for nearly 6 hours and we needed to get home for dinner.

I couldn't believe they wanted to go down by themselves. This slide was huge and they were the youngest kids doing it. But they're fearless! And, as you can see, they were thrilled with it!

Cullen's favorite area (besides the giant slide) was the "farm chores" area where he milked fake cows, pumped water from a well, and became enamored with gathering corn kernels, dumping them onto a conveyor belt and then re-gathering them after they were dropped back into the pile. He probably would have done this all day if I'd let him. Too bad we can't get him a conveyor belt for Christmas!

Jackson's other favorite thing was petting the goats. He chased them all over the place and shrieked with delight the first few times he got to touch one.

Jack and Cullen with some of their buddies

On the hayride

Jack loved watching this real cow get milked and he asked me to take his picture with it.

This is the first slide we went on, before we discovered the giant slide. I was still in denial that they were big enough to go by themselves so I went with them on this one.

The craziest moment of the day happened when we were heading to eat lunch with our friends. Cullen ran ahead of me and I lost sight of him for less than 4 seconds. I started freaking out of course, because the place was crowded and I had been worried about losing one of them all morning. But I knew he couldn't have gone far, it had only been a couple of seconds. I was looking everywhere around us when all of a sudden I spotted him... in the pen with the 1500 lb. cow we had seen getting milked earlier.

He had crawled under the fence and was running around in there (stepping in cow pies of course) and having the time of his life. It was a huge pen and thankfully the cow was at the other end looking annoyed that some little boy was invading his space. I yelled at Cullen to get out of there and thankfully he obeyed right away but when he got to the fence he didn't want to crawl back under because there was "poo poo" on the ground. Hmmm, that clearly didn't stop him in the first place. Well after I finally got him out, I wiped his shoes off on the grass and used up about a whole pack of antibacterial wipes on his hands and face. He still had some cow manure on the tops of his shoes and pants but I decided it wasn't worth going home early over. I'm not sure what that says about me or my mothering skills, but don't judge me unless you are also the mother of 2 year old twin boys. If you are, then you understand and you are probably de-sensitized to germs and gross situations like this too.

I can't believe I just told the story of how I lost my son, found him in danger of being trampled by a massive cow, and then let him spend the rest of the day with cow manure on his pants. I'm going to stop now before I embarrass myself more and just wait for CPS to show up at my door.

Motherhood is such a humbling experience.