We’ve been visiting some farms recently and had lots of fun!

The latest was the Klesick Family Farm way up north. We went there with some friends for their Harvest Festival. This place was superb! It’s a family run organic farm, and since they are small and don’t have a lot of money, much of their farm equipment is old and manual-labour-intensive.

For example, we saw a demonstration of how they dig up potatoes. They hook this 100-year old machine up to a tractor (it would take 6 horses to pull!) where it digs under the plants, pushes them up a sort of potato escalator, someone shakes the plants around to loosen the potatoes, then it dumps the potatoes back along the ground behind. People then follow along and pick up the potatoes. In our case, the kids went ballistic, ran to the potato line, and did all the manual labour for them. Fun!

They also had many, many tractors, most of them looking pretty old. The Boo of course thought this was fantastic and had to sit on all of them. The lucky boy managed to score a tractor ride this way!

Isn’t that a crazy looking tractor? Instead of tires it has spikes! The farmer came up to us and said he needed to use this tractor. I started to get the Boo down, but the farmer (his name was Larry) said Boo could go for a ride if he wanted to, but little kids are often scared by the noise. So he started the tractor and Boo got a HUGE grin on his face! I asked if he wanted to go for a little ride and he nodded his head vigorously. So there you go! A not advertised perk of the journey, an honest to goodness tractor ride.

We also saw some other older equipment demonstrated, took a horse-pulled wagon ride, and pushed around some toys in the “children’s garden” which was basically a big patch of tilled earth. We picked potatoes, bought some stuff from the farm stand, and eventually had to leave in search of lunch. We had a brilliant time!

Earlier in the week we also went to a different farm. This one was the South 47 Farm where they have a “farm tots” program. This was also very good. First there was a little craft where the kids made a tissue paper flower (incidently the Boo really got into this), they dug around in bins full of beans and seats, they wandered through a pole bean maze and over some hay stacks, fed some goats, took a hay ride behind a tractor (big hit), and picked some cherry tomatoes. Boo had a marvelous time. It’s a good thing he likes tomatoes!

Now we’re looking forward to doing a corn maze, picking out our pumpkin from the field, and picking some apples this fall!

A few weekends ago Several months ago (I wrote this ages ago and then forgot about it!) it was grey and rainy so we passed up the zoo for the science museum. There was a dinosaur exhibit going on that we didn’t want to miss. The Boo has recently taken not only to dinosaurs, but the concept of their bones, thanks to one of his favorite online games where you put the bones together to form a dinosaur who them walks off the screen.

The exhibit itself was pretty good. There’s not much sign reading when it comes to taking Nathan to the museum, but the dinosaurs were big and this was good. There were your usual “sharp tooth” T-Rex type dinosaur, a brontosaurus type dinosaur, and a myriad of other smaller ones.

The best part? The exhibit on dinosaur eggs. They showed some with babies coming out of the eggs, and some models of eggs with babies still in them. Nathan found this endlessly fascinating. Plus they had some boxes where you could “dig” and discover eggs. This was fun too.

The Pacific Science Museum is a strange beast. They have a million things to look at and you would think it would be heaven. There are outdoor water cannons that you can fire into a pond, there’s a digger indoors where you can, not surprisingly, dig, there’s an entire section devoted to toddlers and water play, there’s a butterfly house and accompanying insect exhibit (where you can even pet giant hissing cockroaches), somewhere there’s a wind tunnel that we haven’t found yet, and there’s even a model space ship you can climb in. But somehow it always seems lacking. I’m not sure why!

Anyway. Dinosaurs were good and the boy’s current favorite movie is about dinosaurs as well. He’s all boy, that’s for sure!

H and the boy were reading some nursery rhymes yesterday, including Jack and Jill. Quite a few nursery rhymes mention wells, and when we were in the UK we saw an actual well (that was mostly filled in) and showed it to the boy. He had never seen a real one before and was very impressed.

So yesterday while reading “Jack and Jill went up the hill” yadda yadda yadda, H asked what you do with a well. Boo answered that you get water from it.

And you put cats in it.

He’s been paying attention! There’s another rhyme that goes, “ding dong bell, pussy’s in the well, who put her in,” etc etc etc. Funny boy