Farmin

So the kids and I didn't seem to want to leave our house today, because it was just not hot as hell inside. I even tried to get out of going to the farm, but when I called him P-Daddy was still in Seattle and didn't think he could make pickup on time.

I will type that again... sigh... P-Daddy was in Seattle. We (well 4/5 of us) love Seattle. It was either that or Northwest Glory Harbor for our domicile, and since the wage-earning 1/5 of us despises urban living, here we are! That, and the nasty ass commute. I totally support living where we do but alas I love Seattle. But I digress.

So the farm; well it was still hot as hell OUTSIDE so the farm was toasty when we got there at 3.30. I piled the share into the laundry hamper and the kids scampered about like the little rabbits they are. Farmer T is really into kids so it is nice, to be able to go to a place where the kids are welcomed and encouraged to explore. While I helped install paths in the children's garden, G made potato prints and communed with the adolescent chickens and D went belly-swimming in the freshly turned field. The soil there is like baby powder. I don't know why I think I can ever just go there and come home, much less clean.

As I was thinking we were making our break for it, G asked Farmer T if she could "go pick a strawberry to eat." Farmer T responded by handing her a pint box and telling her to have fun. When N, coming back from his potato stamping, saw G's box then he wanted to go pick. So we spent another 30 minutes in the fields (and yes it was hot as hell.)

Still, that's really cool. This CSA is valuable to us on so many different levels, and the educational benefits for the kids are just huge. They're going to a farm and getting the experiential learning, but they have the added benefit of doing this over time. They've seen the chickens sitting on their eggs, and they've fed them and watched them grow from the moment they hatched. They watch the bees soar to the berries and back to the hive again, and they sweeten their tea and oats with that honey. They've seen the hoophouses nurture seedlings and haybale mazes, and they've seen those same hoophouses topple in a winter storm. They've seen the fields flood, but they've seen how the farm rebounds from disasters such as those. They're watching their mother and her adult friends volunteer. They're learning life cycles, which is what one would expect, but they're also being versed in community and resiliency.

In unrelated news, I washed one of the school mats with a load of children's clothes. The mat was a red woven fabric... with a very strong dye. For the first time in my life I dyed an entire load of clothes hot pink. Sigh. I washed them again, I soaked them in oxiclean. This is very effective dye. Nicholas is going to have pink underwear for a while, until I get some blue dye to make them all purple.