Ah, summer days! Preschool is DONE and we are reveling in only driving to town when we want to. The garden, house projects, animals, and who knows what else are all keeping Mommy and Daddy quite busy, and the kids are entertaining themselves throughout. Here are some snapshots of the past week of being a kid at Mountain Meadow!

Strawberry Picking

---

Local you-pick strawberry farm. All photos are my own.

Earlier this year, I got a great deal for pre-paying for 3 gallons of you-pick strawberries at a "local" farm. The kids' preschool was supposed to have a field trip there in May, so I figured hey, I'll kill two birds with one stone. Then the trip was cancelled...and the farm is a nearly 1.5 hour drive away, so we didn't get around to going until last week.

Just like blueberry picking last year, Pixie was a very helpful, patient, and dedicated berry picker, and Little Man...was not. But what was a huge improvement over the constantly whined complaints I heard from him last summer, was the fact that he actually did pick berries.

Sort of.

Pretty much every time I looked at him, this is what I saw.

I filled my entire bucket, Pixie filled maybe a third of hers, and Little Man had a few dozen bitten berries rattling around in the bottom of his bucket. "Don't bite all the berries before putting them in the bucket!" I told him.
"But I have to make sure they taste good first," he said.
Preschooler logic at its finest :)

Obviously not Little Man's bucket!

Gardening Time!

---

We finally got the rest of the garden planted this week! All that is left is two more plantings of corn--we are staggering those every two weeks, to try to avoid being clobbered with hundreds of ears of corn all at once, like we were last year. I've discovered that vegetable and flower seeds germinate well when direct seeded, but none of my herb seeds have come up.

The kiddos enjoy helping plant seeds, as you can see here when they helped me plant the second set of corn one day :)

They really love using the Hori Hori tool!

They took turns on each row, one loosening the soil with the Hori Hori, and the other planting the seeds and patting down the dirt over them.

Switching places on the next row

PLAY TIME!

---

Playing "balance beam" on poles left behind by the previous owner

A farm is such a great place to find creative ways to run, jump, climb, and just simply PLAY. We have been spending quite a bit of time under the huge tree behind the barn, because its low, widespread branches provide wonderful shade on hot afternoons. Now that the grape arbor is gone and no longer provides shelter in the garden, the chickens like it much better back here, too.

Bug heaven!

Between our trailer being parked back here, and the random miscellaneous items collected and piled around by the previous owner, there are plenty of things to do.

Pixie launches herself into space...

And with hair flying, she sticks the landing!

Elsewhere on the farm...

They invented a new game, called "The Golden Rock." It involves climbing these fence supports to reach the large rock that the Husband had set on top of the corner post a long time ago. They climb up, see who can get the rock first, climb down, then whoever got the rock has to climb up and put it back. Repeat over and over. Pixie can't climb up with the rock in her hand, so Little Man gallantly does that part for her :)

Little Man is by far the better climber.

Of course, chickens never cease to be entertainment.

Little Blackie gets toted around quite a lot.

Tragedies and some sad lessons learned

---

Mowing time

This lovely photo shows something that has caused some sadness: the old farmer who comes to cut the hay normally does it later in the month. We've had so much unusual rain and heat this spring that the hay was super thick, extra high and ready to cut a whole month earlier than usual--and as a result, he ran over 3 newborn fawns while mowing. The Husband saved just one that he saw in time. It was heartbreaking, especially because last night two does were out in the field looking for their lost babies.

If anyone has experience with finding and saving fawns ahead of hay cutting, please share what you do!

The neighbor has vowed to wait until the end of the month next year, so the fawns will be bigger and better able to run away from the mower. The Husband also did some reading online and found advice to walk the fields ahead of time with dogs to help find and relocate fawns. Now Big Guy and Fluffball would be perfect for this. But Little Barky would have to be leashed or left behind because...

Scene of the crime

Yup. RIP Lucy. Little Man accidentally let the dogs out of the fenced yard while the chickens were free ranging and the Husband and I were wrapped up in helping load our old washer and dryer for the people who bought them (don't get me started on the aggravation of selling stuff on facebook yard sale sites, ha!). Anyway, instead of telling us the dogs were out, Little Man hid and cried. And Little Barky's Impossible Dream of chasing chickens, blissfully unsupervised, became a reality with a tragic ending.

It's hard to believe that last week we dramatically saved a chick from being killed by a snake, and then lost a full grown chicken to our own dog.

The kids normally take these things in a most amazing matter of fact fashion, but this time Little Man was pretty distraught. The Husband and I were naturally upset over losing a chicken to a preventable cause, but took the opportunity to reiterate to the kids that when they make a mistake or have an accident, they won't get in trouble if they immediately come get us to help fix it. Hopefully that will sink in now!

---

That pretty much wraps up our past week. I hope everyone else is having a wonderful day!

---