Summer Themes: Farm Week

Yee-haw! It's farm week at our house, and I'm pretty sure it's going to be my favorite week this summer, if only because I haven't had to do a thing except bring E. to camp at an adorable farm in Scarborough, Maine and then pick her up a few hours later, happily dirt covered and filled with stories and songs all to do with farms.

Besides attending camp, we've also been reading stories about farms, like:

• On the Farm by David Elliot (a fun rhyming tale about all the animals and happenings on a farm)
• Deep Sea Farm by Dahlov Ipcar (a story about a merman who farms on the bottom of the ocean - totally appropriate, I think, since Scarborough is also a coastal town)
• Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type by Doreen Cronin(a fun farm setting, and I sort of feel like it introduces the concepts of unions...a little Animal Farmish)
• Brown Cow Farm by Dahlov Ipcar (a farm themed counting book)
• Down on the Farm by Merrily Kutner (a rhyming story that follows a little goat all over his farm) 

To finish out our week, we'll likely visit a local farm (I love Scarborough, but it's farm from local for us) and do some strawberry picking and buy some local produce to do a little cooking project with.

I hope to post some pictures of the farm where E. is going to camp at the end of the week - it's really worth a look (and I can't say enough how much fun it's been to send E. there; I know she's really loving going and this week is going by a mite bit too fast for her liking; if we were closer I would have considered two weeks rather than just one!).

A Little Note (that might turn out to be longer than "little"): You might be wondering why I chose farms as one of my themes for our summer fun. I was a really lucky little girl - my grandparents had a farm. They raised cows for beef (organic, grass fed, way before it was cool) and kept a large veggie garden along with high bush blueberries. Both of my grandparents had grown up on farms. Eating fresh and local wasn't a hip lifestyle choice for them; it was the only choice if their families wanted to survive huge catastrophes, like the Great Depression

For me, their home was a little piece of Eden, where I roamed around, helping my grandpa feed the cows and picked my snacks and lunch from the garden. I even saw baby calves born and got to ride on a great big green John Deere. These experiences shaped me in a very appreciable way. I knew what hard work looked like. I understood where food comes from. I was a very small part of a very old tradition, something that was deep within my family. And, above all, I was doing something very, very fun!

I wanted these experiences for E. While we live a pretty rural area and live right down the road from a farm (we frequently have to drive around escaped cows on our way to town), E. hasn't had the chance to really spend time at a farm and see how it works. I felt that camp and doing some activities at home would help give E. just a little piece of what I was so lucky to grow up with.