Blue BIrd Gap Farm

This morning Olivia and I headed down with the kids to a city run farm in Hampton. Neither of us had been but I was pretty excited after checking out the website. The morning got off to kind of a rocky start with either friends deciding not to come at the last minute or car trouble. A sign of things to come? No way! Although I did get us plenty lost on the way down there (thank you DVD player and napping children and Christopher's patience to look up directions) Once there it really was cool. It is basically a BIG playground surrounded by picnic areas and lots of farm animals. It is all free which is perfect for my price range! Liam and Sam marched right up to the first cage which was filled with Turkey's. You could pay a quarter and get food for the birdies so they were all gathered around the chain link fence. Liam did what most kids do and grabbed the fence and stood there looking. Apparently one of the turkeys thought he should have food in his hand and gave him a good sharp peck. Poor Lemers shrieked and then started wailing as he held he hand out to me telling me how much pain he was in (or at least that's what I took the gibberish to mean). It was so sad but so cute I had to take a picture. I was worried that it would put him off getting close to the other animals but the next pen had a deer and Liam became friends with it right away after shoving some clover through the links. Sam kept a nice safe distance but would pull up grass and hand it to me. There was this amazing albino peacock roaming around and I had to get a picture but I have promised myself to not take pictures of just animals so we got Olivia and Ella in the shot too :) It really is a great place but their are roots from trees and gravel every where and Liam must have ate it about five times. Luckily little miss Ella was doing great toddling around and I think she had as much fun as the boys! After seeing most of the animals we headed over to the VERY crowded playground and Sam went straight for the line to go on the huge slide. I thought what in the world? A. there is no way he is going to stand patiently in line and B. that slide is extremely steep there is no way he will go down it. I was wrong on both accounts. He waited patiently for his turn and then gave me a huge triumphant smile once he reached the bottom. Holy Cow my baby is a little boy. He then decided it would be super fun to go face first down the smaller slide. He wanted me to pull him by his arms though so that I could stop him at the end. I am SURE the other parents were grateful for the excellent example we were setting for their children. While Sam played on the slides and Liam ate snacks sitting in the dirt, Olivia and Ella took a turn on the swings. It is always so funny to be a parent and not know if your child is enjoying something or not. Olivia had to ask if Ella was smiling or not so I thought I would do one better and get a picture of the pure joy on her face. After lots of playing Sam crawled into the stroller and announced he was ready to go home. It was pretty hard to pry Liam away from the chickens though, he found them to be much more congenial then the turkeys. On the way back to the car we found a field of dandelions so I taught the boys how to blow off all the seeds. Sam caught on but Liam decided he would only do the yellow dandelions and instead of blowing he would just put it in his mouth. YUK! He also was on shoe strike. I know I know horrible mother but those crocks kept tripping him! That evening Olivia and I got together again and made bows for our little girls. We had done this previously and with the help of Nora come up with some pretty good ideas. Luckily we had Ella to model them... until she zonked in the high chair :) In all I made six head bands and twenty bows so far. they are all waiting patiently in her bureau!