Our Week in Review: Including Mending Fences, Baking Pies, and This Week's Reading List ~ Nourishing My Scholar

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Welcome to our week in review! We have been living on my sisters farm now for nearly two months and I think we have finally found our rhythm! Farm life has so much to offer our children as they connect with nature and the animals all around them.

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This week started off with a bang as the small herd of large cattle we have broke through their fence and made it half way to town before we were notified by the sheriff! Oh, dear! We had to bring the big cows to the small pasture, closer to the house and take the baby cows to the pasture that holds the medium sized cows. We were planning on doing all of this anyway. We just thought it would be another week or two, ha! Our son went with the men and learned all about mending fences. Everything was going well and was mending up fine, until Uncle Johnny accidentally sent a tree through said fence. It was a cherry tree that was about to fall down anyway. So, Uncle Johnny tried to cut it down…but accidentally caused it to fall back onto the fence. The boys had to fix the fence a second time! Afterwards we brought the smaller cows over and released them into their new pasture.

It rained the first part of the week, though that didn’t deter us from going to the farmer’s market. Our daughter’s outfit was hilarious when I asked her if she wanted to go on a nature hike in the pasture. She said, “I got this!” We spent the day out exploring. The children discovered loads of new things like spider webs, lichens, and wishes!

Farm life is definitely agreeing with the children. They love the wide open spaces and the room to explore. They love learning about the different machinery and when it is used. They love the new friends they have in the cows and the chickens.

The children harvested the white radishes that they had planted when we first moved to the farm. They also got a lesson in giving back. We took a large portion of the harvest to Plaza Towers Assisted Living and gave the radishes to the residents. I don’t know who enjoyed this more…the kids or the residents! I suspect the residents, as they stuffed the children’s pockets full of candy and cookies while I wasn’t looking, HA!

Our garden is really taking off now. We added 200 sweet potato plants, 170 tomato plants, sunflowers, pumpkins, and more squash. We harvested our first handful of strawberries and I’m so excited about my beautiful cabbages! Our son is the official bug picker for 2 reasons. #1, because I don’t wanna…and #2, because he enjoys picking bugs and feeding them to his chicken Eragon!

My husbands allergies have gotten so bad on the farm that he is forced to wear a Dust/Pollution mask with a filter so he can breathe. The kids think he’s super cool and the fact that this mask has a shark theme just gives him extra cool points in their book. We decided on names for our Silkie chicks! I named the petite one Winter. My husband named the largest one John Snow (which will be hilarious if he turns out to be a she!), and we named the middle one Hodor. Do you sense a theme? Game of Thrones anyone?

We harvested cherries this week! The children ate as many as they brought in.

So, what do you do after you pick fresh cherries? You make pies and tarts! The children made cherry peach apple pies and cherry peach tarts…with a bit of help from Aunt Teppy. They turned out quite splendid and tasty.

Indoors the children played Jenga and built structures with their Kapla blocks. Our daughter has asked me to teach her how to read so we started working on the sounds of the letters. She really enjoyed making letter a’s in the blue foam. Our son built a transformer out of Lego’s. It was so cool to watch him change it from a vehicle to a robot. Our son watched crash course videos on the relationship of the earth and sun. He then did a digital painting of the Earth revolving around the Sun. He also watched one of his favorite documentaries, “Walking With Monsters”, worked on Khan Academy, and wrote a pen-pal letter to his friends back in Atlanta. Finally, we went to the library! We maxed out both of our library cards, but boy, was this one happy kid! The photo below only shows half his hoard.

We seem to be on another Magic Tree House kick. We had read this series a few years ago, but our son has a renewed interest. He checked out 15 of Mary Pope Osbornes books! We read two Furry and Flo books this week. The Ecology story of a Flower was a great read and helped in understanding why we try not to use pesticides in our garden. “When Bugs were Big, Plants were Strange and Tetrapods stalked the Earth” was a great read about the Carboniferous and Permian time periods. We all enjoyed “Zoe’s Jungle” so much that we read it several times. I started reading Aesop’s Fables to our daughter at nap time. She loves the stories and the lovely illustrations of this book.