After our busy morning at the farm, he got to stay up at nap time today since he is one of the big kids now. He put in his standard request for "spaghetti with meatballs in the sauce" for dinner and cake with vanilla ice cream.
Liam enjoyed his day and we are all very proud of him.
Happy birthday, Liam.
A few weeks ago I entered a contest for a party at a local farm. I think they started as a dairy farm but now run a huge playground and corn maze type place. I won the free party and we took advantage of it today. We had perfect weather and a bunch of friends came to join us.
Gabe is driving a train.
Katie is feeding the goats. I never knew goats would eat ice cream cones but I guess they'll eat just about anything if given the chance.
More goats.
We had ice cream.
The kids panned for gemstones.
Katie is hard at work.
They had go-carts to ride.
Round and round the track.
Coming down the giant slide.
Bouncing on the jumping pillow. Everyone had a great time.
Gabe spent the morning riding with Dad. This is just not fair. Last year he rode on my back in the Ergo and was quite happy to smear strawberries all over my back. This year he rides with Alan in the backpack and actually eats the berries. Just not fair I tell you. Poor Gabe fell off the slide yesterday and sprained his ankle so he has spent most of the past two days being carried around by someone.
Bryan is a big help since he has gotten past the stage of scarfing down every berry he picks or jumping up and down with excitement over each berry insisting that we all look at it because it is the biggest one ever. He's a quiet and hard worker which makes it much easier to get in and out of the fields quickly.
Katie is very proud of her full basket.
Here's one that Abby actually didn't eat. 
Yes, the kitchen is covered in strawberries so I guess I'd better start getting them cleaned up and dealt with. Hopefully we'll get raspberries and cherries next week.
Hopefully later this week or early next week we will get out to an actual farm and pick some decent sized cherries. The ones on our trees are rather small and many are too high in the tree for us to safely reach.
I imagine if you grow up in an environment where your basic survival depends on your own gardening abilities, you learn rather quickly. Good thing we have grocery stores around here.
They have a train at the zoo this summer. Bryan agreed to ride along to be Gabe's buddy since Gabe is now officially big enough to let me know that he has no intent of sitting quietly in the stroller while the bigger kids get to ride the train.
Abby insisted that Bryan take her picture with the polar bears.
The water area is the kids favorite spot when it is warm.
Here's Gabe right before he finally got up enough courage to get in the water with the big kids where he promptly slipped and hit his head on a rock. He was having so much fun that he just barely allowed me to wipe the first round of blood off his head before getting back into the pond with the rest of the kids.
Liam decided that 3 inches of water is more than enough to totally soak yourself. He was dunking his head in the water until I pulled him aside to point out all the tykes running around in diapers and suggested that maybe he stop doing that.
While I was sitting on the side with Robert, I heard one mom trying to encourage her son to go and find a boy his age to talk to and play with. Then she said well, not the ones who are splashing. Find a calm one. I looked up and thought to myself well, I guess he won't be talking to my boys because, well, they weren't exactly being calm today. We arrived home soaked and happy and the younger ones are sleeping now. Aside from the thunder storm that is keeping me from hanging up my laundry outside, life could not be better.
We made sure to celebrate his day with many family and friends. Nothing beats the sugar rush provided by tons of cake, soda and a great pot luck.
I'm thinking we just may have to do this again some time soon.
Here Kieran learns what an earthquake would feel like.
Our budding paleontologists hard at work searching for bones.
You've got to love those glasses. This brings back many a chemistry memory for me.
We found a room full of giant tinker toys and the children built these houses.
We're hoping to get back sometime soon to take in a planetarium show.
We have cherries coming in. Yes, they are a tad small since we don't fertilize the trees at all, just spray for bugs. Here's hoping that the birds don't eat them all and we don't experience "sudden, unexpected crop failure" like last year when the cherries all shriveled up on the trees overnight.
Here's the egg stealer running away after finding a lack of eggs in the barn. So now how do we get rid of the critter?
Ok, I admit. I am a bit excited still over seeing actual food growing on our own property. It looks like this year we can expect another large crop of peaches if things continue this way. The pears and apples are also looking great and I've been getting a decent amount of asparagus every couple days. The grapes are looking good (let's just hope the birds don't discover them). The jury is out on the walnuts, raspberries, strawberries and cherries and we need to find a way to keep the darn skunk from stealing chicken eggs. We're still getting about 6 to 8 a day but that is down a bit from a few weeks ago. I still feel we are running low when we are down to only 4 dozen eggs in the fridge. Maybe in a couple years we'll actually get good at this growing/raising your own food thing.
