A pilgrim's life for me

So I could tell you that this photo is from a week ago. The trees are still bare and the sky often gray but it's warm enough that the kids are wearing fleeces these days. Yep, spring is here in Virginia, but if you super zoom in on these trees, they're lacking the buds limbs are sporting these days. This shot is from November.

Olaiya had a stellar field trip that got lost in the thirty day shuffle between its day and the day we left for Christmas. That should not detract from its awesomeness.

Back then, Olaiya was studying the pilgrims. The class took a trip to a fully functioning 18th century tenant farm. Fields, tobacco house, hogs, turkeys, cows, geese, chickens, all cared for by a farm family. Real people, in period clothing, doing actual, this-is-our-life, work.

This is the tobacco house on the edge of the tobacco field where the tobacco was hanging and drying. Did I mention it was tobacco?

The hogs. Not your pretty pink, many-piglets-in-a-crate, give-them-shots-and-take-them-to-market pigs. These are gnarly teethed, bristly, slop-eating, we-provide-bacon-grease-to-flavor-the-family's-food hogs.

Olaiya attempting to clue in her peers with her knowledge of hogs.

The most majestic of the poultry freely roaming the farmscape. Not pictured, probably due to my own new found fear of them, are the geese. Dude, geese are vicious. I'm not kidding. They were chasing down innocent Kindergartners with their heads lowered and necks thrusting. Moment that went down in Kindergarten Field Trip lore: Mrs. Lewis (yeah, that's me) was escorting five little girls back to the farmhouse after lunch. We purposely chose not the main path displayed here, but a creek-crossing back way to outsmart and avoid the confrontational birds. However, birdbrains indeed, they greeted us at the top of our trail, blocking our exit to the house. Mrs. Lewis held out her purse to the left and for the pecking and while the children escaped around her back to the right.
Extraneous drama note: after the girls passed by I followed them up to the house to hear crying behind me. Olaiya had hesitated and her mom abandoned her to the birds. We managed to make it together sans any nips to our heels.

The farmhouse mama talking to the chil'ens about the dinner she was cooking over the fire. It was chestnut pudding. She and her husband ate it for lunch an hour later. Inside the one room, dirt floor house we found corn husk dollies and other pilgrim-ish toys. Up above in the loft were their beds. Seriously, had I not taken time over lunch to read the literature handed to us at the entrance, I wholeheartedly would have believed these people lived there. Full time. Whenever asked a question, they respond as though you're friendly neighborfolk that's wandered onto their property. There's no "they would harvest the tobacco and take it down the river to Alexandria where they would get tobacco notes", it was all "we travel six miles to go to church" and "our children are out doing chores - there's lots to do on the farm". Nope, nine-to-five actors. Totally had me.

The root cellar.

Helping out with the family's chores.

The firewood isn't going to bring in itself.

That will get a five-year-old's attention.

I love that every unit has a field trip or an event (next week it's the National Postal Museum for the Community unit) and as someone that's done lesson planning, I am in awe and thankful. And maybe I'll get next week's up before it's four months old.