Mutiny

Help me. My children are growing up...and I don't like it. Sometimes I do, I mean I don't miss the diapers and the puke and the endless crying, but since when did I lose my status as their favorite person? After all, I am pretty fun. But lately my older boys have decided that they are not so in to the whole family outing thing. And it's not that they don't have a good time when we go on "an adventure"...it's merely the idea of going out and not being home to do nothing. I don't get it. They hum and hah about having to go somewhere. I don't think I've had a day in my life where I would rather stay home than go somewhere, so I just can't relate. But they go and we have a good time...and the next time they start fussing about it all over again.

Yesterday's adventure was to a farm outside of Seguin Texas. We went in search of railroad ties for a landscape project, but we also noted that they had a dairy and a hayride and tour etc, so we made a family outing of it. We arrived to the farm about 2 o'clock and met Gina, a baptist minister from Maryland who had moved to the farm of 140 acres 4 years ago with her ex-lawyer husband and 7 children to run a farm and a Genesis Christian school. The sign on the gate read "Everything Jesus" and the dairy itself is called MooJesus. They have a website www.moojesus.com. They sell raw milk and lots of organic produce and hay fed beef, lamb, and pork. They also collect railroad ties that are discarded by the railroad company as they replace them. Many of them are really bad, but there were some that were usable in our project. The minute we walked in I knew we had entered a place where time ticks slowly. It was nice. The people were in no hurry, except to feed us and have us sample all their products. We sampled the milk, two cheeses, buttermilk with hone, and their lunch of ground beef and salad greens, followed by pineapple banana shakes. It was good.

It was during the hour long tractor ride that I realized how different my children's childhood is from my own. My children are boderline city-slickers, definitely sububanites! While this was an adventure for them I found it was a trip back to my childhood to be on this farm. There were cows and pigs and stray cats and a beautiful garden. The kids were pointing to the animals like we were at the zoo and asking questions about where they got their food (since there were no stores around). It was a sad realization for me that my kids won't have those experiences that I had growing up....except when we got on "family adventures"...and that's if they keep going with me. I'm pretty sure they will.