Mommy's Day Out

The day of reckoning is looming for our first group of meat chickens.  The husband is hard at work on his chicken defeatherer which he has named the "Mutha Plucka". By the end of this we probably could all fly to France and dine on coq au vin to our heart's content for the amount of money we have spent housing, caring for and ultimately killing and freezing our birds.  The initial capital investment of owning a small farm is crazy, but hopefully in a few years  we will be saving money as well as raising our own food; unless of course we all become vegans after this first round of butchering.

The combination of trying to ensure the boys have a Popcorn Bowl summer while attempting to keep up with all of the farm chores is daunting.  Even if I managed to pick every weed in the garden, collect all of the ripe blueberries, make the jam, shovel the cow and horse's stall, clean the chicken house, prune the tomato plants, plant that flower bed I have been threatening to start since we bought the place, the cow would inevitably drop a load in the stall; there would be another quart of berries ripened on the bushes, I'd run out of canning jars; the dogs would dig up the flowers; the weeds in the first vegetable bed will have grown back before I finish the last bed, and Kyle would do something to piss me off. My hatred of that little shitty rooster is somewhat psychotic.  I am hoping he will be the first test run of the Mutha Plucka.

But let's just pretend I manage to do all of the farm chores, this would mean the boys would be on hour 157 of playing Xbox.

I have tried to get them interested in helping with the farm.  Prince is pretty good about putting the chickens in at night and collecting eggs, though the dogs would probably starve or die of thirst if I truly held to my pronouncement that they are his responsibility.  Ditto for James Dean and the rabbit.   We have tried paying them for picking blueberries.  The husband told them he would give them each $10 if they picked blueberries for a half hour each day last week.  Granted it was 95 degrees outside and the deer flies were everywhere, but I literally saw James Dean bring an egg timer up the hill and set it for 30 minutes.  God forbid he go a minute over the required time.

What is a farm mother to do?  Hire a babysitter and take the day off.

I really cannot remember the last time the husband and I have done anything without the kids besides lift heavy things in and out of the pickup truck or try to fix broken equipment.  The boys have been begging to be left  in the care of our friends' two fabulous teenage boys for a few hours.  Actually, they probably would have preferred a couple of days, but they made do with an afternoon.

The husband and I decided to go to Glimmerglass Opera.  I am not a huge opera fan, but figured a cultural outing would be good for us.  It's funny.  When you move out of NYC the first thing other New Yorkers says is, "Won't you miss the culture?"   But aside from the occasional trip to the Museum of Natural History when the temperature has either been below zero or above 90 for a week straight, no one I know who lives in the city with kids really does anything "cultural".  It is expensive and usually very crowded.  Now that it isn't a subway ride away though, I am always looking for "cultural" experiences. Ironically, the first time Scrappy visited an art museum was on our first visit to NYC after moving to the farmette.

One event we did look forward to as city dwellers was The Philharmonic in the Park where we would get dirty looks from the childless couples trying to listen to the music over the din of our shrieking children running in circles around our blanket.

I consider myself a rather sophisticated person. I watch "The Daily Show".  I know all of the cultural references and laugh at the inside  jokes on "South Park" and "Community" but when I was sitting in the theater watching "Guns and Rosenkavalier" at the Glimmerglass Pavilion, I was suddenly struck by how little I know and really care to know about opera.  When the crowd roared with laughter as the performer started to play an opera riff on his electric guitar, I realized we probably would have had more fun going kyaking on Otsego Lake than sitting in the hot theater.

Opera was followed by a delicious meal, which I did not have to prepare, at Blue Mingo's on the lake.  All in all a good day.  So good in fact, that I have decided to take the next two days and go visit some of my friends in the city.  There will probably not be any museum going, and definitely no opera, but there will fun. The weeds and blueberries will surely be waiting for me when I return.