I love field trips.
I wish we could have field trips every single day. I wish I could organize my life so that we had "field trip clothes" that were always clean, always ironed, always fit and were always spiffy. I wish we had "field trip mode," where everyone knew whether or not they needed a shower, how to do their own hair, which field trip clothes to wear--though they would all be color- and fashion-coordinated so you really couldn't mess up, and what to pack in the car. We would have designated field trip snacks, a field trip diaper bag, and a field trip kit that would include a camera (which always had film/empty smart-media card/batteries), sketchbooks, journals and writing utensils.
Oh, and lots of money.
Lots and lots of money.
Heck, if we follow through with that fantasty, we could even have a designated field trip car, one that would always be clean, well-maintained and filled with gas. It would have room for all of the kids, all of our field trip supplies, bicycles, the baby backpack and sling, winter coats, scarves, hats and gloves, a cooler (which, by the way, would always be clean and never ever EVER have baked beans from the last field trip molding in the bottom), and a wagon full of blankets and pillows.
Then, I would REALLY love field trips.
Because, see, as much as I love field trips, there's something I desperately hate: leaving the house.
No, it's not that I don't like going places. I love going places! It's just that I hate the actual act of preparing the children and leaving the house. It usually goes something like this:
"Mom, I don't have any pants."
"What do you mean you don't have any pants? I just bought you pants! They just fit you yesterday! How can you not have any pants?"
"Well, I was a size twelve yesterday, but I'm a size sixteen today. I don't have any pants."
Or this one:
"The dog chewed up my shoes."
"Oh! You've GOT to be kidding! Which ones did he chew?"
"All of them."
And of course, there's the classic:
"You need to take a bath."
"Why?"
"Because you're dirty."
"But I LIKE this dirt."
Getting out of the house, for me, is torture. I admit that it's mostly because of my own ideals that I have a nervous breakdown every time we have to go. After all, we're homeschoolers. I don't want to be the family that's discussed around some anti-homeschooler's dinner table.
"You should have seen these kids. One of them had two different shoes on. And they looked and smelled like they'd been devoured by a rabid skunk."
So, when I leave the house with my five homeschooled children, I try--I really, really do--to put my best foot forward. I want to be the poster family for homeschooling. Clean clothes, clean hair, clean faces.
Invariably, however, something goes awry.
"Houdin, where are your socks?"
"Oh. I didn't know I was supposed to wear any."
"It's seven degrees outside. You're wearing sneakers. I've been telling you that you have to wear socks every time we leave the house for your whole lifetime. You didn't know you had to wear socks?"
"I forgot."
Sigh.
So, if I had that whole field-trip-preparation-in-a-box thing going on, I'd love field trips even more. We'd go on a field trip every day.
But with things the way they are, even the best field trips can be a gamble. Organizations who provide the field trips aren't always organized. Or kind. Or intelligent.
For instance, we had the field trip to the art museum where the guide interviewed our six-family group about homeschooling for the first fifteen minutes of our alotted hour with her. "What's homeschooling? Who's the teacher? How do you know they're learning? Who's the teacher? Do you all meet in the same house or do you have a school building? How do you know what to teach them? Who's the teacher?"
This same guide went on to seat our group on the floor of a gallery and proceeded to explain to us, in case we had been living under a rock, what paints, paintbrushes, circles and lines were.
"Some painters apply the paints to the canvas with...with...does anyone know?"
After forty-five minutes of that, we were totally done with her, ready to peel the layers off of every Jackson Pollack painting in the joint and then cut off our right ears.
Last week, we did our best to prepare ourselves for a field trip an hour and a half away. We were going to witness maple sugaring! We would get to see how maples were tapped, how the sap flowed, how the liquid was boiled down, and how the final product tasted. We were all very excited, albeit very cold.
The location:
Hale Farm. I have this linked in my sidebar and it's one of my favorite historical field trips. From the website:
Explore life in Ohio's Western Reserve region just as it was being settled and the population was starting to boom. In Hale Farm's village area, the gardens and the characters are firmly planted in the year 1848. Meet settlers like, Jacob and Hannah Meredith, a prosperous dairy farmer and his wife who are quick to tell you that their house is a little more substantial than most of the other homes you'll see.
When we arrived, Blue, The homeschool mom who organizes the trips, hadn't arrived and we were the only ones there from our group. This is unusual because we're usually the last ones to arrive. This wouldn't happen if we had a field-trip routine. But we don't.
On this occassion, we were the first, and this worried me.
School groups were everywhere, lines of forty-five kids being shuffled from one display to another, anxiously raising their hands to ask questions but being told to wait, to put their hands down, to be quiet. Some were doing that "I-have-to-go-to-the-bathroom" dance. Some where just gliding along with the others. I felt completely out of place.
And then Blue arrived.
If she'd had a designated field trip car, she wouldn't have had a flat tire and she wouldn't have been late. We'll have to work on that.
Apparently, the cold weather scared the other homeschool families away, or they couldn't get their cars started, so we headed off, Blue's family and ours.
It was cold outside. Very, very cold. We bundled up the best we could, but the babies weren't too thrilled with having their hands covered with those pesky mittens. They liked the idea of their digits turning blue and their mouths screaming instead. When the going got rough, I got out the M&Ms. That helped.
Most of the displays left us a bit...wanting. We stood in the cold and watched the guides pretend to drill holes in dead trees, and pretend to carry sap to a hollowed out log, and pretend to take rocks from a pretend fire to pretend to heat up the water--which wasn't pretend but was frozen solid. There were sap buckets everywhere, but they were all covered, so we never saw any actual sap. And while there was a wonderful dredlocked guy there who told us about his own homeschooled kids and let us pet his great big yoked ox, he informed us that a cow and an ox are the same thing. This doesn't bode well with children who have already been taught that a cow is a female bovine and that this was a
male ox. Still, it was fun to pet him. The ox, that is, not the dredlocked guy. Although I would have liked to have felt his dreds. I restrained myself, though.
After all, the candle-dipping was hands-off. The sap-gathering was hands-off. The sap-boiling was hands-off. And we never did actually taste any maple syrup because we were told to do that after we did all the other stuff, but the display was gone when we got back. We did have one cool gal who allowed the kids to drill holes in the dead tree and tap the spouts into the holes. That was nifty.
But the whole thing was made very worthwhile after lunch, when we decided to visit the log cabin.
As we approached the cabin, smoked billowed from the fireplace. Before we reached the door, it was opened by a large woman with an even larger smile, dressed in period clothing and speaking with a slight New-England dialect. She greeted us warmly with a "hello!" and brought us all inside "her brother's cabin." Maybe it was just the atmosphere of the cabin, maybe it was the fact that we were finally warm, but I believe that this woman was more than a guide. She was a teacher. I may even go so far as to call her a mentor.
She encourged the children's questions. She said, "Touch this," and "feel this" and "watch this." She had their attention.
She had them all at "hello."
She showed them how to strike a flint, how a flint made sparks in the gun, let them climb the ladder to the loft to see the children's sleeping area, let them lay on the rope bed, let them try on her rabbit gloves and so much more.
But it wasn't just what she showed them. It was how she listened. She asked them questions and she listened to their answers. She invited curiosity and she listened to their questions. She complimented them, attended to them, interacted with them, and she interspersed it all with a hearty dose of laughter.
We didn't want to leave. And it wasn't just because the little log cabin was warm and cozy. It was because we had encountered a real person and we wanted to sit at her feet and learn. She wasn't haughty or presumptuous or chastising. SHE was warm and cozy.
As we were reluctantly leaving, and only because the place was shutting down for the day, she pulled Houdin aside and imparted some important guidance.
"You're the man here. You watch out for these women and children," she said. "There is a lot of danger out there, and they will need you to protect them." I saw my thirteen-year-old son grow six inches in that moment. And it didn't matter to her at all that he wasn't wearing socks.
She waved at all of us, invited us to come again in the summertime, and we assured her that we would.
As we made our way down the path away from the cabin, Sweetheart shouted, "I didn't say goodbye!" She ran back to the cabin and knocked on the big wooden door. The smiling woman appeared in the doorway, delighted in Sweetheart's words of farewell.
Indeed, if we could have field trips like that every day, I would. Even without a designated field-trip car.
Bard put together a collage about our trip
here.
