Tennessee Farm

My mom took the kids and myself to a farm in Tn, The Land Between the Lakes. They have a living homeplace with buildings that are from the 1800s and were moved here and set up. There are several homes and then other buildings like a smoke house, a tool building, a work shop, many barns with animals living in them and there are people who work here and dress as people did many years ago. We had a wonderful time at the farm and surrounding land.


Can you see the little girl? Nathalie is walking through the underbrush to the creek.


Mom and Tad were brave a bit sooner than her AND her shoes were tie shoes and unlike Tad, she didnt just step into the water with the shoes on and thus spend the day in wet shoes! This water is extremely cold and I had the good sense to stay out of it.

Mom is ready to come back through this cold water and is using the children as moral and physical support. This was a beautiful clear creek, the water tasted good!

Me of course, mom took this picture.

Nathalie is "haycorn gathering" (acorns if you are not piglet) and I thought she was cute, I was quite a distance away and zoomed in. Mom and Tad are talking creek talk down below.

A beautiful flower no? Mom is taking photography classes, though she is quite good already and we found many chances to take neat photos for her class. Of course she took her photos to class, not mine, but I still took pictures of the same things. I only take around 40 pictures per item and then delete 99 % of them....

This is called "A discovery" and it involved Tad finding something very neat which we hadnt seen before.

Frog eggs! They were all over this little pond, the pond was more frog egg sacs than water! We moved them gently with a stick to see them better but didnt break or hurt the sacs in any way.

A root by the big lake, or root system. The kids didnt climb up here, mom perched them so she could photo them. This was my favorite of Nathalie.

This was my favorite of Tad.

This is a spring house on the farm.

A work room, there were many items made in here and lots of old fashioned tools. Many more pictures were taken but I cant possibly show them all here.

One of the people who works here, he is making a basket. The kids watched him for some time. We have attemped basket making and were quite poor at it...

One of the houses, the kids call this one the Laura and Mary house for Laura Ingalls Wilder. We are reading the books she wrote in school this year. The other house was much larger and had more rooms, a boys room, girls room, ma and pa bedroom, kitchen etc. This little house though, was a front room, tiny kitchen and an attic. The kids liked this house the best.

Percheron horses, not quite as large as a clydesdale but no small animal. The kids went right up to the fence and convinced these gentle beasts to come and eat green grass from the other side of the fence, from their hands and to be hugged, hung upon, loved, kissed and told how lovely they were over and over.

The horses didnt seem to mind one bit. They were a bit nervous at first, mom thought maybe some children are noisy and not sure what to do with a big horse but they were comfortable very quickly. My children adored them and would have happily budged up in the van and made space to bring at least ONE of them home.

I like this picture, the horse is watching him so intently as he gathers a handful of green tasty things.

*Sigh* yes, we do need a horse... I must agree with you there. Look how beautiful he is! So big and strong and yet so well made.

An extra hug for the road and from Tad some more nice grass.

You can see these were their favorite animals and perhaps the best part of the day, other than frog eggs of course.

This is a rooster who has spotted a hen nearby and was running quickly to say hello to her! He was pecked in return.

A little hand belonging to Nathalie here is poking through the fence to pet the "nice cute pig" who smelled absolutely VILE. There were 2 of them and yes from afar they are fairly cute and cuddly looking but are rough feeling and stinky and just ewww...

Tobacco drying, they had fires underneath in the floor. There were long pits dug in the floor that were filled with ash. The tobacco was dry and we were not there while the pits were burning but you could smell it still. It smelled nice!

Last but not least, we have the shy sheep. Mom said that they came up to be patted last time she visited but this time they didnt. As a matter of fact, one seemed to have an anxiety attack at our very presence and went into some sort of convulsions so we walked quietly away... the kids were disappointed that they didnt get to pet them but shortly found a large stump and played king of the stump and forgot all of their previous trials...oh to be 6 or 8!

So there was our day at the farm. I still have many more pictures to post, am so behind on blogging!