Vegetable Alien

You know, I was all set to write a monologue on spoons this evening, only to find out that - d'oh! - it's been done. So, it looks like it's gonna be vegetables instead.

This morning Juana and the boys and I went on a tour of a farm, under the guise of "pick your own" watermelon. But here's the difference between a canned farm tour versus a "real" pick-your-own experience: On today's farm tour, we were allowed to walk up and down the rows of watermelon plants and admire them in a non-touching way; then we were shuffled over to where a little pile of watermelons had already been picked, and we got to "pick" our own watermelon from out of the pile. A little cheesy, no? And for this we paid $13 a head?

But it wasn't all a complete waste of time. While we rode in the tractor up and down the fields, the farmhands kept plying us with large handfuls of fresh-picked produce. Of course I expected Zach to partake, but it was a complete - and I mean complete - surprise to see Luke gamely sampling radishes, cilantro, tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, and green onions when they were passed around. We went to the little farm stand after the tour and Luke insisted that we buy some more green onions. Did you think I would have said no? The funny thing was that I asked him whether he wanted to eat them plain again, or whether I should chop them up and put them on something, and his response was, "Why not both?" It was weird, almost as if a little vegetable alien had done a mind-control job on our five-year-old. Possibly they put something in the soil.

Zach was, surprisingly, a little harder to please. This particular farm tour involved a lot of sitting on the tractor and listening (as opposed to running wild up and down the rows of plantings) and after a certain point, he began announcing repeatedly, "I'm all done with the tractor! I'm all done with the tractor!" while trying to climb off. Of course he was fully enthused with the watermelon sampling, and by the end his pure white t-shirt was a more or less even shade of pink, with dirt streaks up the sides. While Luke and I shopped at the farm stand, Zach ran around a little maze of strawberry plants, and even though I'm almost sure they were not there for the eating, Zach consumed quite his fair share... I'm even thinking it might have been as much as $13 worth.

Sunday is race day!