Huzzah!

I just got home from work and don't really feel like blogging, but I'd better write about our family visit to Old Sturbridge Village before my sister and the kids come up this weekend to go to the American Girl store. There was tons of good content the last time we went there, so need to get this one out of the way.

Have you ever been to OSV? We used to go semi-regularly when I was a kid and I loved it. Still love it. Wanted to get married there, but it was too expensive, and plus, OSV was going through a bit of financial hardship and I think they had stopped offering weddings at that point. They are back now, though, as back as any kind of non-profit working museum can be, and I was so glad to get back there to enjoy all the things I loved about it as a kid.

The animals are some of the things that I enjoyed most about OSV, and they didn't disappoint this time. We had quite a few specimen to observe:
(Buttercup, the cow, was in quite a mood that day. What a hoot she was! But the oxen were also rather entertaining.) So the live animals were great, but so were the not so alive animals. We saw a butchering demo (this is mutton): and the kids had a great time letting loose some energy on the fiberglass animals: The kids learned about making shoes in the early nineteenth century and Doug enjoyed thinking about becoming a farmer, owning his own little red farmhouse and having a bunch of animals to tend.When you're at Sturbridge Village, it's easy to romanticize this kind of lifestyle and time period. What we don't witness is the stink of sweaty bodies in the dead heat of summer as the women cooked before the open fire in the kitchen, or the emptying of the chamber pots into the fly-ridden outhouse. Yuck.

One of the other romanticized moments at Sturbridge is the coach ride. Here my sister's family gets a ride on the Hartford-Worcester coach service which seems like a lot of fun when you're only riding around the village green, but spending 6 or more hours on that coach from Hartford to Worcester with potentially eight other bodies stuffed in there with you... not my idea of fun. But my idea of fun is spending as much time as possible learning about our national past, and hanging out with my sister, brother-in-law and their lovely family, and both goals were achieved that day. Do you think this should be their holiday card photo? I think it's perfect.