Marketing your backyard...no seriously.

This weekend my sister's family and mine visited an actual farm that allows visitors to roam freely. In theory, this sounded like a fantastic place for children to play in the grass and sunflower fields, while parents lounged in random hammocks throughout the backyard of the farm owners. There were pony rides (which we didn't see), tire swings, animals to pet, sprinklers to run through, an elaborate tree bridge/fort, and much more; however, as adults, we couldn't help wonder if driving an hour and paying $40 to get into this place was worth the money and time and I am not convinced it was. Don't get me wrong, they had a beautiful yard and the whole operation was a good idea, but it wasn't really carried out the way I had pictured in my head (well manicured lawns, wide open spaces, less clutter...). Despite the fact that the adults felt a little ripped off by the outing, the kids had a great time.

Meanwhile, the adults of the group were wondering why more people don't charge people to use their backyard for makeshift "field trips." Kids think anyplace besides home is a vacation or interesting. You could stay at a hotel a mile away and they would love the adventure. In preschool, I even remember driving around the block in a bus to what everyone else thought was a faraway trek, but was really a park around the corner. I was annoyingly astute at a young age, which really took the fun out of a lot of things for me by the way. This is a quality I see in my daughter as well and wish I could change, for her own good of course. In fact, I remember one of the dads at daycare asking her the name of her stuffed animal when she was two (no joke) and her responding "It's a stuffed animal; it's not real." He jokingly mocked the situation by saying "Geez dude, can't you tell this is a fake animal? Duh?" She never named her animals until recently when she started feeling pressure to do so. So now we have 50 animals named Crystal. If we make animals talk in cutesy voices to her, she always says the same thing: "It's not real." Ughhh. By the way, she is amazingly imaginative, despite the picture this store paints.

Okay, off track again... Anyway, couldn't anyone with a reasonably sized yard start a backyard operation like this farm thing? There were 20 children in the hour we were there, plus parents. So, say $6 per person and one parent per child (at the least), that's $240 per hour! There must be some way for me to pull that off! Although I doubt homeowners would go along with the plan. Plus, you would have to deal with strangers walking through your personal space every weekend; oh and wild animals, which this city girl knows nothing about. Anyway, there's my random thought for the day: How we can all exploit our land to earn extra money for rising gas prices, without leaving the house.