4-H youth conference and new learnings

I took G. and a couple of her 4-H friends to a conference at UMaine this past weekend. The 4-H Edge: Connecting Kids to Campus conference, run by UMaine Extension, invites 11- to 17-year-old 4-Hers to the Orono campus to introduce them to college by having them participate in workshops put on by various academic departments. They also get a chance to experience campus life by staying in the residence halls, eating in the dining hall and exploring the campus. The not-so-subtle message from the conference staff to the kids -- going to college should be in your future. It was great. G. chose a couple of workshops related to her cow project so she spent quite a bit of time with the animal science department at the farm. The first workshop was about rumens (a chamber in a cow's stomach) and how it works. I was on a campus tour while she was at this workshop but I met up with her for the second workshop on cow ultrasounds. The kids and adult chaperons stood in the dairy cow barn transfixed at the start of the workshop when the realization dawned on all of us that this ultrasound was going to be a little different than a regular human one. It was the shoulder length rubber glove that the instructor put on as she wheeled the machine over to a cow that clued us in. The look on the kids faces when they realized what was going to happen would have been a prize winner if I could have captured that moment on my camera. But I was at the back of the crowd with no room to move to get that shot. Then there was the 'cleaning out' process that involved pulling out handfuls of manure before inserting the ultrasound probe. And I don't know if this process is like yawning or not but all the cows around us starting letting loose. Since there were cows on both sides of our group, most of us did some quick moving around to avoid the splashing and splatters. It was quite an hour in the barn. The line across part of the screen is the baby's tail. The photo isn't very clear but running parallel to the black circle on the left is the spine. With several cow ultrasounds completed, we moved on to learn about the milking process and then took a tour of the rest of the farm. There were a variety of workshops offered through other academic departments and G. and her friends had a chance to explore other academic areas (fine arts, physics, etc.) in various buildings around campus and really enjoyed the experience. Workshops were scheduled until 11 p.m. on Saturday and it took a while to get all the kids settled in to their rooms for the night. Since wake-up calls were made a 6:30 a.m., there wasn't much sleeping during this conference so when we finally rolled into our driveway on Sunday, we were all thoroughly exhausted. But G.'s thinking college is cool and that was worth a sleepless weekend to me. This conference is an annual event held in mid-May and open to all Maine 4-Hers. If you're interested in learning more about 4-H (it's not all about animals), check out the state's 4-H website