On Wednesday I spent the afternoon at Arethusa Farm in Litchfield, CT. It was a glorious sunny day and as Michael (husband) snapped pics like the one above of me “chatting” with a dairy cow named Velour about Three Blonde Mice, Garrett, our videographer from Digital Video Productions in Brookfield, shot lots of video that will somehow be edited down to a three-minute trailer for the book. Such fun!

Matt Senecal, Arethusa’s farm director, was a delight to work with. He answered all my crazy questions about cows, instructed me in the finer points of milking a cow, showed me how to brush a cow’s tail (and tease it up so it looks fluffy and camera ready) and let us have the run of the place, including their prized John Deere.

The cow that I milked, Viona, was a white Holstein – a blonde just like my three heroines in the book – and other than a few kicks, she was very cooperative during the milking. She even read the book.

Actually, she licked the book. We had to move it away from her because we were afraid she’d try to eat it.

The purpose of all this was to recreate some of the research I did last summer for Three Blonde Mice, in which three best friends, Elaine, Jackie and Pat, take a “haycation” together – i.e. they spend a week on a farm. They learn to milk a cow, make cheese from the milk, forage for wild edibles and take cooking classes with a famous farm-to-table chef ….only to find that one of their classmates intends to kill the chef before the week is out.

Complicating matters is that Elaine’s boyfriend Simon shows up –  just as she’s getting cozy with a hot guest named Jonathan.

I wanted to share my haycation experience in the video, and I’d love it if you’d share yours. If you plan to milk a cow this summer, pick your own fruits and veggies, make cheese, forage for wild edibles, collect eggs from chickens, please upload your photos to my Facebook and Twitter pages using the hashtags #ThreeBlondeMice and #DairyPrincess. Why #DairyPrincess? Because that’s what Michael calls me these days. He used to call me a princess, but now I’m the Dairy Princess. What can I tell you? If the crown fits…..