You have no idea...

how relieved we are this week. You know those times when you feel helpless? Like you see someone that needs lifesaving help and your hands are tied and you can't do anything about it? Well, this might not be exactly like that, but it is close.

All summer long we have worried and fretted about whether we can keep our cattle herd or will have to sell them. Seeing our cattle hunting for food and trying to supplement them with whatever they need has been time consuming and frustrating. Many of our friends and neighbors have sold all or at least a lot of their herd because they simply had no food to feed them and no grass for them to graze. Drought is a slow, but incredibly powerful event to battle.

We have gotten small rains on and off this summer, but this week was such an answer to prayer. We have had over 3 inches in the past two days. Some people south of Wallace received over 8 inches just last night and all throughout the county farms and families were blessed with abundant rain. Usually if we received half an inch or so we hated to celebrate because we knew so many others that didn't get any rain at all and vice versa. It's hard to celebrate for others when you just see your grass and crops continuing to die. This time the whole county is celebrating! Woohoo!!!!

Here are some pictures in addition to what I already posted on Facebook this morning.

Rain might bring some added labor such as repairing our fence line that was washed out from the river...but I don't care at all!

You can see how high the water was during the height of it by looking at the water line on the tree above. Crazy to think it was four feet higher at one point!

Trees collect a lot of trash since our river rarely runs. It might run once every 2 or three years and a lot of branches, trees, leaves, etc., fall into the river bottom during that time. It creates a lot of debris for the water to redirect itself around when it gets bunched up and once the water level goes down it is deposited in big bunches.

I know it wasn't much for posts, but hope you enjoyed it! As for us, we're gonna be dancing around for quite some time celebrating our rain ;-) Praise God!

Farm Laughter

Seriously? I just barely got out of school for the summer...and now I'm getting ready for inservice next week! Wow. It flew by. Having dad recovering from 8 broken ribs along with planning and preparing for a wedding left me without much free time. Here are a few photos I took throughout the summer and never got blogged.

Hope you enjoy them like I do!

This is true love. She laid on the dirty shop floor in 100 degree weather petting Rusty for about 10 minutes.

Tired and bored on a windy, cool, rainy day on the farm? No worries. Plenty of spots to rest...such as the bale fork on a tractor.

Rusty found another spot. His lip apparently needs aired out. That's it on the edge of the bed of the mule. This is just one of the humorous ways we see him relaxing.

Lesson learned: Never leave our high school hired hand and my injured father alone to clean out the drills. Can't find the attachment for the end of the Shop Vac? No worries, my dad just happened to have the mouthpiece off of one of his breathing apparatuses from the hospital handy. I have to admit, it probably worked better than the actual attachment ;)