Farmgirl In Training

This was spoken by a little fourth grade girl today. Her family has a very strong farm/ranch background and she is a good worker. The girl next to her had just said something like, "If you live in a city then you would do fashion and stuff like that."

The young farmgirl responded with, "If I were never introduced to a farm I would just be weird. For me, I would just be plain weird."

It is hard to find an advocate for agriculture that puts it in any better words than that!

Gotta Love Farm Kids

I know it has been FOREVER since I have posted on here. I've been dealing with some things in my life the past few months that have made those months some of the hardest I've ever deal with (and before you ask, no it isn't my marriage. I'm still married to a wonderful man that I love even more today than before). However, one thing that is helping get through it and heal is the kids at the school where I teach and some of the things they say.

I usually post these on Facebook, but I have two stories for today and it takes a bit of explaining. So here they are:

1. During first grade art yesterday we were just having a grand ol' time. That class is all girls except for one boy and they just crack me up. They are all little chatterboxes, too. Anyway, I'm not sure what they were talking about, but their classroom teacher smiled and told one of them that animals have thoughts, too. The little girl's response was, "Yeah, my horse made a bad decision one time and he bucked me off."

2. Today I took a slightly different approach to my second grade art class which is full of rambunctious kids that usually cause me a little extra stress. So I started the class by putting two photos on the board, one of a lion and the other of a lamb. I asked them what they thought the two animals might have in common just to see if they would figure out where I was going with the lesson. There were many guesses, one of which was, "They are animals." I laughed and gave them the other hint and asked them what month it was going to be next month. They figured out that it was March. Then I asked if they had ever heard a saying about March. There were several humorous answers, but my favorite was when one little girl raised her hand and said, "That's when baby animals are born!" I'm pretty sure that's not a standard answer in most schools ;-) For those of you who haven't figured it out already, I was trying to get them to figure out the saying that March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb. Then we discussed the fact that our weather is all messed up in western Kansas so the lion and lamb get all mixed up as well. So we are now drawing one animal that the class voted to call a "liamb."

Hopefully those stories brought a bit of a smile to your face. And here is just one little thought to finish it all off. I'm glad to have been born and raised here in western Kansas, and the phone call I got tonight just confirmed how fortunate I am to have been raised the way I was. My dad called to discuss plans for attending an ABS (American Breeders Service) meeting tomorrow night and finished by telling me he has to go to Wal-Mart before the meeting to take care of a discrepancy on his bill there yesterday. What was that discrepancy? Well, after returning home and looking at his receipt, he noticed that they apparently didn't charge him enough and he owes them about $10. Love my family!

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 ;)

Not always pretty, but always blessed

Saturday was branding day. I didn't take any pictures this times so I'll try to paint a picture with words.

I look forward to this day all year long. We bring all of our cows and calves in, along with my uncle's cattle, and brand, vaccinate, and castrate the bull calves while also working their mothers in the corrals next to them.

Everything was going pretty smoothly and we were on our last pen of calves for the morning. I had saddled up our new horse (Blaze) earlier and then dad finally got the chance to get away from his other duties to try roping calves off of her. He had already roped and dragged in at least 5 calves and she had been working beautifully. She was calm as could be and was handling all of the chaos beautifully.

For those of you who have never been around it, there is a lot going on when we work these calves. Picture this: We had over 8 guys waiting to sit or already sitting on the calves (2 people per calf) after they had been roped and dragged in, three different men on horses swinging ropes to rope the calves, around 20 to 30 little calves running around, a propane tank with a hose hooked to a metal stand with fire and at least four different branding irons in the fire, two different people walking around with syringes and sometimes exposed needles rushing to give each calf two different vaccination shots, about 5 or 6 little kids running around with paint sticks to mark the calves that have already been worked, one or two men walking around with knives and buckets of disinfectant to castrate the bull calves, another young boy with spray to keep the calves from getting infected after being castrated and at least three to four other people taking pictures, etc.

Phew! Hopefully that sets the scene for you. At any given time there could be as many as four calves on the ground with all of these things going on around them, so it is a lot for a horse to deal with. That's why it was encouraging that Blaze was handling it so calmly.

Well, there were three to four calves on the ground with people sitting on them while they were all waiting for me to get more vaccine loaded into my syringe (we were having problems getting the transfer needle to work properly to mix up the vaccine.) I heard some commotion and when I turned around, dad was dragging a calf he had roped and Blaze had started to jump around. He held on really well until she kept going and was bucking/rearing up even higher. He lost his balance and fell off to the left side. He landed really hard on his left side.

As everyone cleared off of the fences they had jumped up on (while grabbing little kids and jumping up from sitting on calves) at least five people rushed over to help my dad. He stayed knelt down on the ground for what seemed forever. When he finally stood up he was extremely pale, could barely talk and then almost passed out.

Being the true cowboy he is, he refused any more help other than to make it over to the fence so he could stand against it and clear his head. Eventually he made the decision that he needed my mom to take him to the emergency room nearly an hour away. While I drove him slowly over to my parents' house and discussed with him how to break the news to my mom, he was insistent on the fact that Blaze is still a good horse.

As mom and dad went on their way, I had cousins kick into gear and take over for my mom to finish preparing the lunch for the hungry workers who would soon be arriving. I tried to pitch in the best that I could and no one missed a beat. It was just natural for them to do what needed to be done. Meanwhile, my uncles, cousins and life-long friends had everything under control over at the corrals to get everything under control and finished before lunch.

After lunch, my cousins once again took over and cleaned up all of the food and dishes while I went over and called my sister before heading back to working the last set of calves.

We finished things up relatively quickly and then we used horses to take all of the cows/calves back to two different pastures while they used people on foot and small UTV's to take the remaining ones back to the closer pastures. During this whole process we finally heard that my dad had broken 6 ribs, one of them in two different places and also had a lung that was 15 percent underinflated. People were genuinely shocked and saddened to hear the news.

One of the neatest things about the types of people my family is surrounded by is the fact that even in the sadness for my dad's injury, person after person went out of their way to offer support in the form of work. I know these people, and as much as I complain about being busy, many of them are even busier than me. I KNOW the sacrifice they are making to help us out, I KNOW that they won't even think twice about it, and I KNOW my dad would do the exact same thing for them.

I want to be like these people. People that don't have to speak the love of Christ. They SHOW it in their actions. I'm trying to do some things for dad in terms of coordinating people to help out since I'm unable to do some of the jobs. But the silly girl emotions keep coming out and I get a shaky voice while I'm talking to them because I'm tearing up when I hear the tone of their voice. You can't fake being genuine. You just can't.

I love my family, I love my neighbors, I love this community of people my parents have carefully formed relationships with because in times like these we will rely on them so much. Thank you for all you have done and if you are still reading, I hope that you now have seen a hint of the wonderful area I live in.

P.S.
Blaze is still staying on our ranch. Dad was very firm on that fact today. My cousin rode her for the rest of the day and dragged in calf after calf with not a single problem after she had bucked off dad. After watching her work and asking for advice, I determined it was safe to ride her out as we took the cattle back to pasture. She was the calmest horse out of the four horses in our group. The only thing we can figure out is that something on the saddle pinched her and she reacted by rearing up.

Identity Crisis

Although my heart and mind tell me it's spring, it's April 23rd...and guess who has a snow day!

I'm never going to complain about having another day at home to get some things done. Today it is even more welcome as I'm in the middle of wedding planning and also doing some remodeling of things in the house to make room for a certain handsome young man that will be living in the same house after our wedding ;-)

In preparation for this summer, we have been doing a lot of work on our garden. Since the weather has basically been below freezing at least once every week for the past 3 weeks we haven't planted much.

However, we have planted our strawberries, asparagus, potatoes and onions. The soil at my place is a little out of whack, so we are trying to get certain types of fertilizer into the soil so the garden can be more productive.

It's nice to live on a farm and have fertilizer whenever you need it. I was one that loaded the tractor scoop. Can you tell? I don't use it very often and the picture above might explain why.

Dad help me spread it out in the strawberry bed.

Now we just have to wait for the weather to warm up so we can see if we'll actually have a good garden or not.

But while we are waiting, our ranch has a welcome addition. Meet Blaze!

I'm pretty excited about her. I haven't ridden horses much lately even though I grew up riding. I've ridden maybe 3 or 4 times in the past 5-10 years. We just don't have a good one to ride. I think that has finally changed! I like very calm, very gentle horses and I think she is going to fit the bill. Because of my schedule and the weather, I've only been able to ride her once. She is a fast walker and was very distracted with the scenery so I had problems getting her to steer straight ;-) She is extremely gentle though and I'm having a lot of fun just being able to walk out and pet her. She almost fell asleep the other day when I was petting her.

She's a beautiful horse and we're pretty happy we got her. So I'll let you feast your eyes on her to finish out my blog this time.

Breaking Spring

I have been gone from here for a while, but rest assured, we have been busy around the farm. This past week I was on spring break. So, along with the help of two sturdy teenage boys, we cleared out a lot of dead trees and branches on the farm.

This task is always a big one. Our farm is surrounded by elm trees and the drought has done a number on them, along with the cedar trees my grandpa planted. We used tractors, chainsaws and just a lot of elbow grease to move trees all week.

The highlight of the week was while my dad was gone. None of us were supposed to use the chainsaw if he wasn't there so we used a tractor to do some damage ;-) There has been a big dead branch that hangs over my driveway for the past year. We decided to use the tractor scoop to break it off. Little did we know that 2/3 of the tree would break off with it! We ran out of time that day to just push the rest of the tree over with the tractor so we planned on doing it the next morning...and then the tractor broke the next morning while feeding cattle. So, 1/3 of the tree still stands!

As you can tell from the above pictures, winter is still trying to hang on here. Because of the snow, we didn't do any tree clearing on Saturday. Instead, I thought you might be like my family and get a kick out of watching the new calves enjoying their morning.

The calves are always very curious around new things and the dogs are the same way. It was pretty fun watching the patience and curiosity of both as they checked each other out.

We continue to be thankful for any moisture we receive and pray for more. It still remains to be seen what will happen with our wheat, but until then, we'll enjoy the little things in life that bring us joy on a daily basis here on the farm.