We Moved: The Before and After Edition

 

I still can't find my daughter's doll bed, and the library claims we have one of their children's books, which, I mean, we might in a tub of Christmas decorations somewhere (because I've unpacked all of our books and it's nowhere to be found, so I'm banking on it being some place utterly ridiculous), but we are home, and it is the most lovely feeling. 

Especially when you can't leave. 

 

My husband spent the past year renovating, adding onto, and pouring his blood, sweat, and highly caffeinated self into his childhood home, the one his grandparents and then parents lived in as well. 

I kept the children alive. He poured concrete. I packed boxes. He got to know the folks at Lowe's and Menards so well they're practically sending each other Christmas cards.  

These are a few of the before and afters.

 

But after months of decisions on his part and "Wait. Did I say I wanted . . . ?" on my part, we are here. And it very much feels like home. 

Our big kids still ask about the "old house" sometimes and wonder if we're moving back or who's living there or why we couldn't move the old house into the new house. But slowly, little by little, they're becoming acclimated too, even if the first week after moving there were countless tears because little people couldn't remember where the new potties were or how to find their room. #toddlerproblems

So when it comes to practicing social distancing? We have a new house to roam, front and back yards made of mud for sloshing around in, and plenty of fresh air. We're here for it. 

Besides, we're farmers. If the TP really does run out, there are always corn husks. 

PS If you can believe it, this pantry used to be a bathroom!

So here's to staying home, staying calm, staying determined, staying joyful, staying in the Word, staying thankful . . . one day at a time.

A Merry Band of Bloggers

My sister lives in Colorado, where the sun always shines and the air is always fresh and the temperature is always just right. So when she visited recently and stepped out of her car, she about fell into a small heap in our driveway because breathing humid Missouri summer air is not for the faint of heart.

Or the faint of hair.

So let's hear it for all the food bloggers and dietitians who willingly volunteered to visit the dairy on a hot, humid Saturday morning, knowing full well what it would do to their hair. I mean, hearts. I mean, heat. It was hot.

Ok. C'mon, guys. Just clap.



(And while you're at it, please give a gentle, quiet "Hooray!" -- we don't want to startle them after all -- for the cows, who start feeling heat stress in about January and don't get a break from it until the following December. Well, not quite. But let's just say they love water misters and fans in the summer as much as kids love a good water park. More maybe.)

Thanks to our friends at Midwest Dairy,  we were able to host these brave blogging souls on a warm day in June, giving them a chance to see where their food comes from up close and personal. Like, so personal a calf could suck on their fingers personal. (Sorry for my white legs. My spiritual gift is getting sunburned without tanning. Clearly.)



Our merry band of bloggers got to see baby calves, only a couple of hours old, and hear from my farmer how we care for the littlest animals on the farm. Between the calves and our multitude of kittens, everybody would have been fine being done at that point.

BUT WE PERSEVERED.

And by that I mean that we kindly nudged them on to meet some of the older heifers and the mama cows who took time out of their lunch to pose for photographs.

#2780 showing off her best side.

(Let's face it: Every girl has a best side.)

 

We rounded out the tour with a trip through the commodity shed to see what our cows eat, explain how our nutritionist tweaks the ration, talk about what silage is and discover why it's an important part of a cow's diet.

After that, we headed back to the shop to guzzle a bathtub full of water (Did you know that's about how much water a cow drinks in a day? Almost 35 gallons! And here you thought your eight glasses of water were good . . . ) and enjoy a meal together, surrounded by silage choppers and wrenches and flies because that's what life is like on a real dairy.

Lauren Lane, one of our favorite food bloggers, even made us brownies for dessert, and I'm not saying that I maybe basically skipped lunch and just went straight for the chocolate, but I CAN say that there was one extra pulled pork wrap left over because, well, I maybe basically skipped lunch and just went straight for the chocolate.

Side note: Brownies taste even more fudgy when enjoyed with milk. And because milk is healthy and so wonderfully good for you, you can even have a second brownie if you want. They basically balance each other out.

This is why you need farmers in your life. We can be helpful when you're trying to make important life choices like this. 

 

We're thankful for our social media influencer friends -- whether they're Instagrammers or bloggers or Facebookers or all of the above -- not just because they took time to come to the farm and see how their food is made, but because as farmers, we're busy . . . you know . . . FARMING. And that means we don't always have a lot of free time to chat with every person in the grocery store or on the street about why dairy is such an affordable, healthy food option.

But people like Cara of Streetsmart Nutrition and Lauren of Lauren Lane Culinarian do. They have the gift of story telling, photography, research and knowing their followers so that they can share information with them in a helpful and winsome way.

 So when a Lauren or a Cara or a Steph of KC Cheeses or Shanna from Wellness for the Win want to know or be reminded of see for themselves where their food comes from, and when, seeing how we care for our animals and land and each other, they believe as strongly as we do about milk and butter and cream and eggs, they help us tell our story in really fun ways.

And we are -- and remain -- grateful for that.


Photos courtesy Wheat Photography

rye silage

Amy Grant may think that Christmas it the most wonderful time of the year, but at the dairy, we think silage chopping time is actually the best!

Or maybe just the most high energy. 

Ok, fine, Amy. You were right all along. But silage is still a pretty sweet time of year, no matter how many CDs you sold!

Where was I? Oh! What is silage? you're wondering. 

It's ok. I was too the first year. Turns out I have this handsome farmer who is happy to explain. Have a read!

Me: What is silage?

Chris: Silage is harvesting and ensiling a forage. 

Me: Wait. What's a forage? Isn't that what dogs do behind dumpsters?

walking beans

I'm currently knee-deep in Ben Sasse's book The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis, which I'd highly recommend by the way, and just read his observation that asking an adult about his first job usually kickstarts a fascinating conversation. 

That's providing, of course, that he's not a 20-year-old who's in college and hasn't yet worked a day in his life. 

Gah. 

My first job -- as a ten-year-old -- was very glamorous. Are you ready?

I walked beans for my uncle in the midst of the Iowa summer heat. 

For non-farmers, walking beans meant spreading out over a bean field to seek and destroy any weeds that would have otherwise been combined during harvest. 

Plus it made for an immaculate looking bean field. 

My mom and sister and a couple of her friends and I would meet at a certain field early in the morning before the sun got too hot. We'd drag along our hoes and water and lots of bug spray,  take 6-8 rows per person, and set out across the field to cut down any weeds that had cropped up. 

It was often wet work; the dew from the early morning made the leaves damp so before you were 50 feet into the field, you were soggy from the waist down. 

And it wasn't uncommon to step on a snake. Or a frog. We'd jump so high we'd land a row over while screaming like, well, girls. 

I walked beans every morning for several weeks. I was covered in mosquito bites. I had a solid sunburn. My shoes were soggy, and my jeans were muddy.

And I made $80.00 when it was all over. It was enough to open my first checking account. At the time, it could have been a million dollars as far as ten-year-old me was concerned. 

Most people don't walk beans anymore. I don't know if that's because of superior bean quality, better spray, or if kids are just lazy.  Maybe walking beans was never really necessary to begin with, and it was simply a good way to keep middle schoolers and teenagers busy in the summer. Hmm.

But I do know that walking over all those acres, cutting down all those weeds, stepping on all those snakes and collapsing into bed from being hot and tired earned me 80 glorious dollars and the reward of sweaty work well done. 

And I can't wait to see my children do the same. It may be working with cows or weeding in the garden or building fence. But I do want them to know what it's like to be sweaty and sunburned and bug-bitten. 

It was good for me. It will be good for them too. And you can take that to the bank. 

All $80.00 worth. 

What was your first job? 

adopting a calf

Mrs. Miller's kindergarten class adopted one of our calves for the year. They wanted to adopt one through another program, but it turns out that dairy was fresh out of calves.

the stillness

"I miss the stillness. It is an antique in this shrill, intruding life, an all-but-forgotten thing of no real value, like ink wells. It is as if we have tried to fill up what stillness there is with all the mindless claptrap we can conjure, as if a little quiet or a patch of peaceful dark is a bug that has to be stomped before it gets away.

In restaurants, I am forced to eat my meatloaf with the television tuned to two mental giants ranting about a topic they manufactured that morning, apparently from mud and straw. In a doctor's waiting room, a televangelist told me I was going to hell, then Rachel Ray made me a tuna melt. 

It is enough to wish for a lightning storm. There's that moment when the lightning flashes and thunder shakes the house. The power flickers and dies, and a dark stillness falls. And you're swallowed up by a pure, old-fashioned silence, free of the hum of the refrigerator or the air conditioner, free from all the man-made background noise that makes you feel less human." - Rick Bragg 

this is going to be the year

That's my go-to phrase regarding our garden pretty much every year: This is going to be the year! 

Let's just say: Hope springs eternal when it comes to our garden. 

Year 1 wasn't so bad. I maybesortakinda let the weeds get a little out of control. Ok, so we had to use the weed whacker at one point. But isn't that its job?! To whack weeds?

Year 2 was just a mess. Don't let the little surprise pictured above fool you. (Somebody found that in a bunch of trees and thought it would be funny to scare the living daylights out of me...and it worked.) It rained for roughly SEVEN THOUSAND WEEKS IN A ROW so nothing grew, and the sad little tomato plants that did survive only produced about a half a tomato a piece. I gave up part way through the summer. 

But every year, I tell myself it's going to be different this time around. And this year, I'm happy to report, it has been. 

For a solid two weeks now.

And by that I mean: the garden still has discernible rows, which is a small victory for me. 

I also planted -- and have managed not to kill -- two lilac bushes, because lilacs are my favorite flower in the entire world. My parents have a 1/10 mile stretch of them, and my favorite time of year is when they're all blooming and the air smells sweet. 

My sisters and I would pick them for our mom, and even though they only last about 12 seconds before the petals started falling off, we loved them. Our dad would go with us out into the pine trees and lilac bushes and help us pick some. He'd lift us up so we could see into the branches of the pine tree where robins built nests, and we'd count the little blue eggs. Good memories go hand-in-hand with lilacs.

And these beauties, even though they're annuals, survived the winter and bloomed again this spring, which is basically like Christmas in May.

Back home in Iowa, humans are lucky to survive the winter, let alone plants. Living farther south has its perks!

Also, little known fact: When you have dogs, also get fences for your garden. Lots and lots of fences. Unless you're into having them dig up your carrots before your carrots even know they're carrots.

See that face? That is the face of a pup who knows not to dig up a carrot.

It's not, consequently, the face of a  dog who knows to leave chickens alone or not to pull out their tail feathers, but heck, we can't have it all.

This may be the year. It may not. But for now, the farmer and I are spending 10 or 15 minutes here or there pulling weeds and grass, attempting to not let the garden tend toward chaos, even though it wants to.

Let's reconvene in August, and I'll let you know how those carrots, spinach, lettuce, sweet potatoes, corn, tomatoes, peppers, peas and watermelon worked out.

Or maybe not. History has a way of repeating itself, you know.