An Announcement
So in our last Maid-N-Meadows update I mentioned we would have a facility tour soon and an announcement. The facility tour is still to come. (It is taking forever to get those last minute organizational details set up!) But the announcement is a pretty simple one to make. I have waited until now mostly because I couldn't quite wrap my mind around it. I just felt too overwhelmed with trying to hold everything together while we worked on the facility. Once we made it that far, life was about surviving the heat of summer and getting some cheese in the cave. Now we are just trying to take back our yard and catch up on a lot of neglected maintenance so I feel like we can breathe a little bit.
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| There is a tree down in the upper right hand corner....to the left, we have 13 foot tall weeds! |
So the actual announcement is...…
Yes! We are expecting a new Showalter sometime in November! No! This was not in "our" plans! Yes, Beulah the current baby, will be turning one in October! These two little ones are closer together than any of my other children. I barely have Beulah's baby book started! So baby number 10 has been a bit overwhelming to think about in the midst of everything!
Burnout
The other topic of this post is "sitting out". Maybe it is the backlog and extra garden work, but I feel like we are under a heavy load. We are starting our days at 6:30 A.M. and not finishing till after 9 P.M. For Daniel this is normal life. I think he was raised this way and is no stranger to late, late nights and little sleep. But I feel panicked by this. THIS is not how I want to live every day for the rest of my life! So I kind of retreated to the quiet of my room today, doing just the minimum while I mulled over our circumstances.
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| Fancy eggs are lots of fun! |
Farming is the riskiest gamble I can think of. Weather, animals, equipment, and labor are always a scramble to relate to and manage. Just in the past few weeks we have had cattle Houdini their way through fencing, two tractor tire blowouts, and a haybine bearing go out. Valuable time goes down the drain just trying to keep the animals in and the chores done.....let alone catching up! These are just average, everyday challenges.
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| Crazy "Seven" and her brand new baby! Definitely a perk of farm life! |
We have had winters where the water pump froze and cracked in two, leaving us to haul water in two feet of snow to all the animals on the farm without access to the creek. I have hauled out my kitchen table so that I could have an infirmary in the kitchen for goats. I have had a calf pee on my couch and goat kids sleeping under the stove for weeks. We have had our hay rained on and worse, sown crops when it stopped raining!
So to sum all this up, I have been running as hard as I can and spinning half a dozen different plates in the process. Today I just thought, "This is nuts! This is not what I signed up for!" I am not really sure what to do yet. Maybe, we have too many irons in the fire. Maybe, I am just anemic and heavy from this pregnancy. Maybe our management systems are not sensible or efficient enough.
- We chored/milked twice today.
- We did maintenance on the facility.
- Macheted and weedwacked the yard.
- Butchered a small cow and put up 250lbs of meat.
It is almost 10:30 P.M. and Daniel and Jake are still at it, while all the little ones have passed out around me. Are we the only crazy ones? What are we doing wrong? Someone tell me about their farming life!
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