This Land, This Life, This Farmer's Wife: 30 Days of Thankfulness-Day 24

Day 24-Opportunities on the Farm

When people think of “living on a farm” or “working on a farm” the images that come to mind are:
1. feeding cattle and livestock
2. driving a tractor
3. operating heavy equipment
4. baling hay
5. scooping the poop
6. driving a semi
7. etc etc etc
When I cam to the farm 14 years ago, there was alot of THAT kind of stuff that was going on. There still is.
Back then, I thought I’d be peech teacher! Speech teacher, speech therapist, speech/language pathologist, speech/language specialist whatever, the kids usually just call me “Speech!” Which works. I was going to be the best ever man. I was going to tear it up in the schools. I was going to therapize my heart out!
But as I had kids and reflected on my life as a child, I realized that the very few years I got to spend with my mom (who passed away tragically when I was 11) were so very precious. I realized the enormity of her impact on my life in such a short little time.
It was then I knew that a career path wasn’t for me. The farm life was all consuming for us and there just wasn’t enough time and energy and resources available for me to have a booming career on top of my husband and his farming and raising a family.
It took me like a million years to realize that this choice didn’t make me less of a valuable person or more of a mother. It was just an individual choice that felt right in my heart and the heart of my husband and it was clear it was the lifestyle for us. I COULD work full time and have three kids and help my hubs out when he needs it and allow him to work all these long hours, but did I want to…..uh NOPE! Does that make me lazy…..uh NOPE! It just makes me, well me! And it makes my husband and kids happy too. So it is.
Well, I can’t actually escape my Peech Teacher role completely, nor do I want to. I’ve ended up working more than I ever thought I would and I am thankful for that too. But, that’s not the point of this dang post.
These days besides diapering and chauffeuring and washing scads of laundry and volunteering etc, I find myself doing a ton of stuff like this:

It’s a spin from our regular logo that our local gal helped us made for some gifts we gave to our Harvest Crew. Well, I had to tweak it a tiny bit for our farm Christmas Cards. I wish I knew Photoshop better, but in the mean time, I make due.
These days I find myself making pintables about drainage tile and writing and editing information about our family for various reasons and tweaking written documents and working on spreadsheets for my husband and planning dinners and tweaking logos for cards.
This ain’t Peech and this ain’t Traditional Farming chores! But it is stuff around the farm that needs doing, and I guess way back when, I decided to be my husband’s helper and I’m glad I can delve in and figure stuff out to help out on the farm!
Next up on the farm….who knows! But I’m game!

Want to start at the beginning? Day 1 Want to follow along and learn more about farming and food? Click on over to 30 Days on a Prairie Farm Series.