New Life Old Farmers

My Loving Spouse loves oxtail soup.  Note the main ingredient…’tail’.  It might surprise you to know, that when the ranchers around here butcher ‘dispatch’ their cattle, they do not keep/use the tail.  It is not uncommon to see My Loving Spouse with a gleam in his eye saying,

“Oh, My Buddy is ‘dispatching’… I’ll bet they won’t keep the tail.”

Off he goes collecting odd buckets or trash bags of tails.  I’m not sure how many tails he uses for soup, but it looks like he is planning on cooking some soon.  There was an odd-shaped trash bag in the sink.

‘What is that thing in the sink?’

“Oh, it is tail, it was in the freezer.  It needs to defrost.”

‘Well, it needs to defrost somewhere else.’

So I got an ice chest, left the lid off and put the bag of tail in it to defrost.

‘I put your tail in the pantry.’

My Loving Spouse chortled a bit….

“You’ve come a long way City Girl”

 

Asking people to pray…asking people for anything is out of my comfort zone, (I know not a great way to live and I’m working on it).  I have however begun to learn, that when I feel that I am ‘supposed to do something‘ it is a really good idea to do it….just how God works.  Asking people to pray for My Girl has already blessed us and humbled us by love.

The first ‘prayer’ slot was filled within minutes of the blog being posted.  As you prayers were added, there were often comments here of ‘Oh, my gosh!’  Some of the prayers we have never met and they know us only through this blog, they even live in other countries, lots live in other states, some are family, some have known me since I was a child and some are part of the village…the faithful village that has walked alongside us for years as  together we took on her hurdles to learn.

My Girl leaves in 6 days.  Some of 31 team are already praying on their day…

This was my day to pray for Laura!  

Bob is home.  I am glad, but Agnes is very glad.  Like a typical ‘kid’ (even though he is not a person nor a goat), he came home kind of dirty and with a small attitude.  Bob is about a teenager in cattle years, so developmentally, he is right on track.  Bob has been spending the last few weeks at Our Friend the Farmer’s house…hanging out with the other teenage cattle thereby enforcing him to be weaned.  Bob rolled in the mud before coming home, hence the muddy matted coat.  He only came back after Elsie and the pigs were dispatched, so as to not upset him.  (Actually, Elsie was doing so poorly that she was just put down, and no, city friends, no one will eat her.)

I am glad to have him back.  Agnes is glad to have him back.  Bob, is glad to be back…even though he says there is no one to play with…sheesh…kids.

Tomorrow is the ultimate farming day and I plan to be absolutely no where around.  (Team Offspring has the same plan).  My Loving Spouse (the original British born country boy) will be here to deal with ‘it’, while every city born inhabitant flees for the day.  The Dispatch Truck is coming.  The real truth is that the truck has a different name, but I renamed it because it was sort of gruesome.  Tomorrow the pigs, Winnie & Maggie and the cow Elsie will do their job, which is to provide food for the family.

Now all of you can say….WHAT!!!

The pigs were pretty cute when we got them.…and they did make us laugh…well, not Number Two Son.  He kept his distance from them as much as possible, because he likes bacon…loves bacon and made a point of not getting too attached to them.  Lately, though the pigs have gotten very, very ugly…almost everyday they were bigger and uglier…which is great!  It has become very easy to not be attached to them at all…and smelly…they are big smelly pigs.Elsie on the other hand is a bit harder…but this cow has had a much better life on her three legs than she could have found anywhere…and now it is ‘time’.  She is not a happy cow…the weather is hard for her, and she has done as well as she was ever going to do.

Go ahead and say ‘it’… ‘it’…

“How can you do that?”

Our Friend the Farmer was betting that we’d end up with the oldest pigs in the valley, but we got the pigs to feed the family.  In fact the older kids Christmas presents were an IOU for 1/4 a pig…and they were very excited.  This was ‘the plan’…all along and now ‘the plan’ is going into action.This is living ‘authentically’…  I know and I have heard people say…’Oh, I could never do that’…and I didn’t know that I could, but in truth this is ‘real life’…I’m just not quite ready to be home when it happens.

 

I like being creative, no… I love being creative.  I even picked ‘creative’ as my ‘word for the year’ last year and then promptly forgot it…because as much as I love to ‘make stuff’…I usually feel a teeny-tiny-tad or a really big giant amount of guilt when I spend my time that way…instead of working…or cleaning…or organizing…or exercising…or washing the car…or brushing the horses…or cleaning the house…or cleaning the yard…or just cleaning anything….yeah, you get it.

Being creative…if just for ourselves…does it make a difference?  Is it a waste of ‘time’…the ever precious ‘time’?  I keep reminding myself that God…who we even call ‘Creator’…created a whole bunch of very cool and beautiful stuff…and it is beautiful whether anyone sees it or not…

I never imagined moving to the country would give me the chance to be more creative, but it has in many ways…the most surprising of course is with my sewing machine.  I didn’t even like to sew before!  Now it seems that, I have one or two new projects swimming around in my head all the time.…and I cannot wait to spend time in my sewing studio.  I get sort of gleeful and excited just thinking about it…

Maybe this year my word should be ‘abandon’…  that could make some great thoughts… create with joyful abandon… abandon guilt….  I just noticed that the word guilt is a lot like quilt…maybe I will just make my word for the year ‘quilt’…without any room for guilt.Yep, I like it…quilt!

Watch out Hong Kong, she is coming…One would never describe My Girl as being shy.  When she was a small child and we’d run into friends at the grocery store, she would hug them, chat with them, be happy to see them and then as we walked away, she’d say,

“So, who was that?”

She lived by the code that said, hug first, find out who they are second.

To say that the Lord has stretched me by being her mother would be an understatement.  This move to this town, this home and the timing was all about attempting to give her a better life…who knew…how far she would take this opportunity!

There have been many hats for me to wear to help her get to where she is today…and now…she is setting out…in a big way…feeling called on a mission to South East Asia for 5 months.  I know she’ll get…

lonely  tired  happy  exhilarated  excited  joyful  amazed  exhausted  overwhelmed  blessed  sad  glad and probably a few others…

I have been wondering….what is my job now?

I have this feeling…

that I am to find others to join with me in praying for her daily while she is gone.  So…I am ‘looking’ for 31 people who will agree to pray 5 times while she is gone…31 people who will pray one day a month for 5 months…

My job right now…I think is to send her off, but to cover her in prayer…

I believe in the power of prayer, even though I am not a big ‘out loud’ prayer, that is not my gift.  I am a simple prayer, a sort of reader’s digest kind of prayer…

I pray in simple words…and yet…isn’t it great that we cannot do ‘it’ wrong.

Together, we can keep My Girl covered in prayer for each day while she is on this mission…and for many of you…I know, this is not the first time you’ve lifted her in prayer….and we are blessed.

If you’re willing to be 1 of the 31, please send me an email to ellenewalton@gmail.com…and say Prayer 31 or comment here on the blog…and thank you….from the bottom of this mom’s heart.

Ellen

I have learned a lot about living in the cold, but apparently I still have some things to learn.  Who knew you should not jiggle a cold hose…We do drain the hose after every time we use it by running it up and over a tall tree branch.

Still sometimes there is a bit of ice in the line, so I thought I’d just jiggle the hose to break up the ice…yes, now I know…bad I idea.  Luckily the break was close to the water coming out part of the hose, so I could still use it to fill up the cow’s water.  The cow’s have a thing or two to learn about the cold as well…like do not pull out the tank heater that keeps your water from freezing.  If you do not believe me, here is the cow’s back up water tank without a heater….can you say…block of ice?The cats appreciate the cow’s nice warm tank full of water…It is a trade-off, but one great thing about it being this cold is that the ground is frozen…no more mud and that is a beautiful thing.

I have so…sew…so much to learn about sewing.  Usually in these situations I can choose to patiently learn to do it ‘right’ or jump in bumble through and hope it sort of works out.  Upon making hooded towels for THE Grandson for Christmas…, yes bumbling through wins again….and we’ll just call the results…whimsical.The Granddogs are brown and white, so I had plans to make this towel brown and white too…but decided to quite and leave well enough alone with just brown.

There is one word when it comes to making pig ears for hooded towels…hard.  Pig ears are hard… actually the nose wasn’t to easy and neither were the eyes…oh, well…whimsical.

I do plan on making more hooded towels, mostly because they were really fun….and because there is a whole barn yard full of animals I haven’t made yet (insert subliminal message here…cow).  Most of the instructions I found on Pinterest called for half of a hand towel and a bath towel, however, I cut the hand towel down even further, to provided material for the ears and to make the towels a bit more cozy…leaving the hood still plenty big enough for the biggest of kids.

The sheep are back in the hay fields behind our farm.  The sheep are nibbling on the left over bits of hay still growing up from the ground.  There are hundreds of sheep…watched over by one shepherd and a bunch of sheep dogs.  The dogs come in all sizes and know quite well how to protect and herd their sheep.  The sheep dogs should always be given a wide berth, if the shepherd is not around……but see, here’s the thing…the shepherd is always around…always.   The sheep are never left alone…and so for the shepherd, it would seem that this is a very lonely existence.…as he spends the days and nights with his dogs in his little sheep camp trailer.  The trailer is little more than a box on wheels, no fancy RV here at all.  The rest of the world goes on around him…we non-shepherds get to have Christmas…while the shepherd’s days do not change and it is almost as if the shepherd could be forgotten…as if he wasn’t part of the world that mattered.…and so I was so pleased that My Loving Spouse said,

‘I want to take a plate of Christmas cookies to The Shepherd.’

My husband has a good heart…and he wrapped up a beautiful plate of cookies for The Shepherd, who we’d never actually met and who doesn’t speak our language.  I was a little bit worried about the sheep dogs.  However, with The Shepherd nearby, all the dogs ran to meet us in a friendly fashion, which made me do a small prayer of thanks right on the spot.  

The dogs were rather warm and joyful as was The Shepherd…who smiled widely…understood why we’d come and hugged us both.

‘Feliz Navidad’It made me think about the way the news came from the angel to the shepherds…the shepherds, who could so easily have been ‘left out of the loop’…but this good news was for all the people.

Luke 2:10 

And the angel said unto them,

Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy,

which shall be to all people.

Merry Christmas to you all…