School Starts, Juggling Act
Feeling like fall this week. Darkness hanging on a little longer each morning and coming back a little quicker in the evenings. Amy commented about being thankful for the decrease in daylight hours, resulting in an earlier dinnertime and a more decent bedtime for the kids.
Amy and the kids officially started the homeschool year on Monday. Hallie is starting the 5th grade, Hasten in 3rd, Wren in Kindergarten, and Carter sticking her nose in all the above. They’re off to a great start. Morale is high for the time being. Amy is excited about the school year and still tweaking the schedule trying to figure out the best way to juggle time with each child.
The juggling act intensifies as she tries to schedule time for both teaching and farming. She loves her role on the farm and remains committed to providing local meats to our surrounding communities, but there are times when she wishes she could just be a mom and teach our kids. If we can get through the rest of chicken season, I think our days will be more manageable.
On Wednesday we put another 140 chickens in the freezer, cutting up almost 100 of them. With a smaller processing crew, we’ve been harvesting smaller batches. Chicken wasn’t the only meat we put in the freezer on Wednesday. Just as we were about to start killing chickens, our processor delivered meat to the farm. Six pallets of ORVF beef and pork into the freezers. Without time to organize and sort through it, we have lots of freezer work to do in days ahead.
After processing, we moved 120 chicks out from the brooder to the field. Hasten and I moved another 125 chicks out yesterday afternoon as Amy took the girls to run errands and go to Hallie’s volleyball practice. 19 chicken shelters being moved to fresh grass everyday.
More moving cows and bush hogging. Mowing cabin yards. A little shower over the weekend, but no more rain other than that.
Not a lot of book listening this week, but I did finish listening to Andy Catlett by Wendell Berry. Here’s a couple more quotes:
“For many years now, that way of living has been scorned, and over the last forty or fifty years, it has nearly disappeared. Even so, there was nothing wrong with it. It was an economy directly founded on the land, on the power of the sun, on thrift and skill and on the peoples’ competence to take care of themselves.”
“The world I knew as a boy was flawed, surely, but it was substantial and authentic. The households of my grandparents seemed to breathe forth a sense of the real cost and worth of things. Whatever came, came by somebody’s work.”
Have a good week.
Will