this week {August 17, 2015}

This week, we are:

• Getting ready for silage season. (It's like this, but with corn.) That means it's a mad dash to having all the equipment--trucks, tractors and choppers--ready at just the same time as the corn. And enough silage truck drivers. And coffee. And meals that you can eat with one hand while driving through fields. It's an art form really. 

• Waiting for Doris and her peeps to lay some eggs. When we ordered our broilers earlier this year, Murray McMurray Hatchery included one exotic chick in our shipment. They didn't note what kind it was or if it was a hen or a rooster, so we named the bird Horace. Turns out she's a Doris. And we're hoping that sometime in the next month or so, she'll start laying eggs. In the meantime, we're loving watching her feathers change from all brown to beautiful golds and reds.

• Dreaming about paint colors for the baby's room. Ok, mostly that's just me. But Chris, bless his heart, listens to me run through every feasible color palette about once a week and doesn't even complain. That's true love right there. 

• Remembering that farming can be hard but it is also worth it. It's easy to assume that farm life is idyllic, that it's only made up of kittens and beautiful baskets of mocha-colored eggs and glowing sunsets and fields of corn tassels wiggling in the wind. But as with any vocation, it can also be skunky--filled with 16-hour days, bad weather, tractors stuck in mud and heifers that live to sneak through fences. It is a good life, and we wouldn't change it, but it isn't an easy one.

• Giving thanks. For sunrises and sunsets, for a triad of puppies who love to sleep under the porch, for cows who chew so loudly we can hear them from our porch, for books we have a hard time putting down and tall glasses of lemonade, for baby blankets and onesies, for good sermons and long brunches, and especially for each other, we are grateful. 

What are you especially thankful for this week?