Vaughnshire Farm

This is one of the funniest political stories I have heard in a long time.  It comes from my own 7 year old young man.  As you read it, I think you’ll agree his keen political insight has him destined for leadership!

Here is the background.  I have offered a reward for a little history work.  In true southern fashion I gave the older boys a pellet gun when they memorized the 50 states and capitols.  Now the next two boys are making the effort.  Our seven year old, Patrick, has been studying diligently and his 5 year old brother is helping him.

Beth recently took Patrick with her to an eye appointment where the conversation suddenly turned serious with this question, “Mom do you think Obama will be president”?  Beth answered with an “I don’t know” and a period of thoughtful silence ensued.  Eventually Patrick states that he sure hopes he can finish learning all the states and capitols before the election.  Beth turns to him, now very curious, and ask what the states and capitols have to do with the election.

Patrick turns to her and says, “Well if Obama is elected he will take all our guns and I won’t get my pellet gun”!  After Beth suppresses the laughter he says, “Yea and Hitler will take away our guns too”.

Beth, puzzled once again, relays to him that Hitler is dead.  A rather shocked and animated Patrick replies, “Really SHE died? I thought she wanted to be president too.”

Out of the mouth of babes….

I can’t say that I have spent all my time playing with my new little boy.  He has given us our fair share of sleepless nights and fussy times.  There have been lots of diaper changes and walking the floor.  He’s a serious boy, but will occasionally crack a smile or let out a big happy sigh.  He has brought so much joy to our family.  Here at 4 weeks, we are still enjoying his cuteness.  I love it and am trying to soak in every moment as a sweet victory for newborn days pass so quickly!

I was recently informed by our 3 year old daughter, “My baby is better than your baby because my baby doesn’t cry all the time like yours.” 

If you could have know how farm illiterate/challenged we were just a few years ago, you might appreciate some of the farm stories all the more.  I remember driving by a neighbor’s farm not long after we had moved from out of the city and looking at all their “goats” in the field.  We had been looking for some goats to clear some brush and they seemed to have an abundance of them.  Maybe they would sell us a couple of them?  So we pulled over and asked the elderly gentleman about his “goats”. 

He starred at us a while, looked back over at his “herd” and looked back at us and said, “Well, Dem ain’t goats, Dem are sheep!” 

Minor mistake.

Back then, telling sheep and goats apart proved to be a challenge for us.   Did you know there was such a thing as hair sheep–they don’t look like the typical woolly sheep.  

My, how far we have come! 

A couple of weeks ago, our 5 year old comes running in the house after being outside for a while working with the big guys.  He mainly observes and hangs around the boys when they are working.  He still gets distracted with honeysuckle, ant piles and lizards. 

So I asked him what he was up to and he says, “Well, I was just watching daddy and the boys cut up one of the rams and put cheerios on the other ram.” 

Hmmm….I had no idea what he was talking about. 

After some more inquiry and vague 5 year old answers, I found out that daddy and the boys were castrating the baby rams…and he had been watching them.  They decided to do the old fashion cut on one of them, like last year’s pig and use the handy dandy elastrator banding tool (using cheerio looking rubber bands) on the other one. 

You know…just a regular day in the life of a farm boy. 

A few days ago my 7 year old came in from doing his farm chores and sighed a big sigh….and then unloaded all the frustrations a 7 year old farmer can have.

“YOU will not believe what happened.  Every time I try to move my chicks to the chicken tractor something happens…The first time it was about 16 degrees outside and then the next time it was about 8 degrees.  AND NOW, Bonnie (the milk cow) broke through the chicken tractor and ate all the chicken feed and now I can’t put my chicks in the chicken tractor because the zip ties are completely broke!”  SIGH….

Me….standing in the kitchen listening to all his frustrations and offering him little help — after all, the boy just wants to put his chickens in the field.  They are ready — you know.  1 more inch to grow and they will hit the top of the chick cage! 

Yesterday, after returning home from grocery shopping, I meet a very happy farmer boy who informed me: 

“Guess what???  I finally put my chicks in the chicken tractor and NOTHING HAPPENED!”

For his sake, I sure am glad nothing happened and his chicks are finally safe living the life of farm chickens on green pastures!

After supper the boys get in a little light reading by the fire on a very blistery cold winter’s night….

These Salatin books win hands down in the minds of these farm boys:  Salad Bar Beef and Pastured Poultry Profits. Tonight, we heard Salatin wisdom in the form of  two boys excited about the books they were reading……The constant “Did you know..” followed by some piece of sustainable farming insight or some funny story or some great idea they are going to pursue became very entertaining. 

Technically, these books aren’t written for 10 year old boys, however, these boys have used the Salatin books as well as the knowledge they have gained through growing practical experience here on the farm, listening to sustainable farming cd’s, reading farming magazines and other books and attending conferences to grow their knowledge and maturity well beyond their age—Well, they are ready to make a go at it!

They both are in the process of starting up business here on the farm.  One with raising beef, one with poultry. 

Tonight, I paid my debt on 5 dozen chicken eggs to the 12 year old after he asked the question over supper, “Do I get to charge a late fee to someone that doesn’t pay their bills?”  I got the hint.  Remember he submitted me a bill for his chicken eggs 2 days ago! 

On the last day of the year, we set aside time to reflect on the year and give thanks to God for His Sovereign hand upon our lives.   We remember the joys and trials of the year. We talk about the Providential hand of God moving in our life and marvel at His mercy and grace even amidst trials.  We remember activities and projects we worked on, accomplishments, things most memorable, things that were hard, things most blessed, things that were sad and things that brought much laughter….It is a time of remembrance and thanksgiving for everyone in our entire family. 

We have found that this little exercise is a great way to peak inside the hearts and minds of our children.  When our children are able to write…even if that means in scratch…..we require them to pen some of their own thoughts on paper.  First is a paper about reflections:  ”Write what you learned, experiences you had, things you did, things you are thankful for and other memories of this year.”  Second is a paper about intentions:  ”Write a list of goals you would like to accomplish for the upcoming year.” 

For those that can not write, we usually have them dictate to us (or an older sibling) their goals and we write them down for them.   For those who do not yet talk coherently, we usually make up a goal they will be pursuing whether they like it or not (i.e. potty training, learning how to sit on a blanket during family worship time and church, etc…).   How wonderful it is to look back over the years and see goals set by our oldest children, like “I want to learn how to read”, and compare that to where they are now or to see their memory goals and hear them recite chapters in the Bible they have learned! 

We each work on our reflections and goals in preparation for our time of celebration on New Year’s Eve. 

Our 10 year old completed his list of 2007 reflections today.  I will for brevity sake only highlight a few of his page long most memorable reflections.  He states: 

• In 2007, we bought our cow named Bonnie Blue and we also moved to the farm. 
• In 2007, I caught my first coon!
• I grew my first crop of corn and my brothers and dad and I got to castrate a pig. 
• My brother and I raised a 40 lb turkey and we learned how to breed rabbits.
• I also learned how to milk a cow and I did more school work this year too.  Everybody turned 1 year older. 
• In 2007, I did more work for less pay. 

He wrote in all seriousness and after he was finished, he handed it to me to see if he had written enough.  I agreed it was sufficient all the while chuckling to myself about the “more work for less pay” reflection.  I did notice on his goal’s paper he had a plan to make $500 this year.  Such are the lessons learned by a 10 year old from serious reflections on his past year of life. 

Our 7 year old’s list of reflections was highly entertaining and enlightening.  As with all the children, the impacting influence of farm life was highly evident….more than I realized.  A few of the (newly turned) 7 year old’s reflections were:  

• I helped work on the milk barn.
• I started learning how to read.
• I learned that a chicken will die without water. 
• I learned NEVER to put a chicken in with a dog cus’ the chicken gets killed.
• I learned that a castrated cow won’t breed with a milk cow. 

And I learned that moving to a farm teaches children way more than you will ever think they will learn and it is only through teaching them to reflect and remember things in their life, even from a young age,  that you find out some of those little known facts that were bouncing around in their little heads. 

As I was reading through my drafts, I came across this post that I wrote back before the drought consumed all of our time and energy and way back when we had green grass…evidently I never posted it…so here it is…
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End of May 2007

Today the children will show the Vaughnshire organic chicken feed gathering and processing steps.

What is that out in the field?

Why….it’s children running around in the field with empty water bottles catching June bugs and Japanese beetles.

Here are more children at the processing station. When I asked the 4 year old what they were doing he said, “Torturing the beetles…mom!” The two year old said, “Soup, Mom…”

After they successfully kill or incapacitate the beetles, the 3rd crew takes the fresh organic chicken feed to the laying hens and watch them gulp down and enjoy the fine gourmet chicken food produced right here on the farm.

That’s just one way we incorporate creative play, work and productive organic farming all into one.

Organic pest control, healthy organic chicken feed, increase in egg production, decrease in beetle population, entertainment, play and work for the children makes for happy tired children and an added bonus of mom being able to focus on the laundry mound.

We have a handful of boys running around here and they always amaze me with their unique boyness that still baffles my feminine mind.  The way they look and smell…and dress is uniquely different…at least around here.  The camo hat and pants, the pockets full of….well, junk, the million questions I don’t care about, the things they find funny and entertaining…..well, they just aren’t me.  That’s ok…that’s why I enjoy them so much.  They are full of busy, boy energy. 

We recently purchased a hardback book series written by the author R.M. Ballantyne who wrote a series of Christian adventure books for boys.  A quote from one of the books:

Boys [should be] inured from childhood to trifling risks and slight dangers of every possible description, such as tumbling into ponds and off of trees, etc., in order to strengthen their nervous system…. They ought to practice leaping off heights into deep water. They ought never to hesitate to cross a stream over a narrow unsafe plank for fear of a ducking. They ought never to decline to climb up a tree, to pull fruit merely because there is a possibility of their falling off and breaking their necks. I firmly believe that boys were intended to encounter all kinds of risks, in order to prepare them to meet and grapple with risks and dangers incident to man’s career with cool, cautious self-possession…. R.M. Ballantyne, The Gorilla Hunters

Two of my boys just finished The Gorilla Hunters and have been talking about it for days.  They each revisit parts of the book that they found thrilling and engage in animated conversation over the adventures that Ballantyne wrote about in the 1850’s.  

The only caution I would give is that these books will inspire your boys… not only in conversation….but after your 10 year old reads The Gorilla Hunters or The Pirate City or The Young Fur Traders and has just memorized a deck of survival cards….don’t be surprised if you walk in your kitchen one morning and see something like this appear on your kitchen “What’s For Supper?” board:

My daughters comment as she was starring at the kitchen board was “What is wrong with them?”  She further added, “I would never write anything like that mom…” 

The “turtle blood” had me asking “…drinking turtle blood??? Where did you get that idea???”  My 10 year old left the room and came running back with a deck of survival cards and pulled out the turtle card…promptly turning over the card he read….”Edible…if water is unavailable, you may drink turtle blood to maintain hydration until water can be found…” 

Just another, “Hey…..Mom….did you know…..” statement I can see us having at the grocery store one day.  Maybe since the turtle blood was dealt with at home, some poor elderly lady in the grocery store won’t have to worry herself sick that she passed cultists in on isle 7 and save me explaining that it was just the survival cards they were reading.

I have been amazed to see how farm life has affected our home schooling these days. I am still unpacking boxes of books. We have more books than anything else and it seems that we are still digging book boxes out and are shortly about to run out of book shelves. However, I have yet to unpack my homeschooling books so the children have had a nice reprieve on any sort of written book work for weeks now. Not that we did a lot of written book work to begin with, however, I do feel it is very important for my children to know how to write well so we do spend focused times on this important skill. The only written work they have done is making garden plot plans, recording rabbits and breeding information, business ideas and figuring out how much they need to sell and of what items at the farmer’s market in order to make a certain amount of money. Not your typical A beka type handwriting drills or math problems…but it works just the same only they are more motivated and interested in figuring those types of problems compared to a workbook.

But for now, in addition to lots of reading, other projects have been taking up their time and attention. Recently my older boys have been working on building a poultry tractor for their guineas and turkey as the baby birds are ready to graduate from being in a smaller cage to a real tractor that will be moved around the yard. This is sure to supply them with a generous supply of bugs that we are hoping will soon be a distant memory. Once the guineas are a bit bigger, we will release them to free range around the property.

In other happenings, we have been learning so much about the simple things most farmers take for granted. While we were not intending on being pig farmers, my husband received a real live baby pig for his birthday (from his nephew) So we were sort of thrust into learning all about pigs in a short amount of time. The pig is a very interesting creature and from what we can tell–this pig is very smart. He has escaped a couple of times, but the boys have risen to the challenge and figured out ingenious ways to catch him.

Looking out the back door, I caught two boys running around the yard with a very large net. This was the first attempt at retrieving him. Since his little operation(of which I am getting ready to tell you about)…he has been much more content and happy in his little home eating lots of leftovers and scraps from the kitchen.

The net didn’t work. The boys eventually had to trap the pig in their possum trap. After repairing the fence…they put him back in his pen. We found that those heavy plastic dog houses work great for pigs. He needed a place to sleep up off the ground where he could be warm and dry from the rain.

We were told that our pig needed an “operation” …the kind to render him sterile and secure his life as that of a meat pig. If you aren’t aware, pigs need to be castrated if you intend on raising them for meat for several reasons. 1–big male hogs that are not castrated are aggressive and dangerous and 2– those hormones affect the taste and quality of the meat. Unfortunately, we found out that you are supposed to castrate male pigs when they are about 2 to 3 days old—our pig was 10 weeks old and quite a bit bigger than a baby piglet. My husband spent a short amount of time reading about how to do this procedure himself and when fully confident, he called the 11 year old, the 9 year old and the 6 year old boys to come with him to the barn and told them the short story of what they were going to do. “Patrick…you sit on the pig and don’t get up— Pierce, grab one leg, Peyton, you grab the other leg and don’t let go.” My husband quickly made the cuts and did the job and I stood on the porch listening to this pig screaming like nothing I have ever heard. It reminded me of the scene in the movie, “The Princess Bride” where the farmer boy is in the pit of despair getting his life sucked out of him.

All is well, however, and the pig is now well on his way. The boys grew up a lot that day and are all the better for it with more conversation fodder for me to watch out for the next time we make it into a grocery store. To make the day more interesting, my 9 year old had the great idea that only a male mind would think: he suggested putting the pig testicles into their trap to see what they could catch. My husband, being the adventurous guy that he is, agreed with the idea and they set the trap in the woods. The next day, they went to check the trap and to their delight, they had caught a possum — a possum with 9 babies crawling all over her. Needless to say, we did not keep them as pets but they provided another interesting learning experience for the kids! You can imagine how excited the boys were catching 10 possums at ONE time with two pig test…well..you know. I couldn’t catch their excitement and wasn’t thrilled with it in the least. I finally went inside the house when talk started about “Hmm…I wonder if the cat will adopt the baby possums and nurse them?” Can we please move on…One thing has already led to another…let’s not risk something else happening and force me to blog about something even more strange than pig bait.

We did finally move on and with much more excitement I was able to finally plant some potatoes and make some progress in the garden.

I have always intended to take a picture of the things I collect out of the washer and dryer each week.

Here is my running list of things that I have pulled out of the washer or dryer over the last several years of having boys:

1. part of a bungee strap with hinge.
2. miscellaneous scrap metal pieces from who knows where. This week I found a small copper pipe?
3. crayons - several times this has happened. Most of the time I catch them before the dryer, once I did not and if you are wondering if it ruined the clothes…yes, it did and the dryer as well.
4. candles - i caught this one before the dryer.
5. rocks
6. springs, nails, screws, nuts and bolts, staples and various other tools and tool parts.
7. pocket knives - this is a regular
8. compasses and tape measures - also another regular
9. wallets and money
10. legos, lincoln logs, toy cars and various other toy parts
11. and last week a large real looking and feeling fake plastic snake that I think stopped my heart as I screamed and nearly fell back over my pile of clothes. To make the story more interesting, when I bought this life-like snake for my 4 year old, the young guy said, “Now, you need to remember you bought this because it is liable to scare you real bad late one night!”  Imagine putting your hands (working in very dim light in the unfinished basement which made it worse)  in the washer to scoop out wet clothes and feel a slimy, wiggly thing that wraps around your hand and all you can see is a black snake like thing amongst the clothes that you can’t get away from fast enough.  I think I took 3 years off my life with that experience!
12. once living real red worms that son #4 put in his pockets last spring
13. a once living real blue belly skink lizard that son #2 put in his pocket and forgot about. Afterwards, I called upon the guilty son to retrieve the dead lizard out of my washer and he tried to convince me that his lizard was only half-choked because of swallowing too much water. I assured him that his lizard was fully choked.

I threaten to charge a nickel for everything I find in their pockets and a $1 for all living or once living creatures, but in all my spare time I haven’t managed to put together a tally chart with each boy’s name on it and items I need payment for.