(I’ve combined the wonderful idea of a One Sentence Journal, where you commit to writing just one sentence about each day, and a Gratitude journal, where you make a short – or long – list of things that you’re grateful for each day.)

It seems, though, that in my busy-ness, I have been stressing moderately about getting everything done. But, thinking about the Gratitude portion of my journal has made me realize that I have not been grateful for what we have gotten done! (Seems to me I’ve been hard on my husband about being hard on himself for not getting enough done, too. Double anti-gratitude whammy.)

In my experience, the less gratitude I show about getting things done, the less I accomplish.

So, in the name of being prepared to deliver food to all those we’ve committed to, here is an expanded and public entry to my Gratitude Journal:

• All the oats and barley are planted. Shea and Daddy had a great time planting together.
• I actually got to run the tractor for a few hours for the first time since our son was born! (From this I realized why John arrives from his hours of solitary tractor work in such a good mood. Once or twice, as I pulled the cultivator from the ground to start another row, I wondered how much fun John was having trying to run the seed cleaning set up while entertaining our 2 1/2 year old. Mostly, I enjoyed the relative silence of the diesel tractor, though. )
• Our laying hens are up to speed, laying almost 40 eggs per day.
• Our broiler chicks have survived in less than perfect housing to start loosing feathers and start looking far less cute than when they arrived.
• Our sheep are so happy with their new barn that they stay in it even when they could go out!! (This is partly because the pasture fencing is about a day away from being ready. The grass was ready last week but the containment devices will be ‘a go’ this weekend.)
• Our vegetable garden, which somehow grew from ‘Enough salad greens and beets to take for dinner each night’ into ‘Please don’t let all of this be ripe at the same time!’, is 75% planted and looks pretty darn good. We may even be able to afford a wheel hoe before too long to make the maintenance of a large garden easier.
• The pole peas that the kids planted are coming up and Shea, who is 2 1/2, started jumping up and down, yelling: “Mom! Come see! Come see!” When he noticed them poking their light green heads out of the dirt.
• I finally might have found a Canadian source of Fertrell products so we can get our poor chickens on to some decent food that we can actually afford to give to them. (Around here, you’d have to charge about $7 per dozen eggs if organic feed costs were to be recouped.)
• I have relaxed my sense of what is important enough that the foot high lawn in front of the house is not bothering me.
• Yeah for being hicks! My sense of what is ‘too hick’ has also been relaxed. Not only do we have a truck cap sitting in the yard, but our 7 week old Barred Rock laying hens live in it surrounded by a temporary fence! (Photo potentially to come, though actually adding this task to my to-do list seems just a tad counter productive, no?)

And, last but not least, I am grateful that I forced myself to take the time to write here. Because, whether or not people read it; whether or not this blog brings any of our customers more insight into how their food is raised and by whom; whether or not people agree with all I write, the writing of it is worth the effort. Putting my thoughts into written – okay, typed – words is soothing like nothing else that I do. And so, thanks to me, for taking the time to do something that, though it might be solely for my own good, is absolutely worth it.

Happy Eating!

Here are a couple of our mixed blessings (or so I think when there are too many of them tackling me at once!) They’re ‘bottle babies’ meaning for one reason or another, we’ve had to feed them milk replacer from a bottle instead of letting nature take her course and have mom feed them. Usually, the reason is because we didn’t like the course that nature was on when we found them hypothermic and near death on a cold winter night. Feeding them in this picture are Big Farmer John and Little Farmer Shea.

(I cringe as I write that as I’m forever lecturing about not to pigeon hole our son. “You know Dear, he might have a different unique gift for the world than farming!”)

This next little guy is on his way up the side of a round bale. We’re loving our new hoop barn but, as you’ll see in the next picture, there is one major drawback.

The lambs can all cavort around in the hay! Happily, they still seem to do their business in the pack area but it’s just not good for the brain to see little manure machines running in the food!

Here you can see what I mean. It’s fun to watch them go crazy but…

All right. This has been a busy weekend. I will soon be adding more pictures as the season also entails maple syrup and a great first run for a teen entrepreneurial program that I’ve developed. (Check out the program here.)