Needing a break

October is half over already and I'm wondering where the time has gone. It's been insane around here this month. Both Carla and I have been working pretty steady both off-farm and on. By the end of this weekend Carla will have had twelve straight days working in town at either the restaurant or the gas station. Up until a few days ago I was helping our neighbor with his harvest and put in about ten days trucking grain from the field to the grain bin.

Of course when we're not working off-farm, then there's work to be done around here. We've been struggling to fit in hauling our hay bales off the hay fields and into the yard, harvesting our own tiny bit of grain and all the other usual house and yard work. Homeschooling has somewhat been put aside for now as we try to keep up with life in general!

Through this time we've let the boys either stay home with Carla or come with me to the field. The majority of my days helping our neighbor had them joining me in the grain truck. Earlier on it was fun, but after the days start to add up, being crammed together all day in a truck loses much of its appeal. There were occasions the boys could get out and run around, but when a combine was around it was time for them to get back into the truck, for safety reasons, to keep them out of the way and to keep them out of the grain dust. But I've been spending so much time with the kids lately (at home and at work essentially) that I'm looking forward to every spare moment to myself!

Harvest time does provide opportunities for learning, too. As our farm is more into beef cattle production, the boys don't get as much of an opportunity to see different grains. Helping our neighbor combine wheat let the boys see where flour comes from. Wack a few kernels with a hammer and it's obvious! Hammer some oats and you see oatmeal!

The pace of work this month has been quite a bit different that most of the spring and summer simply due to the weather being so much dryer now. It's has to be at least three weeks since we last had rain! We haven't seen such a dry stretch all year! There's even salt blowing off Chaplin Lake in the wind today. I didn't think it would dry out that much this year.

I hope the weather holds for a while as there's still so much to do...so many bales left to haul (both ours and our neighbor's which he hires me to help with), corrals to clean (again ours and my neighbor's which I help with, too)...I could use another two months of warm dry weather! Ha! Something tells me I'll be working in cold, wet slop before too long...