Grilled Farmhand Sticks

Again with the easy week night meals! This is a favourite here, very versatile.  We often are in the middle of important farm work at dinner time, losing daylight hours. This is a side affect of working day jobs and coming home to the livestock chores of 4 different kinds of animals. Chad needs something that he can eat quickly, on the go, and is nutritionally dense.

I start with what veggies I have on hand. Load the kabobs with them. Then I cube up the meat to the size of the veggies. I brush with oil, usually butter but coconut oil and lard work well and olive oil is a last resort (temps too high for olive oil and it makes it taste off).

Once oil is brushed on I generously sprinkle with seasoning of choice. Swamp Fire works well. I also like Pensey's Bicentennial and Bavarian. Your favourite seasoned salt will work, but watch the salt quantity.

Grill until the meat is as done as you like, turning a few times while it grills.

Recipe that is shown above:

Grilled Farmhand Sticks

All of these cut into 1 inch cubes more or less:
Zucchini
Sweet pepper
Baby bella mushrooms
Onion slice
Beef stew meat
Butter
Seasoning and salt

I make variations, use different seasonings, use lamb, deer meat, pork, beef.....whatever vegetable is in season. That is why they have yet to get sick of it. You can even use the butter and seasoning that drips and pools into a roux and make a cream sauce for pasta/rice/couscous/quinoa, then serve the veggie and meat on top.

Easy. Prep time is about 5-10 minutes (how fast you are at chopping things into cubes and threading on the sticks) and grill time is about 10 minutes too, but mostly hands off.

Clean up is easier. If you just have the serving platter and everyone eats off sticks there is no need for dishes. Clean up gets longer if you make the pasta version. That's why I don't usually make that- but if I have the meat thawed and the grill going and unexpected guests pop in, the pasta is a great meal expander. I love feeding our farm guests!

Bottle Calf!

Sorry for missing a day, I've been writing furiously on a post about immunity management for our 22q series, but I keep remembering things to add to it.

In the mean time, twice a day I have to wash bottles and make formula......for a red angus baby heifer calf. She's Lily's bottle calf, to show for Clover Kids at the county fair. We'll raise her up and keep her for breeding or trade her back to the ranch for a beef steer. We'll see. Susan Maribelle Test Red Stamps is growing on us. She's a sweetie.

You know aside from the dreaded cow spit kisses and Lily getting it into her head that Susan can suck her eyeballs out. Lily gets up early and forgoes some evening activities to manage the electric fence, make sure she has water, and feed her the bottles twice a day. It is a big responsibility, but she wants to do it.

When you give a kid a responsibility they ask for and set them up for success, then they often surprise us with how capable they are.

We all have our part in this project. Lily feeds the bottle, I do the dishes and mix the milk, Holly keeps Lily company and is emergency watch (if the cow hurts Lily or Lily needs me ASAP, Holly is the runner).

Holiday Road, Summer Vacation

I love road trips. LOVE THEM. I love them with kids, I love them with a fox, I love them on top of a box, with a fork, with green eggs and ham.

I love coming home more.

We live a life that most people yearn for as a vacation. Instead of setting up my life to take breaks to do something I love, I work the things I love into my daily life. Sometimes that means waking up and deciding to hi the road for a day and stop at the places as they appear on the map. Delivering farm products has made this possible on a regular basis, opportunities to explore communities we would not have guessed would hold treasures of history and relationship.

This is my life. I love it.

Recently a family member asked if we didn't feel we were missing out by not taking family vacations to destination resorts. We can't leave the farm unattended, so usually I travel with the kids. Chad hates travel anyway so it all works out.

I've driven 813 miles to Yellowstone and camped with a 2 year old on my own. Why not?

Ive taken the kids to Galveston, TX twice, though once was for a funeral. Chicago was a delivery trip and was fun too.

My kids have a life that is like summer vacation never ends. I can only hope they will cherish their childhood adventures as much as I am loving making them.

Disney world seems to me like a lot of work. It does not appeal to me, they don't ask for it, so I figure they will go when the time comes.

I hope to take an RV to California when they are older and explore the coast....or maybe a train.

I plan to travel to Iceland in 2017. Alone. Or maybe with one kid. Depends.

Mostly, though, as I lay in the grass soaking in the sunshine, I realize that moments like this, even though the dishes need done and clothes are piling up, moments like this are the vacation that most people dream of. This is my life. What a blessing to be in this moment.

I love my house and the farm has several quiet spots for meditation and reflection.

The things about my house I don't love, I am changing up.

Life is an adventure. I don't see our little road trips as escapes from the daily grind, I see them as part of our life adventure. I've redesigned our lives and the definition of vacation does not apply. We have intentionally and mindfully done so.

When we were first engaged the minister that was doing our pre-wedding counseling asked us to write down our dream for retirement. Individually we both wrote, almost as a joke at the time, that we wanted to retire to an apple farm in Virginia. We talked about this through our first married years. Then, suddenly, we asked ourselves, why wait for retirement to build the life we dream of?

Ask yourself that question, what are you waiting for?

Still, I am also planning a weekend retreat for just me. I have writing to do that isn't getting done. That is more like a work retreat and I will return to the farm having done hard work and will be ready to play.  I guess I have reversed in our lives the vacation/work dichotomy.

It is an awesome way to live. 

June Flew By, A Visual Record of our Farm School

The number one request I get from readers is to explain, describe, somehow convey how we do school. We unschool. How can that possibly work?

It is all about relationship. Relationship and trust and respect are all at the core of how we learn and live. Everything after that comes freely. So we don't have school days. We don't set up hour blocks. We don't spend oodles of dollars on fancy packages of worksheets and books and we don't spend oodles of time talking about what learning systems and what packages work better than others. We can spend that time on the go.

We just do. We just go.

Just is such a tricky word, because things that are just something are never really that simple. I'm not just a mom and we don't just play.

My kids do chores with me, they explore their interests, they build things, they take apart things, they teach each other things, they observe, they paint, they play, they sing, they go! go! go!......

And randomly, always in context, they give us a window into all the things they are learning. Lily often gives tours of the farm and points out the various kinds of weeds and plants and their practical applications. We somehow got on the topic of linear mapping and Euclidean geometry and for days Lily pondered and puzzled out loud how 3 points could not form a triangle....that was incredibly amusing, until it frustrated her. Holly can put together ingredient combinations that are fantastic. She is five and taught herself how to play a trumpet and is now exploring scales. Isaac figured out the iTouch and has mastered five levels in Reading Raven (a K-2) reading program (he's 2 and nonverbal). These things just come along. We don't do table work. We don't drill facts. We walk, observe, cook, work create, and discuss together and in the world.

I could go on, but I think that a visual record will be the best introduction to our methods. Here is June: