They Thought It Would Never Come...Summer

6/5/2017

Summer is finally here!

The school year is officially over.

The backpacks are put away.

The assignment sheets are all complete.

Freedom!

Who are we kidding?

Our kids just trade assignment sheets for summer chore sheets.

The fans have all been hung in the barn.

Today all the show girls get pulled out of the field and put back in their show stalls.

It is time to get them back on show feed and give them daily baths and workouts.

There is no rest in the summer.

Today the boys will start with washing and blow drying 2 cows.

Shortly, they will be up to washing, drying and working 6 cows each day.

Don't blame the parents (Mom tried really hard to talk them out of all of this)...

Isaac and Walker chose this many cows.

The plan is for each boy to take a beef feeder and a Miniature Hereford heifer to the county fair.

The week after county fair, we are headed to The Ohio State Fair where we will be showing the 2 heifers and a cow-calf pair (or two).

All of these cows will get a daily bath, conditioners blown in, and either a tractor walk around the hay field or individual ground work in the barn yard.

This alone is a full time job. We figure about an hour per cow, which will mean about 6 hours per day of cow work.

Now...

Add a little bit of kid procrastination, dilly-dallying, fighting, snacking and "resting", and the day is pretty much gone.

However...

The list goes on.

We do ask them to do some things around the house/farm to help out Mom and Dad.

For instance...

Put your dishes in the dishwasher.

Pick up after yourself.

Mow the grass and weed eat.

And the occasional miscellaneous project.

A post shared by 4 Wiley Farm (@4wileyfarm) on Mar 12, 2017 at 2:57pm PDT

And to top it all off...

We have an almost 15 year old boy with farm boy muscles.

He is in hot demand with all the neighbors this year.

I guess that gives him some motivation to cut out some procrastination, dilly-dallying, fighting and "resting" so that he can move on to the paying jobs.

And we all know that it is way more fun to do the same work at someone else's house than it is to do it at your own house.

Besides....

He keeps seeing a truck in his 16 year old future.

He had better be throwing a lot of hay bales this summer!!!

But do not fear...

It is not all work and no play around here.

Both of the boys will be attending a week of church camp this summer.

And they have already told us that they are spending 2 weeks (we say 1 week) with one grandma and going to North Carolina with the other grandma and grandpa.

A post shared by 4 Wiley Farm (@4wileyfarm) on Jun 2, 2017 at 2:49pm PDT

They finished school last Wednesday and we let them do whatever they wanted on Thursday and Friday.

Freedom can turn into an interesting adventure.

They decided to raid the trash pile and found an old hose.

They zip tied it to the trampoline and poked more holes into it to make their own soaker hose.

Turned on the water...

And they had their very own country boy water park.

Summer will go too quickly and before we know it we will be once again packing lunches and backpacks.

For now, they are enjoying the freedom from school, sunshine, sleeping in (just a little bit), working with their beloved animals and machinery (green of course), building those farm boy muscles and working so hard they can't wait to crash into bed each night.

This is Us - our life, our story, our farm