Picking worms

"Are we having worm casserole for supper tonight?" Glen asked as I walked toward the house with a container full of night crawlers.

"No," I said

The worms aren't part of my meal plan for the day. They're part of my quest to be a fun mom.

This morning, as we waited for the school bus, Dan was wowed by all of the night crawlers in the driveway. When he asked why they were everywhere, I explained that their soil was saturated with water from all the rain in the past 24 hours. They needed to come above ground so they could breath.

"You know what all these worms would be good for, Mom?" Dan asked.

"What?" I replied.

He paused for effect, grinned real big, and then said excitedly, "Fishing!"

I agreed as he stooped over to peer closer at one of the bigger worms wriggling across the driveway.

"Should I touch it?" he queried.

"Sure," I said. (I had a napkin in my hand because I didn't have time to wipe the breakfast off his face before we raced out of the house. Dan's bus comes anytime between 7:20 and 7:28, so we usually rush out of the house only to wait for several minutes.)

Dan poked the worm. It curled up. He jumped back and laughed. I wiped the worm goo off his fingers.

During the last minute of our wait, Dan told me I should go back to the house, get a jar, and put all the worms in the jar so that we could go fishing later.

"The big worms can be for he big fish and the little worms can be for the little fish," he said, matter of factly, gesturing with his hands for emphasis. "Maybe we can catch a piranha with that big one!"

The bus came. Dan clambered up the steps. I walked back to the house.

As I walked, I thought about Dan's request. Historically, my answer to requests like these has been no. But, lately, I've been trying to say yes. I've been trying hard these past couple months to be a fun mom – a mom with more patience, a mom who yells less (Thanks, Orange Rhino!), a mom more open to spontaneous fun.

I've learned that I don't have to yell to get the kids to listen (the May issue of Scholastic's Parent & Child has a great piece on getting kids to listen). I've learned that I do have time to have fun with the kids. I've come to view the couple minutes of time I spend on fun activities as an investment in my children's happiness. I don't have to say yes to all of their sometimes crazy requests, but saying yes brings me joy instead of the guilt that comes after saying no. And joy is way better than guilt.

So, when I got to the house, I grabbed a plastic container and dumped in a little potting soil. As much as I would have liked to pick worms with Dan, I knew the worms would all be gone by the time he returned from school. So, I silenced the reminders in my head of everything I should be working on and went back out in the rain to collect the night crawlers.

And I smiled, hoping that Dan will smile just as big when he sees the container full of worms this afternoon.

P.S. Dear Mother Nature: I'm sorry about all the mean things I said about you this winter. Thank you for the beautiful, slow rain that will turn our pastures green, that will bring our alfalfa and oat seeds to life, and, that brought the night crawlers out of the earth to give me an opportunity to practice being a fun mom.

Plans change

The sun in shining. The thermometer says it's 70 ° outside. It's a beautiful day.

We should be doing field work or hauling the last of the manure out. But we're not.

Instead, we're dealing with an ag bag full of corn silage that an assortment of wild critters used for their winter smorgasbord.

Glen found the holes last week after the mountains of snow between the bags finally melted. There are so many holes in the bag it could pass as a chub of Swiss cheese.

Our plan, initially, was to transfer the corn silage from the ag bag to our upright silo and treat it with acid. But the corn silage wouldn't go through the blower.

So, instead, the guys patched up as many of the holes as they could and then packed dirt around the bag. Glen is going out now to IV the damaged spots of the bag with propionic acid in an effort to minimize spoilage.

We're also going to seal up the bag of silage we were feeding and start feeding out of this one so that we can use it up before summer gets here.

This was not how we planned to spend our Monday, but farming wouldn't be farming if plans didn't change on a regular basis.

     *     *     *     

Plans change in life, too.

The last I'd heard, my cousin Scott's leukemia was in remission and they were making plans for a bone marrow transplant.

Then I got a call last night that Scott had gone into cardiac arrest. He passed away early this morning. He was 37.

Now, instead of talking about plans for his recovery, our family is talking about plans for celebrating Scott's life.

Sleepers

Daphne wears sleepers. A lot. She spends about 98% of her time in a sleeper. Dan and Monika wore sleepers a lot, too, but the proportion of time spent wearing sleepers has steeply increased with each child.

Daphne – 3 months

There are a couple reasons why:

(1) Sleepers are comfortable; the fabric is soft and there's no elastic waist band to cut into a baby's tummy. The way I see it, my kids will have the rest of their lives to try squeezing into jeans. Plus, I think jeans look funny on babies.

(2) Because they don't crawl up like pants, sleepers keep babies' legs warm.

(3) Sleepers eliminate the need for socks. Keeping socks on babies is a ridiculous endeavor.

Dan – 3 months

Sadly, my older babies' sleeper days ended long ago and Daphne's will come to an end one day, too.

Monika – 3 months

But what if we never outgrew our sleeper days?

Just think...

There would be no muffin tops.

Or plumbers' butts.

Or bare midriffs. (Really, I don't want to see your belly button unless we're at the beach.)

Sure, we might all look like Teletubbies, but we'd be comfortable and covered.

There would be no more digging through the laundry basket trying to find a pair of socks because your daughter refused to wear the first pair you set out for her.

There would be no need to decide if this shirt looked good with those pants. Picking out clothes would take a fraction of the time.

No need for belts.

Plus, lots of sleepers these days come pre-accessorized, so we wouldn't need a jewelry box full of baubles.

Life would be whole lot simpler.

Daphne – 4 months

Snow thankful

I told myself I wasn't going to write about all of this April snow. This snow on top of mud was not something I found humorous or wanted to remember.

But then last Friday happened and I decided that someday I'll want to remind my kids that, yes, it does snow in April. Sometimes it snows a lot in April. I ran into our friend Eddie at the grocery store yesterday and he said that back in 1950, farmers didn't put a seed in the ground until a month from now.

I've been trying to keep a positive attitude about our white landscape. I keep telling myself, "We need the moisture."

Even Glen said, "All this snow better pay off this summer, or..." (He didn't finish that sentence.)

I've convinced myself that, if April showers bring May flowers, then it must also be true that April snow will help the flowers grow.

I found out last week that Glen's dad planted a whole bunch of tulip bulbs in one of our flower beds last fall. The flower bed that's still buried under a pile of snow. Nonetheless, tulips are one of my favorite flowers and just knowing that they'll pop up sooner or later gives me hope. I am so ready for some color in our yard.

And some color in the pastures, too. Glen said he thinks that all this snow will help the pastures green up quickly once the snow finally melts. I hope he's right.

Last year, we put the cows out to pasture on April 12. Yes, I know, it was an exceptionally early spring, but we normally put them out during the last week of April or first week of May. We're now in the last week of April and the pastures are nowhere near ready to welcome the cows. I'm looking at our milk cow pasture in the picture above. Can you see it?

My positive attitude about the snow was tested last Friday. At 1:40 a.m. that morning, I woke up to the sound of someone pounding on our front door. I looked at the alarm clock and knew right away it was our milk truck driver. (Our milk gets picked up at 1:45 a.m. to go down to Woodbury, Minn. for bottling.) I shook Glen until he woke up and whisper-yelled, "There's someone knocking on the door."

The milk truck was stuck in our driveway. It took an hour for Glen and the driver to get the truck unstuck enough to drive over to the milk house, load the milk, and then get the truck out of the driveway.

Thankfully, snow days come when you most need them. School was canceled on Friday, so at least Friday morning's agenda didn't involve getting the kids to school. (I will say, though, that it would have been better if the snow days and late starts had picked days other than Tuesday and Friday. Those are Monika's preschool days and she's missed several days of preschool this winter due to the weather.)

The snow day and the sunshine gave us a chance to do something we had been meaning to do all winter: build our first ever snowman.

I feel supremely better as a parent, now that we didn't let winter pass without making a snowman. And, instead of being bitter about the snow this month, I'm thankful for one last opportunity to have some winter fun with Dan and Monika.

Skidloader love

Our skidloader had a bad week, so it's on a date with the repair guy at the implement.

(I had to go back a long way to find a picture of our skidloader.)

While it's there, we're renting this skidloader from the implement.

Glen + this skidloader = ♥

I think Glen has a crush on it.

It has more power than our skidloader. What man-farmer doesn't love equipment with more power?

It also has two speeds. That means it takes him half as much time, in high speed, to drive out to the bags of haylage and high moisture corn.

And it has a cab. With a heater. Which happened to come it pretty handy today, since it's only 30-some degrees out and sprinkling. Glen didn't install his plexiglass poor-farmer's-cab on our skidloader this winter, so to go from completely exposed to completely protected made a big impression on him.

I happen to like that this skidloader has a horn. Glen probably does, too. We're getting corn silage from Glen's dad's farm right now, so Glen hauls it here in a dump wagon. Someone has to sit in the tractor and run the hydraulics to dump the corn silage into the skidloader bucket. Then, the corn silage is dumped into the TMR mixer. (Yes, it's a bit of production.)

Anyway, it's hard for the person running the hydraulics in the tractor to see how much corn silage is in the skidloader bucket. But, with a skidloader with a horn, all Glen has to do is honk when the bucket it full. I can't tell you how much easier it makes dumping corn silage.

"There's only one problem," Glen said, after the first day of using it. "I don't want to give it back."

Glen didn't say it, but using this skidloader has to be a little like rubbing salt in a wound. He really wanted to buy a skidloader just like this one with the cash we should have got from selling our extra corn last year. But... last summer's drought changed those plans.

Now, like an old flame that just won't burn out, this skidloader is here to rekindle his desire for a new one.

He even went as far as calling the implement to ask about the price tag for this skidloader.

Maybe I'll go buy him a lottery ticket. Because, unless we sell the 20 extra cows we're switching, a winning ticket is the only way this skidloader will fit in our budget.

Poor guy. It's really gonna break his heart when this skidloader leaves.