Farmer Fridays - The Real Farmwives of America & Friends - Holidays on the Farm

Welcome to another The Real Farmwives of America & Friends Farmer Fridays feature.






In this quarterly edition, The Real Farmwives & Friends will share their stories of spending the holidays on the family farm.

On our family farm, our Christmas is just like yours in many ways I'm sure ... we decorate the house, we shop and wrap presents, and we bake among other things.

Big Sissy loves to make Puppy Chow/Muddy Buddies or as she calls it, Reindeer Chow, for Santa's reindeer.

This year, she also made my Great-Grandma's Peanut Butter Balls with and without coconut.

(The yummy recipe will follow in a future post.)

Little Sissy even joined in on the fun.  

Where our Christmas and essentially every holiday is different than yours is there is always work to be done even on the holidays on our family farm.  As pig farmers, our pigs need fed and watered twice a day among another things.  Our pigs don't understand when it is a holiday and we don't expect them to.  Taking care of our pigs is our top priority on our family farm so even on a day like Christmas they come first.

This year we celebrated Christmas with The Farmer's family on Christmas Eve starting at 11am.  Besides his normal pig chores, The Farmer had pigs to move to another barn on Christmas Eve Day so his day started very early and was very busy before our family celebration started.  Although I'm sure that isn't how your Christmas Eve started, we wouldn't trade it for anything because being a part of a family farm is one of the greatest things ever.

Besides if we didn't live on the family farm, we wouldn't be able to go sledding like this on Christmas Eve.

So from our family farm to your family, we hope you had a wonderful, blessed Christmas and wish you a Happy New Year!!

Big Sissy, Bubby, and Little Sissy on Christmas morning

Be sure to check out the other Real Farmwives of America & Friends posts to learn more about the holidays on their family farms.

When life hands you lemons

I really try to think of myself as an optimistic, upbeat, glass half-full kind of person.  I remember once reading the quote, "Attitude is the reflection of the inner you."  I truly believe this and have always tried to make lemonade when life hands me lemons. 

Well professionally, life has been handing me a lot of lemons lately which results in a tad more lemonade than I would prefer.  (Don't worry, I still have a job, just a lot of changes and then more changes on top of that.) Any way, these "lemons" have made me more than ready to bring on 2011 as I hope they will quit heading my direction in the new year. 

Although the lemons have been plentiful professionally in the last few months, thankfully, I still have my faith, family, friends, and health which is truthfully all I need and for a bonus, my kitchen table is still clean. 

Wordless Wednesday - 3 Kids and a pig, literally

As if attempting to take a picture with three kids ages 8, 5, and 20 months wasn't hard enough, only a crazy mom like me would then add a live animal such as a pig to the picture and then repeat this process each year to have the perfect picture for one's Christmas card. 

Yes, folks, that crazy mom is me.  I don't know why I do it, but in the end we usually end up with a pretty good picture that took about 20 takes to get. 

Although, I won't be showing the actual picture that we selected, I thought I would share some of the "fun" we had taking these pictures.

Sometimes operator error is the problem, like cutting the pig's head out of the picture

 

Neglect...

Neglect...

Accoring to Merriam-Webster, the definition of neglect is as follows:

1.  to give little attention or respect to : disregard


2. to leave undone or unattended to especially through carelessness

Well, I have neglected a lot lately starting with this blog.  It is been well over a week (ok, almost 2 weeks) since I last blogged and I have been anything but consistent this Fall with my posts. 

I have lots of posts written in my head, but finding the time to actually type them out has not happened.  I thank those of you that have continued to follow along and have faith in me.  It is because of you that I will try to keep going and get on a more regular schedule because when I'm not blogging I'm also not keeping up with my friends' blogs and that is not good either.  For example, I have yet to join in on my good friend Leah's Hunk of Meat Mondays linky party.  I mean what kind of friend am I ? 

Besides not following my friends' blogs, I haven't done a real good job of keeping in touch with a lot of my friends lately by any means of communication and I really hate that.  I would describe my status the last several months as treading water and I'm sure some of you can relate.  I think I might finally see the light at the end of the tunnel as things at work should be changing around the 1st of the year which should help... I hope.

And since I haven't done a good job of blogging lately, I didn't get to tell you about the amazing cake our cousin made for Thanksgiving.  Check this out...

Yes, every part of it is edible.  She is absolutely amazing and just yesterday got a call from Food Network. Be sure to check out her blog, A Couple of Sweet Things.

So now that I've spilled my guts on just a few of things I've been neglecting, I'm proud to say that there are a few things I haven't neglected.

Thankfully, I've been able to plan out a work schedule that has kept me close to home most nights and that is huge for this pig pen. 

We finally got the house decorated for Christmas after I had to battle our pre-lit tree.

When I first plugged it in, this is what it looked like.

Thankfully, after a few good shakes and one extra strands of lights I know have a tree that looks like this.

Unfortunately I took this picture during the day so you can't see all of the glowing lights. :-)

I've also been doing a pretty decent job on my Christmas shopping and am almost done thanks to my pre-Thanksgiving shopping,  Black Friday shopping, Macy's, Amazon, and my sister-in-law's Etsy shop.  Now I just have to get everything wrapped. 

And most importantly, my kitchen table is clean with nothing piled on it.

So even though I've been neglectful, this full-time, working farm momma knows, it can always be worse.