If you give a girl a bucket...

If you give a girl a bucket like Red Hill General Store gave this girl, you never know what she might use it for around the home and garden...

At first we used it as a lunch pail to have a picnic in the car on a slightly rainy day in between Vacation Bible School and swimming lessons.

(I don't know if you can see those gogurts in the bucket or not (they are the blue tubes sticking out on the top left hand corner), but those are an amazing lunch treat at this pigpen.  They are specifically designed to be frozen overnight, put in the lunchbox or lunch bucket in the morning, and completely defrosted by lunch time. Big Sissy requests them all the time during the school year and they are a great source of calcium and Vitamin D.)

Then, we used it as a trash can after our picnic in the car. (To keep our trash contained in the bucket, I had everyone put all of their trash, if possible, into their sandwich bag before putting it in my bucket.  As an FYI, we are able to recycle the Kool-Aid drink pouches through Big Sissy and Bubby's school.)

Later we used it as a vase for these beautiful yellow spider mums, but be careful, this particular mum tends to shed.

Big Sissy thought it would make the perfect place to put all of the kids' drinks for our Father's Day family cookout.

And she was right.

(Having kid-friendly, mom-approved drinks accessible to the kids at a height they could reach was highly popular with both the kids, moms and dads at our family party.)

And Little Sissy thought it was fun to carry around the house and play peek-a-boo with it.

It also made a great place to store all of Little Sissy's necessities like lotion, hair bows, and her hair brush... what more could a 2 year old need.

(I do have to tell you the most popular item in Little Sissy's bucket is her diaper rash ointment.  Thanks to a tip from a great friend, we started using Resinol this winter for diaper rash and it is absolutely amazing.  It is a non-prescription product, but you have to ask the pharmacist for it.  I really can't believe I've potty-trained 2 children and was almost ready to start working on potty-training a third child before I knew about this product.)

To Bubby, it was his pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.  Unfortunately, the money wasn't real, but to a 5 year old you can have a lot of fun with play money and a pot or bucket of gold.  

That being said, you, my lucky readers, have the chance to win one of Red Hill General Store's buckets.  You see my good friends over at The Real Farmwives of America and Friends are giving away a galvanized embossed tub to one lucky reader thanks to Red Hill General Store.  So be sure to check it out and enter the contest.


While Red Hill General Store did provide me with a bucket to blog about for this post (thanks Red Hill General Store), the pictures, ideas and opinions shared here are my own.

Our Bucket List for the Summer

Even though I'm a full-time, off-farm working momma that still has to go to work 5 days a week despite the fact that the kids are on summer break , I've tried to craft a pretty good bucket list for our summer.  This will be our last summer for many years that no one at this pigpen is in 4-H.  Big Sissy will be a first year 4-H member next year and in Indiana you can be a 4-H member for 10 years.  So needless to say our summers are going to get real busy after this year.

So that being said, I'm trying to squeeze in as much as my work schedule will allow as summer is about spending time with the family and letting the kids truly be kids.

Swimming lessons, vacation bible school, 4th of July with my family, the county fair, the State Fair, and soccer camp have been on our list the last couple years; although, this will be the first year Bubby can attend soccer camp.  (It is just a one week program for 1 1/2 hours each night about 5 minutes from our house.)

This year we also have a pretty exciting family vacation planned; however, The Farmer and I have only told the kids that we are going on vacation.  They don't know where or when, but let me just say we may or may not be visiting a mouse and his friends.

So, I'm pretty pumped about this year's bucket list which is why I was excited we started working on one of our items today.  Another one of our annual summer bucket list items is our county library's summer reading program.  Growing up I loved the summer reading program and I have tried to instill this love of the library and in particular the summer reading program with Big Sissy, Bubby, and Little Sissy.

Today we made the first of many trips this summer, I hope, to the library to officially sign up for the summer reading program and enjoy the library.

Big Sissy hit the computers.

Bubby loves looking for books and movies about farming, building, and trains.

Little Sissy lined up the dinosaurs.

So here's to reading this summer and enjoying our summer bucket list.

What's on your summer bucket list?

It's Lobster for dinner at this pig pen

So as you know, one of the positives of surviving the last few weeks at our house was traveling to Maine for work and partaking in some fresh Maine lobster.  Although I've never written out my "bucket list", I would definitely say this was on my bucket list.  The only thing that would have made it better is if my family could have traveled with me, but such is the life of a mom that works full-time away from the home.  

Although it isn't quite the same as visiting the beautiful Atlantic coast of Maine, I was able to bring a little bit of Maine home to my family.  Thanks to this nice box, the foam cooler with frozen gel packs and salt-water dampened newspaper, and the amazing staff at Port Lobster, I checked this box full of 5 LIVE hard shell Maine lobsters as part of my checked baggage to bring home to my family to enjoy.  Thank you Delta Airlines for safely getting my lobsters from Portland, ME to Indianapolis, IN. 

I didn't get home until after 9pm on Saturday night so we decided we would have the lobster for lunch on Sunday with my in-laws.  We did open the cooler when I arrived home to make sure the lobsters were still alive.  

I wish I had a picture of  Bubby's face when we opened the cooler as they were most definitely alive and moving around.  As a fan of Discovery's Deadliest Catch, he was pretty pumped to have a cooler full of live crustaceans in his house. 

 

We put the lid back on the cooler and put them in the refrigerator for the night. 

The next morning we were really struggling with what pot to use to prepare our after church dinner... we decided on the turkey fryer pot and used the fryer to boil the water.  (This was a great choice as I believe it really helped keep the "fishy" smell out of our house.)

After filling the pot with water and some salt, we brought it to a boil.  We then added the lobsters and boiled them for approximately 20 minutes.  I did learn in Maine that you can't set a timer and walk away.  Boiling them for a certain amount of time based on weight is helpful, but you really have to watch for them to turn the bright red color and then take them out of the water.  

 

All that was left was melting butter for all to dip the yummy lobster and we were ready to eat.

This is quite possibly the easiest main course we have ever prepared at this pig pen, but it might also be the most expensive, but it was all about the experience.  I'm glad that Big Sissy and Bubby have already been able to try lobster and The Farmer and his parents were more than happy with their fresh Maine lobster.