Good Morning! I awoke to the sound of rain.....again. The last three weeks have been overcast and rainy, leading to a farm full of mud. Everything is muddy, even the sheltered livestock pens. The chicken yard, well, let's not talk about the chicken yard. I was thinking of replacing them with ducks anyway.
The rain has certainly made homesteading not the most pleasant of adventures. Besides trying to keep the livestock dry and fed, I've been trying to convince the 10 and 8 year olds that playing in the muck is not the most enjoyable thing in the world or should be limited to once a day. Don't get me wrong. I'm actually a great proponent of dirty kids. They should get dirty.....daily. But when the dirt is mud and the play times are mixed in with indoor times necessitating a complete change of outfits.....well, let's just say that my laundry basket looks like it exploded.
And the rain isn't making that any easier either. Two years ago I put the older 4 children in charge of their own laundry, giving them their own baskets, a specific laundry day, and two rules: use only cold water and only use the dryer in inclement weather. For a while, read that: a couple of weeks, everything perked along fairly well. Until one of them "forgot" to do their laundry until late in the day. I graciously allowed them to use the dryer. Then all of a sudden children who can recite whole scenes from movies they saw once five years ago couldn't remember their wash day or to put them on in time for them to be hung out to dry. Frustrated was a kind word for the way I felt. I was tempted to just get rid of the dryer but the frugal side of me just couldn't get rid of something that worked. So I took it to the Lord.
Yahweh is the protector of the frustrated and downtrodden and, if you are a homeschooling mother whose children outnumber you 6 to 1, you have been there at least once. If four of those children are 18 and older, you've been there lots. And, if those children have been raised to be independent thinkers who don't just follow the herd, you live there. Two weeks after I began praying to Yahweh about how in the world to resolve this without resorting to my "Attila the Hun" impersonation (I've really been trying to cut down, honest) my dryer died. Oh, hallelujah! I don't think I've ever been so happy to lose an appliance. Ray tried for a week to fix it. "It" turned out to be a part that would cost half the price of a new dryer to replace. Ray spent another week trying to figure out a way to finance a replacement before he realized I wasn't interested in replacing it. Like it or not, no one was using a dryer.
That was a year and a half ago. I've never really looked back, although the children have.....and often. To handle situations like winter and the current monsoon season that we are enduring I purchased a drying rack from Amazon.com for the small stuff and set up an old damaged flagpole someone had given us to hang shirts and pants on hangers. It works fairly well, except for sheets and towels. I've been trying to get Ray to install a longer clothes horse, and here, that would suspend from my 12 foot ceilings and be lowered/raised by a pulley system for those items. But, until now, I've been able to get those things done and hung outside on a regular basis. At least regular enough for me to feel that the gain isn't worth the argument. Now, however, I could really use that.
But, eventually, we will get some sunshine. And I will be ready to grab my chance for some clean-air fragranced sheets and open aired towels.
Now, it's time to get started on another day.......and a load of clothes.
May Yahweh bless you in this new day!
Laurie
The rain has certainly made homesteading not the most pleasant of adventures. Besides trying to keep the livestock dry and fed, I've been trying to convince the 10 and 8 year olds that playing in the muck is not the most enjoyable thing in the world or should be limited to once a day. Don't get me wrong. I'm actually a great proponent of dirty kids. They should get dirty.....daily. But when the dirt is mud and the play times are mixed in with indoor times necessitating a complete change of outfits.....well, let's just say that my laundry basket looks like it exploded.
And the rain isn't making that any easier either. Two years ago I put the older 4 children in charge of their own laundry, giving them their own baskets, a specific laundry day, and two rules: use only cold water and only use the dryer in inclement weather. For a while, read that: a couple of weeks, everything perked along fairly well. Until one of them "forgot" to do their laundry until late in the day. I graciously allowed them to use the dryer. Then all of a sudden children who can recite whole scenes from movies they saw once five years ago couldn't remember their wash day or to put them on in time for them to be hung out to dry. Frustrated was a kind word for the way I felt. I was tempted to just get rid of the dryer but the frugal side of me just couldn't get rid of something that worked. So I took it to the Lord.
Yahweh is the protector of the frustrated and downtrodden and, if you are a homeschooling mother whose children outnumber you 6 to 1, you have been there at least once. If four of those children are 18 and older, you've been there lots. And, if those children have been raised to be independent thinkers who don't just follow the herd, you live there. Two weeks after I began praying to Yahweh about how in the world to resolve this without resorting to my "Attila the Hun" impersonation (I've really been trying to cut down, honest) my dryer died. Oh, hallelujah! I don't think I've ever been so happy to lose an appliance. Ray tried for a week to fix it. "It" turned out to be a part that would cost half the price of a new dryer to replace. Ray spent another week trying to figure out a way to finance a replacement before he realized I wasn't interested in replacing it. Like it or not, no one was using a dryer.
That was a year and a half ago. I've never really looked back, although the children have.....and often. To handle situations like winter and the current monsoon season that we are enduring I purchased a drying rack from Amazon.com for the small stuff and set up an old damaged flagpole someone had given us to hang shirts and pants on hangers. It works fairly well, except for sheets and towels. I've been trying to get Ray to install a longer clothes horse, and here, that would suspend from my 12 foot ceilings and be lowered/raised by a pulley system for those items. But, until now, I've been able to get those things done and hung outside on a regular basis. At least regular enough for me to feel that the gain isn't worth the argument. Now, however, I could really use that.
But, eventually, we will get some sunshine. And I will be ready to grab my chance for some clean-air fragranced sheets and open aired towels.
Now, it's time to get started on another day.......and a load of clothes.
May Yahweh bless you in this new day!
Laurie
1 comment:
haha Laurie~ this is Luke's second week at Cape Fear. The first week I was gonna but him a purdy umbrella. The next week a purdy canoe. Now I think his dog needs a life jacket and he needs a jet ski? take care!
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