Personally, this winter I've had the opportunity to reevaluate where I'm at in my health, my role at the farm and as a mother. Now that Baxter is 3, he is more and more independent on and off the farm. He rambles around always finding a task to keep himself busy - hoeing in the silo garden, collecting rocks, visiting the chickens or snuggling up with the kitties. And of course big sister Beatrice, 6 now, is the queen bee of the farm and if she is not at school she and Baxter are off on their own adventures.
For the past 7 years I've most likely had a baby on my back or on the ground crawling through the rows or toddling around - at each respective age needing to nurse, eat, sleep, be held, be "protected" from farm animals, be carried along the farm paths, have a diaper change. While it has been tremendously rewarding to raise our kids at the farm it can be a bit of a mind meld. Even as a laid back, down to earth mother I have had my share of needing to be "productive". I think I'm getting there - both with opportunities to do physical "real" work and with the patience to find the balance between work and home and kids. Last season I started to see the coming change as I was able to help pack bins on harvest days, hoe a half row of some crop or other or occasionally leave the kids at the farm while I ran back home to catch up on office work.
It can be a real challenge and juggling act to be a work at home mom and farmwife. It isn't always the bucolic dream you might think or as productive as the modern, western, busy work-a-day mind wishes. But at the end of day it is pretty great to be cooking your own food for dinner and think back to the morning when your kid was drinking milk straight from the cow. So here we go again for another farming season, one during which I hope I'll get dirtier than ever.
