Week In The Life 2015 – Friday’s Words and Photos

Wondering about the Week in the Life photo/documenting project?  You can find more about it in THIS POST.

Getting ready for the day.  Going to have to be on top of things this morning because we have a lot we want to accomplish today and we have big plans to help Dad and Wyatt with the cows at 10AM.

First up is cleaning.  The kids and I tackled all of our major weekly cleaning chores this morning.  I scrubbed the bathroom, Kaitlyn vacuumed and Tyler did the dusting.

Oh and good news – my UP fitness tracker that accidentally went through the washing machine on Monday and has been drying out until today seems to be working just fine, thank goodness.  I’m sure I will get a lot of steps today.

My mom and Kaitlyn plan to take cupcakes to some new move-ins this afternoon so they were rushing to get them mixed up and in the oven before we had to leave.

Tyler helped by putting the cupcake liners in the pans, making a “patter-in” as he went.

The dogs (this one is Charlie) tried their best to get in the way.

And I took a minute to snack on one of Wyatt’s protein creations.  I think this one was a coconut (he’s obsessed with coconut right now), pecan, caramel donut.

10:00 AM  Time to saddle up!

Dad, Wyatt and Kaitlyn rode the horses and Tyler drove along behind on the 4 wheeler, with me riding with him so I could hop on and off to open gates and do whatever was needed on foot.

We had to round up all the cattle from the back pasture and move them to the corral.
My little cowgirl – she did really well for her first (or maybe second time) herding cattle on a horse all by herself.

Overall, it wasn’t too bad getting all the cattle where we needed them to be.  Then it was time to separate the calves from the cows and then to pull out the boys so we could work on them.

The kids were left to entertain themselves and I had figured I would pretty much just end up watching and taking photos but I wound up being much more hands-on than I had planned.  It took all three of us adults working together to get the calves “banded” as quickly and painlessly as we could – and it wasn’t all that quick or painless.  Kind of frustrating actually, but that’s to be expected with this kind of thing.

There’s Mini Hopper, the orphan who is still bottle-fed twice a day. He was convinced he should be eating, not participating in whatever craziness we were undertaking and tried to eat my hand.

This is just about the only time during the whole week of this photo project that  he pulled the no-more-photos-hands-covering-face thing.  I was actually pretty happy with how cooperative the kids have been with me having the camera out all the time.  They like taking some of the photos too.  Kate took some of the earlier ones of me, and I’m pretty sure Tyler took the one of the chain below (which I’m pretty sure was supposed to be a photo of the horses but the focus was off.  I actually really like how it turned out though) and about 100 blurry unattractive ones of me (which I promptly deleted).

This little guy was only a week old.  Dad has no idea why he came so late.  It’s amazing to see the size difference between him and the other calves – they’re huge!  Obviously, he didn’t get “fixed” along with all the others.

Once they made it out of the chute they would often lay down right away.  I guess that is their way of dealing with the stress.

Wyatt had to leave for an appointment, but the rest of us managed to get the cows back to the pasture just fine.  In fact, it was even easier that trying to get them into the corral earlier.

2:00PM Lunch was a bit – ok a lot –  late.  Salad and nectarines for me, boiled eggs and fruit for Kaitlyn, and Tyler went with cereal.

We then attempted to frost the cupcakes, which had overflowed in the pans a bit and the wrappers were pulling away from the cupcakes on their own and…well it was a cupcake fail.  Guess that’s what we get for using a cake recipe that we had never turned into cupcakes before.  They tasted fine but looked bad enough that the Welcome to the Neighborhood cupcake delivery had to be postponed.

It has taken a while (weeks!) but Tyler has finally settled into the No Screens thing and will once again occupy himself with toys for long periods of time (at least after being prodded to do so).  This is how he plays, with toys (usually cars) strewn around him, sprawled flat on the floor and carrying on a big conversation/story line out loud.  It’s pretty cute, actually.

Dinner!  I had the best intentions to put dinner in the crockpot at lunch time but we got home too late for that.  Of course we were too tired to even think about cooking, so Sam picked up pizza from Summit Inn.  Pepperoni pizza for us, cheese sticks for the kids.

Total photo count for the day (after deleting all the blurry photos the kids took):  24 on the phone, 149 on the DSLR.  Almost all are straight from the camera and unedited at this point.

While spending half the day dealing with cows isn’t really a “typical” day for me, what is typical lately are the daily reminders of how things were when I was growing up, how much WORK being an adult is (even before you add in farm chores), and how much more I value it all looking at it from this perspective (oh and did I mention how much less I complain than my kids do? 😉 and how I don’t really mind doing a lot of the work now, even when I get stuck doing gross and dirty things).  We live in a gorgeous place surrounded by caring wonderful family members and I’m grateful for that every day.

Anyone else still working on Week in the Life along with me?  What are you learning as you review your photos and notes?