Evolution of the Blog

As the year's end is days away, I'm reminded to reflect and evaluate, which I come by naturally. I started this blog almost three years ago and visit it occasionally just to read what we were doing when the children were three years younger with two less siblings. When I visit, I'm reminded that three years isn't all that long of a time period when compared to someone's life, and at the same time become overwhelmed with the amount of things that we jammed into those years.

My first blog was written the day I resigned from teaching. With a little over a month left of teaching, I documented each day. Those thirty two blogs helped me get through the end of one career to start another. It also helped me realize that I love writing. I've never been one for journaling, but this is what started three years of documentation.

That first year saw over 112 blogs, which were mainly focused on the children's activities. I wrote about experiments and art projects; trips and birthdays; baptisms and holidays. Our preschool like schedule meant that everyday we were doing activities, and I wanted to hold on to every moment. That year the kids weren't in school and I wasn't teaching. We were free to just be together.

The second year was the year of changes. Our two oldest started preschool, 3-year old and 4-year old, which meant I shuddled them around. I was pregnant with our fourth child, which meant I was doing everything not to vomit all the time. Then we moved to a different town on our little piece of land, and livestock followed shortly thereafter.

This last year we welcomed our baby boy, and settled into farm life. It has seen fewer and fewer blogs, which is because I know the kind of environment that I write well in, which doesn't include farm work, house work, or the children. I have had so much to blog about this year that its been hard for me to focus.

In the coming year, I'm hoping to blog more giving equal attention to family life and the farm, LimeStone Station. I see blogging as writing my own history book for our family. Its become a hobby that I see value in. So here's to the New Year, and more for the history books.

Harvey

I was rushing to the teacher's lounge with my lunch in one hand and my phone in the other, when I saw that my husband had left a voicemail. In typical fashion, I skipped the voicemail and went straight to calling, which saved some of my precious twenty minutes for lunch.

As I slid into my seat at the usual table, I informed the other teachers that we were the proud owners of a pig. They bombarded me with questions, to which I could barely answer. A friend of a friend at my husband's work found a pig on the side of the road, and it needed a home. We said that it could come to our house, which started a new round of questioning because we lived in town.

My 6'8 giant of a husband had this little piglet in his Carhartt coat snuggled against him. The piglet was all scrapped up, which resembled road rash. His deafening screams when I touched him made me think the poor thing wouldn't survive. We put him to bed in his straw nest that I had penned in with Rubbermaid tubs in the garage.

Like parents putting their baby to bed, we started talking softly so he wouldn't be disturbed. My husband explained that he was found in the country where a gravel road intersects a blacktop with a four-way stop. His rescuer was on her way to work and noticed him beside the stop sign. We spent the rest of the evening speculating how he got there.

I predicted that the farmer was weaning him by moving the piglets to the nursery in a trailer, when he did a Houdini act and jumped out through the slates in the trailer. With that reasoning, it was hard to imagine how the fall from the trailer hadn't killed him or how he hadn't been run over.

After two weeks, he was thriving like Wilbur from Charlotte's Web. He was even mischievous like Wilbur when he got himself stuck in the arm of my old fleece coat that I had donated to him to keep warm in the cold spring weather. However, he was too cute and too stinky for us to keep, so we packed him up and took him to my parent's farm.

We never named him because we knew he was destined for the freezer. However, my mom had no qualms and immediately named him Harvey. My parents had operated a farrow to finish operation for over ten years but sold off everything in the mid 90's. Aside from my siblings and I raising animals for 4H and FFA, my parents were out of the business. This stray pig brought them back into it, and started a partnership with us.

Harvey sparked our passion for providing the highest quality of meat with the best conditions for the animal. We saved Harvey only to kill him for our freezer, but he gave us the realization that our food should be personal. It should cost more because it's a life. Harvey woke us up to what the food system could be. After Harvey, we started doing the marketing for my parent's pigs, which they started raising in their pasture. Then we bought our acreage, and started raising them ourselves. Now the same customers that bought from us in the very beginning, buy from Limestone Station. Harvey is where it all started for us. Eight years later, we are still perfecting the art of producing pork.


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