A Load of Manure for Mother's Day

    I'm not a huge fan of "greeting card holidays."  In fact, I'm not a huge fan of greeting cards in general.  If you know me in real life you may have noticed that I don't send cards anymore.  Sorry. 

  But that's not what this post is about.
  My husband and I usually don't do much for Mother's Day or Father's Day so I wasn't expecting or wanting much, but I was looking forward to being treated a little special by my boys on that day.  But Mother's Day was not necessarily a good day for us.

   For starters, Mother's Day is on a Sunday.  Sundays are never good days in our household and my three-year-old's church attire is to blame.  That topic in and of itself could be a whole blog post, possibly even a series.  Actually, I could see it as a reality show, "Survivor Sundays: Church Pants."    

   But I digress.

  Anyway, on Mother's Day my preschooler was out of sorts, I was still stewing at my husband over the goat fiasco from a few days before, and there was a dump trailer of wet manure drying in the sunshine in our backyard. 

   That dump trailer of manure was in a way part of my Mother's Day present.
   The day before my husband offered to take us all out to eat some place nice for Mother's Day.  If you have young children, going out to eat someplace "nice"--like a restaurant where they don't have your meal ready and wrapped by the time you get to the end of the counter--may not be considered an enjoyable way to celebrate your special day.  Especially in the Mother's Day weekend crowds.  My diaper bag does not hold enough toys, nor does Olive Garden have enough breadsticks, to entertain my two boys while we wait for our plates full of delicious noodles.  It was a lovely day outside anyway, one of the first days in a while it wasn't pouring rain, and we were enjoying being outside and getting some garden work done.  So, instead of going out to eat, I suggested we head over to the neighbors for a load of sheep manure for our garden.
   Yeah, I know I'm weird.
   Of course, getting sheep manure is a family affair, so we loaded up the boys and headed over to the neighbors with the tractor and dump trailer.
   Our neighbor was happy to donate some of his sheep manure to our garden.  Thrilled, really.  So thrilled that when my husband told him to fill the trailer up he took him quite literally.  The boys and I sat watching as the skid steer loaded it up, the excitement growing (well, in two of the three of us) with every scoop.  Our neighbor just kept loading the trailer and going back for more. 

   "More manure!" My three-year-old exclaimed. "How much manure do we need Mommy?!"

   Finally, my husband started driving the tractor out of the sheep pasture with heaping-full trailer behind him.
   He didn't get far.  The overloaded dump trailer got stuck in the soggy pasture.
   The scene that made my sons' day.  Nothing is more exciting to a preschooler and a toddler than watching a tractor and a skid-steer try unsuccessfully to tow a manure-laden dump trailer out of a muddy sheep pasture.  As I answered the steady stream of questions from the three-year-old about tractors, skid-steers, and why they were dumping the manure back out in the pasture, the toddler bleated happily at the herd of sheep.

  After about 45 minutes and one broken tow strap, it was decided that the trailer was going need to be almost entirely unloaded in order to get it out.
   It was supper time so we headed back home for a quick meal.
   After supper, it was time to figure out what to do with the stuck trailer.  Of course, all of us had to go back.  My husband was going for the dump trailer, my boys were going for the entertainment, and I was going because the manure was my idea on the first place.  As my husband scooped 6 tons of manure out of the trailer with the tractor bucket, the skies got darker and darker.  I had walked the boys over in a wagon so we headed back home to avoid the rain. Just as my husband got the trailer out of the pasture, it started to pour.  He finally came home, soaking wet and covered in manure.  The small load of manure he managed to get out of the sheep pasture was now stuck to the inside of the dump trailer from the rain.
   Which is why every time we looked out into the back yard on Mother's Day, we saw the dump cart, bed tilted all the way up ,with a load of wet manure drying in the sunshine and why the highlight of our day was finally getting it unloaded into the garden.
   Next year, maybe we'll go out to eat.