My Favorite Thing About Fall

    I actually wrote this last fall and never published it.  I found it in my drafts and I have been celebrating the end of sunblock for the past couple weeks so I thought I would finally post this. 


   My oldest son is kind of obsessed with fall.  I've already written about that, but the level of his love for all things autumn is really beyond description.
    I, on the other hand, do not have warm fuzzy feelings about this season.  Well, I guess I do if you're referring to the two layers of fleece sweatshirts I put on when the temperatures dip below 70 degrees.  There are a few things I do like about fall....the colors, the crisp air that reminds me of running high school cross-country and marching band at football games with my favorite drummer, and the festive feeling of the approaching holiday season.  But mostly my thoughts about fall revolve around how we're entering 6 months of freezing darkness and doubts that my house can withstand the forces of two little boys cooped up inside for days on end.  Basically, I just can't enjoy fall because I have a really bad attitude about winter.
  But, I have found a silver lining to all of this.  This realization was the highlight of my week last week.

    WITH THE END OF SUMMER COMES THE END OF SUNBLOCK.

    I feel very strongly about the importance of sunblock application in young children.  My husband would tell you I'm tad bit obsessive about it (well, maybe more than a "tad bit"--I have been known to use up an entire 8 ounce bottle of kid's sunblock in one week).  My fears of my children being expose to too much UV radiation are not unfounded; I have two very light-skinned boys, one with red hair, and a significant family history of melanoma.  So two or three times a day every day from March through September my boys get a thorough slathering of Banana Boat.
    Research shows that when applying sunblock only 25-50% of people use the dermatologist-recommended amount of lotion; most people apply much less than the 1 ounce recommended for adults and most don't re-apply it every 1-2 hours.  I can assure you that, at least when it comes to sun protection for my children I am not a part of this statistic.  Despite being outside for several hours a day every day in the summer, my boys are just as pale as they were last February.  Their pediatrician actually said I deserved a standing ovation for my obvious diligence in their skin protection when I took them for their week visits in July.

    But despite my zeal for broad-UV-spectrum protection, the twice-daily sunblocking ritual is not something I --or the boys-- enjoy. The four-year-old usually sighs and rolls his eyes like a teenager as he plops into our official "sunblocking chair."  Meanwhile the toddler takes off running through the house screaming "Sunblock!  Sunblock! Sunblock!" until I chase him down and all but sit on him to get him slathered in sunscreen (I've actually considered filming this whole process and marketing it as an exercise video). 

   So, last Thursday on the first day of fall as we got ready to head out to the pool in 90-degree heat, I looked out at the north-pointing shadows and decided that the intensity of the sun's rays had waned enough that the boys could survive 45 minutes outside without sunblock. 

    When I told the boys they could head outside without sunblock they exclaimed with delight, and I almost thought I heard the sunblocking chair sigh with relief.

Freeloader Farms

We had big plans for our little homestead this year.  Our hopes, dreams, and expectations for 2017 were beyond optimistic. Just to name a few:

-Continue our successful chicken farming

-Become successful dairy goat farmers. Get buckets and buckets of goat milk, never have to buy milk again, make our own goat milk yogurt, maybe even make our own soap. Sell the baby goats and make some money for more livestock. 

-Harvest enough garden produce to can and freeze to feed our growing family through the next year with enough leftover to sell at farmers markets. 

-Start a vineyard.

-Add more trees to our orchard.  Harvest some apples, peaches, and pears 

-Add a pig named Christmas Ham and maybe some turkeys to our little farm. 

This was just the homesteading goals.  Also on our to-do list were things like "refinish the kitchen cabinets," "add a mud room in the garage," and "knock out two windows in the living room and fill in the existing one." 

Oh, and raise three children. And there's that place my husband has to go to every day so we have money. 

So let's take a look at how all of our goals panned out so far this year. 

-We lost 21 chickens this past winter in three separate horrifying coop invasions, including a few chickens that were beloved pets. We replaced them with chicks that grew into chickens that refused to lay for so long our toddler would chase after them shouting "You bunch of freeloaders!"

-Mr. Goat died under our care. (We actually lied about this to our children because they were already too traumatized by the chicken massacres.  We just said he went back home.  I thought it was worth lying to save their little hearts.  GD figured it out though.). One of our own goats died. We got one cup of goat milk total. We kept the baby goats because they're cheaper than therapy for the boys.   We now have freeloading goats.

-We got a late start on our garden. It got flooded three times. Then it got overtaken with weeds. Then we didn't get rain. Then we got bugs. Then the baby goats ate half the stuff. And then we stopped caring. We froze a couple bags of beans. I thought I would miss the excitement of canning. But I didn't at all. Walmart has plenty of frozen vegetables. 

-Everything else failed so we didn't test our luck with a vineyard. 

-We had about 50 gorgeous bug free peaches we were so excited about. Some critter came and ate all of them just before they were ripe enough to pick and left us nothing but a pile of peach pits. And we had lots of pears but they tasted bad. 

-We were too traumatized by the chicken massacres to add edible livestock to our plate (pun intended). 

The only produce our farm harvested this year was 100 lbs of apples we picked out of ditch down the road. Just call us a bunch of freeloaders.