Date Night & Diaper Bag

A couple of weeks ago Ryan and I had date night. I was thinking, "Ah, we could go do something together. Relax. Get away from farm work for a couple of hours."
So what did we do for date night?
We picked up a hay trailer. From an hour's drive from home. And we had a babysitter for about 3 hours.

Sigh. Do you see the red thing in the foreground here? That's it. It really is pretty nice and well built, but we'll just chalk this up to things I never expected to do on date night before being a farmer's wife. 
On a related note, this picture is a little out of date and at this point we actually have steel on the roof of the building! You can stand in the building, in the rain, and not get wet. It's exciting.


Tonight I finished a new diaper bag for my daughter! I loved my old one, and I'm forever grateful a friend of mine made it for me, but I decided it was too small and was getting a bit beat up. So I got the pattern "Case Closed" from Stitchin' Sisters, and this is my result!

It might be too large, but I like it. After I packed it with what was in the other diaper bag, it didn't seem too big anymore... I modified the pattern heavily. The three pockets on the front exactly hold the pyrex 1 cup containers I use to transport her homemade baby food, which is a very custom need for us.

I tried not to go overly baby-like and not too floral, but Ryan may still feel it's a little feminine. Ah well, if he doesn't like it, he can make one!

I like the end result for a diaper bag, but I'm not sure how much I'd recommend the pattern. It needed a lot more diagrams, and the ones it had weren't very clear. I've definitely worked with better patterns, although this was my first bag I've ever made that had real structure and a zipper, etc. 


What do you think of it? Too feminine for any future boy babies, or OK?

Calves and Hot & Cold spots

It's calving season here, and as of writing this I think we're up to three.

I say I think because calves are kinda little. They're shorter than the grass the cows are currently grazing, and they have a tendency to wander off. Can you tell there's actually two in this picture?

I think.


The other night Ryan and I were walking the field right after dusk and it was perfect weather to find the warm spots and cool spots on the farm. 

This is one of those things I never knew was real until I owned 40 acres. There are noticeable warm and cool spots in the landscape! And I mean they're about 100 ft in diameter and are probably 5 degrees cooler or warmer than the ambient temp. 

It's really pretty cool. I kept getting all excited when we hit a warm or cool patch and I'm pretty sure Ryan thought I was nuts.

As usual, I'll finish up with the little one picture of the day. Ryan always wanted to throw dry ice in a bucket of water because he heard it was cool. We had some left over from our locker date, so we did.

Our little lady grabbed a stick and spontaneously started stirring. All I could think was "double double toil & trouble." Halloween costume idea perhaps?

Slopes and Charity Quilt

We had another work day with some friends coming out to help with the building, and Ryan got himself in a bit of a hurry on Saturday morning getting ready for people to come out. He was frustrated with the water trailer not wanting to come off the truck hitch, and then when he finally got it off he misestimated the slope and we had a bit of a mishap.

We had a bunch of steel for the building roof in the back of the truck, so we couldn't have the tailgate up. Everything (500 lbs of feed, tools, 20+ 2x4's, etc) including the 20 sheets of steel slid down out of the truck and onto the grass.

Our friends, and their iPhone camera, were just in time to help pick up.

Do you see the cow in the background of this one? At least the weather was really nice, usually this sort of thing happens at dusk in a snowstorm in December.

Then we got down to the business of building. Jim and Ryan framed windows and doors while Drew trimmed the rafters to the right length and Michael, Adam, and I put purlins on the roof. I actually thought that was kind of fun, apparently childhood monkey bar skills have application in the "real world!" This pic was taken by Adam from the roof while Ryan and Michael go fetch tools. 


I recently did some scrap organization in my quilting area and decided I hadn't made a charity quilt for the year yet.

This one will go to Quilts for Kids, which is the charity my guild has picked for the year. It's about 36" square, and I have to say I like this one better in person. The border fabric doesn't look quite so busy in person somehow.


Last for anyone who stuck with me this long, Ryan sent this picture of my "Little Engineer" to me at work. He was repairing his chair in the kitchen, and she got the idea that she needed to figure out how to use the screwdriver too. 

 Sorry the pics are fuzzy. Ryan wanted to capture the moment so he didn't have time to focus, etc. 

 Totally made my day.

Morning Glories and Peach Jam

I don't have a green thumb. It's just something I have to get over and admit to myself and the world around me. I know as a Farm Wife (yes the caps are on purpose) I should have a fabulous garden, both flowers and veggies. But those of you who read this blog or know me (or both) know that I just don't. So instead, I love my volunteer flowers. The ones that reseed themselves, don't have to be watered, and are pretty. 
Go Morning Glories!!

While the blue ones may be nicer, these purple ones just keep coming up and taking over my porch. I'd be annoyed if they weren't so pretty! So instead, I encourage them. And by encourage, I mean in the fall I spend time on my porch with my daughter picking the seeds off the vine and tossing them back into the garden.

So as I posted a few months ago that our peach tree actually bloomed! It's taken a beating in the snow storms of the past few years, so it didn't make very many peaches. But I did google a white peach jam recipe, and found this one on a blog:
Peach Jam
So I made it today!

Yum. I've tried some, and it's delish.


Lastly, last weekend we went to Kansas City for my high school best friend's wedding. It was totally awesome, and then on Sunday we went to the Kansas City sculpture garden. So I'll close with some pics from the trip!

The giant shuttlecocks are one of the more famous sculptures in KC, although I don't think my daughter saw the artistic significance...

The sculpture in the background is called "sheep piece" because the sculptor's sheep liked to climb all over it. Love it!

Marquardt 102 beats Fisk 101

I have a phrase I like to use when I do home repair around here:
"Marquardt 102 beats Fisk 101." 
It's kind of like the way classes in college are numbered. If English 101 is the intro class, English 102 will be just the tiniest step above it. Not the intro, but no expert level. So our house was previously owned by people named Fisk.
They were do-it-yourself-ers. 
I say that with a bit of tongue-in-cheek because, well, in many ways I'm just as cheap about my home repair. 
So there are some things that they did that are.. um... less than perfect. Not that they started with perfect materials mind you, since this house was built in 1868. But here's a good example.
This is our coat closet:

It is a folding door with a rail at the top. When we moved in, if you closed the door all the way the little guide would often slide off the rail. This would be Fisk 101. So I employed all of my handyman style skills to fix it.

Can you see my fix? Here it is from the back.

Oh yeah, check that bad boy out. That's a shim that's been broken off so it's not too long. I unscrewed the rail on one screw, slid in a shim, and rescrewed the rail in through the shim. (rescrewed; is that a word? Hmm... spell check doesn't think so.)
And that would be Marquardt 102. Pretty good, huh?


So recently we decided we hated the storm door on our house. Chances are 90%+ that it was purchased at an auction for $20 or less and it showed. Darn thing was a pain in the keyster. (Huh. Keyster is also not a word. I'm full of these tonight!)
Here's the old door

What you can't see is that I've ripped out the bottom screen because our cat clawed it to death. If you've never seen a screen clawed to death, consider yourself lucky. It's ugly. Not to mention the screen totally loses its purpose in life. I've also already replaced the broken latch on it once, and the entire open edge was coming off so it made a horrible cracking noise every time the door opened and closed. 

Turns out if you replace a screen door, it's not a super easy process. It involves, like, drill bits and stuff. 
But two days later, here's what we have!

I feel the need to say "voila!" Maybe this one was actually complicated enough to be Marquardt 103. Or even Marquardt 201. Anyone want to hire a contractor? No job too small! 


So I invite you to share. Do you improve the things the previous idiot did to your house with things that are only borderline less idiotic? Or do you hire someone?

Lady in Red & Talking to Sheep

As I helped Ryan herd sheep tonight--this consists of standing in a spot he dictates and just being generally intimidating--I looked down at my red shirt and red polka dot farm boots and thought to myself, "this is probably not what Chris De Burgh was thinking when he sang 'Lady in Red.' "

While I do actually own a red dress that cleans up ok, this is not it.


My daughter's newest, best trick is that she makes sheep and cow noises. Not "baa" and "moo" but "me-eh-eh" and "maaahw." Altogether more accurate. Considering her current words are "Mama," "Daddy," "ball," and an occasional "num-num" in reaction to food she likes, she's soon going to make more animal noises than words. She's working on turkey noises too... 
But here's a video of her talking to the sheep for your viewing pleasure.

Bad Summer Night Poetry

There's a party in my garage,
and everyone's invited.
Turkeys, chickens, garden tractor
coexist united.

In amongst the concrete mixer, 

a brooder design is working well.

But can you tell turkey from chicken

in a building hotter than heck?

Cicadas and crickets harmonize
in a sky marbled pink.
They tell me "go and get a camera!
Then just stop and think."

So I leave you with the sound
of an Iowan midsummer night.
It's time to go in and wash the eggs
before I get a mosquito bite.