The Forgotten Chores

We have some daily farm chores that we have to do. Most of them I don't mind at all. It's all pretty simple ~ feeding them grain, putting out hay, filling water buckets. It takes maybe 10 minutes. Now I know my friends who don't have alpacas think that cleaning up poop is a bad job, but I completely disagree. It's my favorite job. I'll pass the grain and hay feeding on to my husband in a heart beat and focus on the poop. The poop is easy to scoop and generally has no odor (though their urine can at times stink). The part that I like most about poop scooping is that it forces me to take a break from the rest of life, and I get lost in my own thoughts. How often in our busy lives do we have that luxury? It is the best therapy.

There are chores that I put off. It's too easy when I have a full time job, two children, and a farm to care for, to come up with an excuse not to do certain chores. I didn't realize how many things I walked by, knowing they should get done, but I had a ready made excuse why I didn't have to do it. Well, after our vacation to Wisconsin, I had a few days of vacation that I took at home. We came home from Wisconsin on Wednesday evening, but I won't return to work until Monday. Thursday I walked by a few things with the excuse that I was tired and recovering from our vacation. But when Friday came, I knew I needed to do away with the excuses or soon the vacation would be over and I wouldn't have completed the things I wanted to.

One thing I often rationalize and get out of doing is brushing Spot. Spot is a Great Pyrenees and is supposed to be brushed everyday. I admit I am terrible about this chore. I can't remember the last time I did brush him. So on Friday morning, I set out to give him a good brushing. He's moving so you can't see how handsome he looks, but you can see all the fur I brushed off of him (on the ground in the distance):



I did some other things like cleaned up our backyard, picked up a tarp that was out in the pasture, fixed a fence and so forth. Once I told myself no excuse would work, I realized how quick some of these things were to complete. I wish I hadn't put them off for so long. If I had just done them, I wouldn't have had to come up with excuses everyday.

One chore I really wanted to accomplish over my vacation was to rake up the leaves and weed the front flowerbeds. When we built out house we chose not to put in a yard, but instead put a very large flowerbed and landscaping in front of our house.



One thing I didn't think about was the fact that the chore I hate the most is raking leaves. I should have never built a house in the woods! Every year I put off raking the leaves and soon my flowers come up inbetween the leaves and it makes a huge mess. On Friday afternoon I decided it was time to tackle this dreaded chore.

It's not done, but after making each of my kids put in an hour of work on it, and I worked during those two hours plus another after they were done, I decided that was enough progress.

For Saturday and Sunday, my goal was to get some yarn spinning done. I'll post about that in my next blog entry.