This blog is a repost from November of 2015, but it’s still my heartbeat today, so I’m sharing again. xo, Sarah
When I look over my shoulder and see my little lady making her own bouquet as she follows me in the flower fields, my heart overflows.
“Don’t forget to strip the leaves off, Mama!” she says with a grin.
When I help my growing boy harvest German chamomile to dry for his tea-making venture, and listen to him brainstorm how to rig up a home-made chamomile rake to make the job easier, I am filled with an intense joy.
One of the primary driving forces for the beginning of our farming adventure was our children. When we started building a small farming business from scratch, our son was 4-1/2, our daughter a 1-1/2 year old bundle of energy. We wanted our kids to know foundationally where food comes from, and were excited for this to be something they’d always known and experienced, not something that dawned on them one day. We wanted them to grow up around chickens and kittens and vegetables and dirt, and for them to be aware that they were a part of our farming team. We were so incredibly inspired to be at the farm for their early years.
Now inspiration is one thing, but the daily working out of diapers and naps and planting and harvesting is quite another! Nurturing the littlest ones holds challenges for every parent.
We “accidentally” signed up for fairly-new-parent boot camp combined with the flower-farmer-florist learning curve! And while we wouldn’t trade our experiences from the past few years for anything, it definitely has held its challenges. The only way we’ve made it, slogging through this season of long days and short years, is through grace and balance and prayer (lots of prayer!).
Our kids are still pretty little, but at least for now most of the mind-numbingly hard, long days that are part of farming with tiny people are in the past. Our children are more ind
ependent day by day, our farm systems are more established each season, and I’ve found myself reflecting a lot lately on how we ever made it through the first few years of farming without throwing in the towel!
As I’ve reflected, a few things have started to stand out in my mind. For instance,
- Consistency is important.
- Keeping our eyes on our long-term goals (and actually taking time to set those goals!) is essential.
- Realizing that potty training will actually most likely occur before anyone gets married is key.
But as I’ve given it more thought, I believe the true answer to “How in the world are we still alive, still sane, still farming?” lies in that we purposefully seek to live a balanced life. A healthy work-life balance (which is so often discussed in our culture that it has become a cliche) is tremendously hard to manage, and our family farming adventure is no exception. In some situations, our business grew more slowly because we rightly chose to meet immediate little-person needs rather than bend over backwards for the farm. At other times we skipped sleep and harvested by head-lamp (or head lights!) while they slept in order to meet deadlines.
It was (and often still is) a series of daily, in-the-moment decisions that added up one at a time to equal the balance we were desperately working for. Isn’t that what life is like, no matter our vocation or situation? Life is an accumulation of decisions, inches, steps that eventually become a way of life, a marathon run?
It was us trusting God to answer our prayers for wisdom about which decisions and directions were best moment by moment, and to give us grace for everything, from daily “moments” to our life-direction.
We are so thankful for this amazing opportunity to truly live life together as a family, and as time passes, I realize that I am thankful for ALL the moments and days – not just the pretty ones!
