My life is not normal

Lately on Instagram I've been following the Red Stick Moms Blog posts when one mom from the group takes over the Instagram account and documents their day. This morning, I realized that if I was to document my country life (#mylouisianacountrylife), it would look VERY different from their lives in the city or even near the city.

So, I wanted to document my last 24 hours just for the heck of it.

Josh is gone to a horse breaking clinic in Lafayette, so my mother-in-law got J, my daughter, off the bus at her house. The in-laws are our closest neighbors, and by the road live 3 miles from us on the same road. When I got off work, I picked up my son, R, from day care and drove the 30 minutes it takes to get home. I saw no cars on the entire 5 miles of country road to my in-laws house. I picked up J and we headed to the house. We immediately put our boots on (them in their cowboy boots and me in my rubber boots) and tromped through the mud and grass to the barn.

J, (4), is in charge of feeding the dog, cat, and chickens and getting the eggs, and yesterday, for the first time for me, she did her chores without having to be asked to. I praised her lavishly. I put R in charge of feeding our boarder horse, Spring, and getting him some hay. He had to have help getting the feed scoop full and carrying the flake of hay, though.

I went through the mud to feed the other 3 in the back pen and let them in off the rye grass, and then fed Tex and the mule on the other side of the barn. Usually Josh puts them up at night in a pen even further from the barn, but I decided that I didn't want to go out there in the dark the next morning to let them out, so I left them out. A few more hours on the rye grass won't hurt anything.

After we fed, I brushed Hazel and roped the dummy for a while while the kids played on top of the feed bags in the tack room and rode their bikes around. When it started getting dark we headed to the house to eat supper, checking the onions and potatoes growing in the garden on the way there. The green onions have been thriving, and the other onions have sprouted. We found three potato sprouts as well.

I heated up some meat and potato hash leftovers for us, and then the kids took their baths. We watched about 30 minutes of a movie, facetimed with Daddy, and then they went to bed. I worked on packing our bags to go to my mom's for the weekend. Then, I sat down and listened to some new songs we might be able to sing for Cowboy Church. I realized I wasn't going to have any time to type up our slides for the music, so I went ahead and typed those up and sent them to everybody. By that time it was about 10:30, so I set my coffee pot and alarm, went to bed, and read my AQHA magazine until I got sleepy.

This morning my alarm went off at 5:45, and it was raining pretty steady. I drank my coffee and threw on Josh's big rain slicker and went to the barn to feed. The horses aren't used to seeing me in that, so the three in the pen got scared of me and ran around like idiots. and Hazel wouldn't come in her stall to eat when I was close to it. Then they wouldn't go out on the rye grass because it was raining, and I had to halter and lead Tater out so that the other two would follow. I let the chickens out and fed the cat and dogs. Spring's stall was a disastrous, wet mess, so I just moved him and drug his big huge water bucket to the dry stall next to it and cleaned what I could. Then I labeled the barn with chalk on the concrete so that our neighbors would know how much to feed everybody while I'm gone tonight and tomorrow. Hopefully it'll be easy for them, because they can just leave the horses out.

I headed back to the house just as I heard J screaming "MAMA?"wondering where I was. She came out of the house with her boots and rain jacket on to look for me, and R stayed at the door with his footy pajamas on. I had sweated under the rain slicker, so I jumped in the shower while the kids got most of their clothes on. A few talks later, we finally made it out the door, into the car, and drove the 30 minutes to school, meeting no cars on the first 15 minutes of it. We were, as usual, just barely on time.

It seems like we have to do a lot more pre-planning to accomplish things than most.It's ALWAYS 30 minutes to get to school, no matter what the traffic is like. There is no fast food (except at the neighbors' house!). The grocery store is found in our (or our neighbors') pantry or in the garden. We always have mouths to feed, weeds to pull, stalls to clean, and always something going wrong.

 It's a lot of work, but I'm thankful for my Louisiana country life.