Iowa-born and transplanted in southwest Missouri, I grew up sort of country – raised by a country veterinarian and his wife/office manager. We tended all sorts of animals including chickens, dairy and beef cattle, horses, dogs, cats and the occasional turtle that lumbered into our front yard. It was a great childhood!
I was blessed with nurturing 4-H leaders and FFA advisors while gaining all the benefits a kid could glean from both of those organizations. Even at Missouri State University, the encouragement continued with gifted professors, advisors and teachers who lead me to a degree in agricultural communications and Spanish.
The adventures escalated into the world of advertising, public relations, marketing and sales. I was a goalsetter, a ladderclimber, whatever you want to call it, and then my world was rocked – by MOTHERHOOD.
In 2002, after working in the Kansas City area for a few years, my country boy husband and I decided to move to his homeland in northwest Arkansas.
We spent several years looking for the perfect piece of property to give our family a similar upbringing to our own “greatest childhoods ever.”
Low and behold we found the perfect little spot out in the country that included a little old farm house. This place was everything we’d dreamed about. We sold our house in town and headed to our new home in the country. If we had to, we were convinced we could live on love inside a camper – then the shoes began to drop. We found out we were expecting our first child and swiftly moved into the old farmhouse.
The bigger I grew, the more turns this adventure took. Our well went dry and the central air conditioner went kaput in the middle of that sweltering Arkansas July. I was surprised by a frog in the toilet one day and a lizard that crawled across the old kitchen floor the next. Suddenly, I began to rethink this idea that raising children in the country was going to be charming and fun.
My handy husband set to work making repairs in the house to make it suitable to bring our baby home in the fall. For about a month, I ran to town every weekend to wash clothes at a laundry mat while Nathan worked feverishly to get enough pipes laid to hook onto the city water system.
We didn’t have central air conditioning that summer so we learned to enjoy the great outdoors shooting skeet, working cattle and cleaning out fence rows. I went to a doctor’s appointment and had to explain why I was 7 months pregnant and covered in poison ivy.
There’s never been another summer quite like that first one on our farm. Now with four active children, we have learned to work together and realize this farm life we chose is not always easy.
Thank you for letting me share escapades of farm life, raising kids and critters on a little piece of heaven in northwest Arkansas. I hope we’ll be great neighbors.
