Love, bubs and life on our little farm

So, living on a property with little kids when your partner has a busy job that has long hours and a lot of travel associated with it - well it is kind of a catch-22, his well paid career is the reason why we can own a lovely acreage and afford for me to have competition horses but it also makes my life that much harder too.

I don't come home in the evenings from a long day at work and just have to worry about feeding hungry grumpy kids and ourselves. Instead I have to convince said kids that they can wait whilst I desperately try to stop them from either screaming at the front door if they stay inside or getting into trouble/danger/water/rat poison/snakes and-or spiders if they are outside with me, while running around mixing up horse feeds, dashing through dark paddocks feebly lit by spotlights, locking up chickens and generally accounting for the state of the place and fences after being away all day. Makes for that extra fun in the evening and typically makes getting dinner for the kids that much later, its a busy couple of hours...

Ditto for mornings where our alarm goes off at 5.30am or earlier so that we can feed all the animals their breakfast and still get to work at a reasonable hour.

Other things are just that much harder too - gardening - we have so much more garden space to manage and keep clean, mowing is a good three hour job just to do around the house, let alone the driveway and main entrance.. even the groceries - we have to shop at the produce store as well as the usual grocer and greengrocer and fit bags of pellets and grain into the back of the cars.

You have to train your kids as soon as they start crawling about snakes. I must look like an idiot but with both kids I have stood in zoo snake houses, holding the kids up to the glass, repeating "yukky, dangerous, NO" ! Considering there was a small brown snake sliding through the kids shoes on the shoe rack on the front verandah the other day, this is a necessary lesson.

With Jase away alot, and my nearest family 2 hours away, I have a fear of something happening to me, like a freak accident with a horse kicking me during feed time and knocking me out in the paddock, leaving my two kids under four alone. No one would know - the kids can't ring out for help yet (we are working on Elka, she can give our address etc) and no one exactly can pass by our secluded property to notice, it worries me to think of what could happen to t he girls (Jase always points out that maybe I should be worried about myself also but I always forget that bit -aahh mothers!). So with Jase being overseas at the same time as I hve a new horse who is a bit of a unknown as far as behaviour, I organised for my parents to call me each evening at 6.30pm to check I was answering the phone and therefore safe and well inside. Worked well - except for the other day, when a storm created chaos on the roads making me very late home and my mobile battery died so my parents were getting no answer either the home phone or the mobile and were starting to get ready to panic! Whoops.

And storms - that is a whole different kettle of fish on a property - you lose the power much more often, it takes longer to get put back on (why would be we be a priority really!? never mind that we are all on tank water that needs power to deliver water into our homes) and you have bleeding big trees falling down around you. I for some reason,  always cop the worst storms when Jase is not around - including one last year where some paddocks had lost nearly every tree. So true to form - today we copped a whopper, well we had had two storms already by 3.30pm (love Spring!) and I happened to look out the laundry door to the South and saw this moving unbelievable fast right over us. It was scary.
Yeah life is that bit harder on a property but sometimes its a little bit sweeter too!