life. faithful.

My last post was getting a bit long, so here's part 2 of lessons from the dairy :0) A) Competition can bring out traits you never knew existed--and what works for one may not work for another! ~When my parents bought the farm (wow, that comes across a bit strange--maybe I should say "purchased"...), a Border Collie came with it. His name was Jimbo, and he was incredibly timid--so much so that he was sharing his doghouse with a litter of kittens when we moved in. Border Collies are great herding dogs to be sure, but Jimbo didn't know us and he seemed unsure of himself around the cows.      On the other hand, we brought with us a Great Dane & German Shepherd mix named Duke. He was a huge black dog with more energy than he knew what to do with and a major chocolate addiction. His tongue was huge, and when he ran it flew out of the side of his mouth, waving like a flag, causing him to run crooked to compensate.      Duke thought the cows looked like...

*Note: I typed "lessons from the diary" first, but that would have been a whole different kind of post!* When I was scraping the snow (which was over a sheet of ice--not much fun) off the sidewalk last week, one thought kept popping into my head: This is so much like scraping the holding pen after we milked... Since that was my thought at the beginning of scraping, I had a decent amount of time to dwell on the thought...so naturally that turned into me figuring out how to write about it. This, my friend, is the result of my snow-scraping exercise: Lessons I Learned as the Daughter of a Dairy Farmer 1. Mornings aren't entirely bad. ~If you know me, you know how dramatic that statement really is. Growing up, it took at least 3 wake-up attempts to get me out of bed in the morning. One of those attempts was undoubtedly my brother jumping onto my bed, placing one hand on the bed beside each of my shoulders, and bouncing me as high as he possibly could while holle...