I Can't Believe He Did This

It has been well documented in this blog that I love my husband.  Seriously. He's a great guy. He works hard and he's a great dad to our girls. But I think our nearly 15-year marriage has hit a rough spot.

You see, I'm going to have to hang him. Our house has been fairly peaceful.  Both girls sleep through the night with little chance of waking. At 6&3 years old, they are both potty trained and have been for some time. For the most part, they are self-sufficient. 

But the most recent addition to our house pees on everything. Including my brand new living room carpet.  And he stinks. And he has paws the size of Alaska.  And he licks my toes and bites my skirts. And he's so darn cute that I couldn't say no when my dear husband brought him home.

This addition to our family comes just 12 weeks before another addition is due. And I don't have time to potty train a dog right before giving birth to a human. 

My husband has a big heart. He rescued this dog from a friend that had a pregnant dog show up and give birth on his property. My husband will play like a man and pretend that he doesn't like dogs and stray kittens, but we now have an 8-week old puppy in our house.  And there is a whole litter of very friendly kittens outside of our back door. 

In my defense, I am a softy as well.  My parents never let me have a pet growing up, saying the farm full of pigs was plenty. So I decided when I had kids that they could have whatever animals they wanted.  So now we have Biscuit, the dog who pees on everything.  But don't my kids look happy?

Anyone have advice on how to potty train a dog?  I'd really like to save my carpet. And my sanity.

Gone in 60 Seconds

Where should I even begin? Where do you start when you have witnessed both the good and bad of humanity, seen animals alive that shouldn't be and had an outpouring of help similar to an old-fashioned barn raising?

The beginning of June is always my crazy busy time for work.  The first Saturday in June marks the Vintage Indiana Festival, the event I hold to celebrate Indiana's wine industry.  The Friday before is my setup day. I spent the entire day at Military Park in downtown Indianapolis setting up the festival. It was a hot day of determining porta-potty placement, stage locations and lots more. When I left the park that night, the park manager told me that bad weather was expected for Saturday during my event.

I hit panic mode. I spent Friday night awake, worrying about where I would send 10,000 people if a tornado struck downtown Indianapolis. My worries were for naught, during the festival. We had a few brief rain showers, but overall it was a beautiful day.

That night I took my student workers out to dinner. My head finally hit the pillow at the hotel at 11:30pm. At 1:30am, my husband's phone started beeping. My cousin, who we farm with, had texted to tell us a tornado was close to our house.  Now it was time for my husband to hit panic. He was dressed and out of that hotel in 15 minutes, after only having 2 hours of sleep.

It only took about 20 minutes for him to call and tell me the tornado had destroyed one of our hog barns. I immediately started crying. I was so upset for him. My husband farms with my family, my Dad, Uncle and cousin. All he wants is for this hog farm to survive and he pours every ounce of himself into the farm. It is his life's dream to be farming. And I felt like his dream was being shattered once again.

Once daylight broke, I couldn't believe the mess that I was standing in. Metal and debris littered the farm and fields for miles. The roof of the barn, which once was planted firmly on top of the barn, was now floating in our lagoon, leading my husband to say it looked like Noah's Ark.

But the amazing thing through all of this, we only lost a handful of animals. In a barn that houses hundreds of sows and baby pigs, we lost 12. That's it.  They were safe in gestation crates that kept them from blowing away in the 165mps winds that blew back sheet metal like it was paper.

This barn is not the ones at our house, rather 4 miles south of our house. We do have 3 folks who work for us who live in a house at this barn and only one shingle came off the house. No one was hurt. God was watching over everyone.


I can't even begin to quantify the outpouring of help we've had from the community. I keep saying this is why I live in rural Indiana. People have just showed up to help.  I don't even know how we'll begin to thank everyone when it's all over.

Farming sucks. If it's not raining, it's hot and dry. Or a tornado comes and blows away in seconds what it took decades to build. It's always something. Honestly, you can not make any money farming. And people gripe so much about how we raise livestock, that we should let the animals roam freely in fields, blah blah. Let me tell you, had these pigs been roaming in a field when the tornado hit, everyone of them would be dead. The stall they were in saved their little hams! And that's my soapbox...I'll step off for now.

But it's still a lifestyle we fight to save. Because I can't imagine living any other way. And my husband wouldn't trade the hours, headaches and heartache for any other career. The barn may have been gone in 60 seconds, but the determination to survive continues.