{"id":597,"date":"2014-12-31T07:22:39","date_gmt":"2014-12-31T07:22:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/franchlife.com\/?p=597"},"modified":"2015-01-02T05:47:25","modified_gmt":"2015-01-02T05:47:25","slug":"exhausted-yet-id-do-it-all-over-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/?p=597","title":{"rendered":"Exhausted yet I’d Do it all Over Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are days on the franch that are simply exhausting. \u00a0I wanted to be able to say \u201ctoday was one of \u2018em\u201d but last night I was simply too tired to write. \u00a0Some evenings my husband and I collapse on our couch both asking why we are making our lives harder by living on a franch. \u00a0We don\u2019t have<\/em> to do anything that we do on our franch. \u00a0We are in fact choosing<\/em> to do it. \u00a0Actually, that’s the way it is with most of life, isn\u2019t it? \u00a0It helps on those harder days to remember it\u2019s a choice. \u00a0Occasionally, we romanticize what life would be like without all the responsibilities that come with farm animals. \u00a0Then, thankfully, there are days, like yesterday, when we rub our sore muscles smiling at each other as we listen to our children re-tell the stories from a day well lived. \u00a0Yesterday our family butchered the first round of broiler chickens on our own in our backyard. \u00a0Our children are participating in a chicken competition\u00a0at an upcoming junior livestock show. \u00a0As we get closer to show day, only certain birds meet the standards of the judge so those that do not measure up can be butchered early. \u00a0It was a day all of us worked side-by-side in the fresh outdoor air from sunup to sundown. \u00a0It\u00a0began first appreciating the life of each chicken. \u00a0We all expressed the heart-wrenching hardship of picking up a chicken from its pen to be butchered moments later. \u00a0Prior to choosing that first broiler, we had yet another family debate over whether we\u2019d finally become vegetarians as we were all emotional and hesitant about starting the process. \u00a0Then, it was unanimously decided that we love our homemade chicken wings on Super Bowl Sunday. \u00a0(We aren’t\u00a0ashamed of our love of chicken wings and apparently we’re not\u00a0alone \u2013 it is estimated that 1.25 billion chicken wings were devoured during Super Bowl XLVII!). \u00a0Yesterday, we didn’t need to lecture our\u00a0children on the importance of teamwork. \u00a0This lesson was learned in\u00a0how we all depended on each other to complete their assigned tasks for the process to go smoothly. \u00a0Something we will always remember about yesterday was how our five year old daughter was set on proving she was as grown up as her siblings. \u00a0She didn\u2019t bring us over to where the lines are in the garage marking her height to show how she\u2019s grown over the past year. \u00a0Instead, she firmly planted her feet beside the butchering table and watched the entire process with determined, wide-opened eyes. \u00a0Last year, only four years old, she had insisted on helping and then immediately erupted into hysterics crying, \u201cI thought you were only going to take its feathers off.\u201d \u00a0(To this day, I don\u2019t know where she came up with the idea\u00a0that that was happening. \u00a0It isn’t like she’s ever seen an alive chicken scurrying about without its feathers before?). \u00a0Once she knew she could handle what was happening, she eagerly\u00a0asked for ways to help and then worked at her tasks as much as the rest of us did at ours. \u00a0At the end of the very long and tiring day, you could see in all of our expressions a real\u00a0sense of accomplishment in yet again raising our own food. \u00a0We are indeed choosing to live a more exhausted life by living on a franch. \u00a0But, for us, it means a fuller life with everyday experiences for our family that I once only read about. \u00a0And if I could live all these days\u00a0on our franch over again like the movie Groundhog Day,\u00a0<\/em>I\u2019d happily live them the same way every time. \u00a0Exhausted by all we do. \u00a0Yet, at the same time, energized by all we do each day. \u00a0Life\u2019s good on the franch. \u00a0And now you all know what we’ll be eating come Super Bowl Sunday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are days on the franch that are simply exhausting. \u00a0I wanted to be able to say \u201ctoday was one of \u2018em\u201d but last night I was simply too tired to write. \u00a0Some evenings my husband and I collapse on our couch both asking why we are making our lives harder by living on a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=597"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":613,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions\/613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}