Stories from the Farm

My 4-year-old son amazes me daily, nothing gets past him.  Even when you don’t think he is paying attention, he is soaking everything in.  We try to be sensitive about the inevitable circle of life and explain it so that he understands what is going on.  While doing this recently, I was blown away by his understanding of what happened and was very matter of fact about it.  He picked out a couple weiner pigs at the fair last summer and their time to leave approached quickly.  I scheduled the butcher to come out while my son was at school.  We explained that we were going to trade the pigs for bacon, sausage, ham, etc.  I had a friend that said this is what her parents told her growing up and it worked well.  When he got home from school he asked about the pigs and I told him that the guys picked them up.  Without skipping a beat he said “You mean the guys that are going to skin them?”  I about fell on the floor…

This morning while feeding the sheep we were talking about all of the lambs.  He was explaining to me that he was going to take care of all of them.  I told him that some of them were going to be leaving in a while to go to their new homes.  He thought about this for a minute and said that he really wanted all of them to stay.  I explained that in order to buy hay for the mama sheep and daddy sheep we had to sell some of the lambs.  He was finally ok with it, but he went out and pointed to all of the lambs that needed to stay.  Luckily he picked out the ones that are staying.  He has a good eye 🙂