Reaping and sowing

People tend to wonder what I’m about. I mean there’s so much a girl can do so why do too much some say? Why not be good and work in one area, maybe two? Specialize and play nice. Be good to your husband, massage his feet, bake muffins and never be grumpy when you get your period. Consider getting pregnant as you can’t leave it too late when you’re already 34! (Ding ding ding! Last round last round!) Settle down and be satisfied. Good girl. Pat pat. Sigh… I see many more 35 –ish year old women like me struggling with this theme it’s not funny. Enough of that already.

Having a 64 acre farm with 34 animals (was 50), being at work 49 hours and having my own business naturally has its merits. It gets harder if there are other things also in the equation like a social life, trying to see friends, going to business networks, designing logos and illustrations for overseas relations and fabrics for Auckland with also wanting to do some writing. My days are filled from dawn till night and I enjoy them. Most of the time. I stopped watching tv because by the time we can the news has come and gone hours ago. Now there’s a calf living in our kitchen. Nico just phoned to say he’s off to Invercargill for several days. If that's ok. Of course it is. I feed the animals and bottlefeed the wee fuzz man.

So when do you know you do too much? Well for starters when I started to hear Nico grumble more and more. Very loudly. We had to sit down and discuss a few things. You get the picture. This was last year and we managed. For me everything is about the enjoyment of achieving and learning and it’s about respecting myself and my life partner. It’s about choices and about learning to take time to do nothing. That last part is incredible challenging: therefore it hardly ever happens. It’s a very rare event to see us lazy butting about.

People think everything just happens to us and that maybe we got ‘lucky’ living the lifestyle ‘dream’. The truth is we work harder then hard; we have to tend our relationship so we don’t drive each other mad and we have to learn to take our foot of the gas pedal to just enjoy life. This is hard for us. We sweat to make things work, plow through the paddock with hail, rain and snow in gummies and we are still thankful for the animals we care for, the people we have met and the way things worked out for us. Gratefulness creates happiness. Sometimes we forget and get tired. Very tired. Then fortunately we are kindly reminded by someone or something that all is well and to roll with it. Thank you world for the changes in our lives and the inspiration we may receive and give to others. We also say thanks for the wondrous calf that is our temporary flatmate. He can't cook but he's a lot of fun.