For nearly 2 weeks we’ve been enduring the most insane frigid weather I’ve ever seen. Growing up in rural Kansas, I’ve seen plenty of winter storms, massive snow drifts and icy roads. But none of that has come along with what we’ve experienced lately.
Nope.
In the past few days, we’ve seen the most devastating cold temperatures that I could ever imagine. The danger is only emphasized by our crazy attempts to care for our animals in any way we can.
- Chopping ice on top of water tanks and buckets multiple times each day
- Hauling fresh water to all of the animals daily
- Seeing water tanks, buckets, hoses, pumps, barrels and spigots all freeze solid
- Thawing hoses and buckets in our entryway
- Taking in a frostbitten newborn calf
- Moving the cattle from the pasture to the Goat Trails for better windbreaks and shelter
- Seeing the baby calves snuggle the goats in the Goat House for warmth
- Checking heat lamps in all of the shelters daily
- Losing power to the barns because the heat lamps burned out the electrical panel
- Building a new baby goat heater for the momma expecting babies any day
- Bundling up to go outside multiple times per day
- Hauling tons of wood into the house to keep the fireplace running
- Filling the entire house with smoke because of the open ventilation in our renovation area
I’m sure there’s more.
With such a mild winter until this point, I’m surprised that this season has had so many wild things to teach us in a couple of very short weeks. We thought we were fully prepared for cold weather but there’s simply no way we could have ever been prepared for this.
Since I’m only a few short weeks from delivering our brand new baby girl – Aaron has been taking on all the outdoor work and chaos basically solo. It’s been unreal. I’ve done what I can to keep things moving inside the house and keep our family functioning. “Stressful” barely scratches the surface of it all! In fact, I caught this funny photo of our fireplace reflecting in the front window of the house…where you can clearly see the renovation dumpster. An actual dumpster fire – ha! Very accurate.