Shaved Bald and a breath of Chicken Poop

Getting ready to take a dip in the pool with a family of almost 11 and 13 if you count the grandparents that live with them!  So much fun for Stacey, Henry and me! (While Maggie was home silently suffering with her stroke on Tuesday).

Mr. running pants was chasing after the other kids, the dogs and the really cool kid-sized four wheeler!

Here he is with no hair thanks to his mother!  You can check previous posts for the hair cut nightmare.  Thanks to my friend Beth for saving the day and evening out his hair cut.  Yes, it was so bad we had to shave it all off!

Cutie cuteness.

Checking out the goggles.

This week has flown by!

 

Another little love bug.  He didn’t want us to leave.

An older brother.  Henry loved watching this one wrestle with one of the other older boys in the pool.

Serious about driving Uncle Johnny’s tractor this morning.  We spent the whole day on the farm and someone fell asleep quite quickly this evening.

Another turn on the tractor.

And, there’s nothing like a tractor ride after lounging at your very own pool (bucket) at your country, country club on the farm.  Plenty of pigs, chickens, horses (when you’re really brave), dogs, toys, tractors, water and dirt.  What more could a little boy ask for?  And your great aunt even lets you have an egg to throw every once in a while.  Oh yeah, there are plenty of people to entertain.

After taking a ride in the old Lincoln minus AC on a 90 degree day with my back stuck to the leather seats and warm, heavy air blowing in my face, I was reminded of my summer days not so long ago.  And picking up eggs with a child in one hand, sweat dripping off my body, chickens pecking my toe nails and breathing in clouds of chicken poop dust, I was also reminded of manual labor.  Not a natural birth but naturally working your butt off.  Hot summer days with all dryers running full blast, mountains of laundry so high it made an Alaskan snow bank look like an ant hill (now that’s a major exaggeration but it certainly felt like it).  Just as we made a dent in it (we as in Dave, Whitney, Angela and our eastern European Angels and I) a load as big as the most massive pile of laundry your house has ever created multiplied by 5,000 (another exaggeration) was dropped off due in the morning.  Then we (Dave or I) in the heat of the day would load all of the clean hotel and restaurant laundry into the truck.  Do drop offs and pick ups.  Climb two levels of a fire escape with clean laundry.  Now this was quite dangerous and painful on a good day.  Now imagine torrential down pours or your feet so sweaty in flip-flops that you are losing your balance.  Then imagine garbage bag size canvas bags filled to the brim with heavy sheets and wet towels.  Now imagine carrying those down the fire escape and across the employee parking lot because there was never a place to park right by the long walk way to the fire escape.  Yeah, I carried those bags that were larger than I am and weighed half my weight sometimes.  But most of the time I made sure no one was looking and dropped those babies down three stories.  Uh-ha.  Yup.  That was my solution to our pick up problems at that particular inn.  Then I would hustle on over to the local yacht service business on the harbor and pick up some boat laundry.  Sometimes dropping it off it would be low tide and getting it down a steep incline to the float where the boat was without dropping it in the harbor was a skill one had to attain quickly.  There was always a balance, a physical balance but also a balance of looking somewhat normal as I was the business owner without sweating so badly it looked like I just went swimming.  And looking capable enough but almost slightly pathetic in case there was someone nearby who might take mercy on me for being female.  There was always the balance of being polite to the twenty something male employees for guiding me to the correct place but not wanting to kill them for never offering to help lug 300 pounds of laundry.  It’s amazing what a little chicken poop and manual labor can do for bringing back memories.  We did have lots of fun doing this even though it was a challenge on a daily basis.