What if...

Farm life is good.  Just last night Ben said it's so refreshing to get out of the car and breath in this air, even if it literally smells like shit.  The cows are a stones throw away from our house, remember?

So as good as life is on the farm there are some particular dangers that if I let myself think about, I'd never let my kids out of the house. In many ways it's just as dangerous, or maybe much MORE dangerous, then living in town.  It just doesn't feel dangerous until something happens, or you think something's happened.  Let me explain....

A couple weeks ago, before 6am, Levi was up.  I was already at my parents' house exercising (yes, I get up pre-dawn to exercise in my old bedroom...call me crazy).  He didn't wake Ben up, instead he got dressed in pants, a t-shirt and his orange Crocs and walked outside to find me.  It was cold with crusty snow on the ground and he didn't have a coat on, he started to cry.  Ben woke up, from a dead slumber, hearing Levi crying and couldn't get his brain to figure out where it was coming from.  Levi wasn't in bed, he wasn't upstairs, he wasn't outside the house....so Ben came to find me.  While Ben was looking inside the house, Levi made it to me, thanks to my mom letting him in the house.  Not knowing Levi was safe and sound, Ben burst into my parents' house too and found Levi snuggled in my old bed watching me exercise.  It was very scary for Ben and the What If questions started to spin in our heads.

Later that same morning, Levi put his coat on and said he was going out to help Uncle Bruce grind a bale.  Ok we said, but then come back inside.  Well, while Ben, Noah and I were inside getting ready for the work/school day, Levi was wandering around from one area of farm action to another.  The sun wasn't up yet and big tractors were moving and little Levi should not have been out there.  My dad took Levi with him in the tractor to go mix up feed and thankfully brought him back when I needed to be leaving for work.  He told me they hadn't always known where he was and it was too dark for Levi to be out there.  Again, in the same morning, the What If questions started to spin.

Today, Levi told me he was going out to play on the skid steer.  Fine.  Ok.  Happens all the time.  He'd been gone for a while and I went out to check.  Oh, Uncle Bruce and Roger were busy clearing out the manure pit, Levi was riding along with Uncle Bruce.  Hauling poop ranks just under harvesting and hauling grain.  So, I went back inside for a while.  When I was ready to leave to go to story hour at the library with Levi I went outside again to see if I could coax him off the tractor.  Much to my surprise, he walked out of the milk barn with my dad soaked with water from head to toe.  Levi had fallen into the poop pit.  It's like a zero entry 7 or 8 foot deep poop pool.  He hadn't walked in the poop, he fell in the deep end.  Thankfully, they've been working at clearing it out for the past few days so there was only two or three feet of poop in it this morning.  And thankfully Roger was out there and actually heard Levi calling for help.  Thankfully, my dad was around to help him get cleaned off.  The What If questions haven't stopped spinning yet.  That poop pit has been one of my biggest fears on the farm for almost 6 years now.  Today it was for real life.

Boundaries and guidelines.  We need more boundaries and more guidelines or the What If questions are going to keep on spinning.