Janet's Blog

I was so excited when we first looked at our house, before we bought it.  One reason was because, in the backyard, just a few feet from the back door, was a fish pond.  It didn't matter that it was square and painted bright blue; it didn't even matter that it no longer held water.  It was there, filled with potential. One of my earliest memories of my grandparents' farm is of the fish pond in their yard.  It was a small, shallow cement pond, an oval of maybe three feet by two feet, not more than ten inches deep in the center.  That's where the tank goldfish lived in the summer, under the shade of a big old tree.  I would sit there with Aunt Marilyn for long stretches of time, just watching the fish dart around the pond.  We moved to Norfolk when I was almost five, and my grandparents, along with Marilyn, followed in just a few weeks.  For the first time in their lives, Grandpa and Grandma had a beautiful, new house in town.  Grandma soon ...

I'll admit it---I've always had a love/hate relationship with the month of March.  On one hand, I love March because it includes the first day of spring.  But, on the other hand, I hate March because it usually includes so much wintry weather.  I hate snow in March, but I love March snow because it melts so fast, providing much-needed moisture for sleeping plants.  I hate brown grass, but I love the hint of green that starts to appear in the grass in March.  I hate the bare tree branches, but I love to see the new little green buds swelling on the lilac bushes.  I really hate March wind, but I love soft spring breezes. I hate looking at the dry, dead landscape in March, but I love to see green shoots erupting into the purples and yellows of crocus and daffodils.  In March, even dandelions are beautiful!  I hate to see my trash-strewn yard at the end of a long, wind-swept winter, but I love the excuse to get outside and pick up other people's tr...

I just finished another round of parent/teacher conferences for my afternoon pre-K class of 16 four- and five-year-olds, so I'm feeling rather wasted.  Talking to parents non-stop, for hours at a stretch,  is hard work.  I was thrilled to have 100% turn-out this time.  This is rare, even for preschool parents who are still excited to hear how their children are doing in school.   People are sometimes surprised when they find out that we conduct conferences for parents of preschoolers.  However, today's public school preschool is nothing like "nursery school."  In fact, today's preschoolers learn more academics than the kindergartners I taught thirty years ago, and as much as I learned in first grade!  Please tell your friends and relatives:  if they want their children to enjoy a traditional kindergarten experience, send their three-year-olds to a high quality preschool! So, what do children learn in preschool?  Academics include learn...

On Wednesday evenings, I help with check-in for our church’s Awana program.  Kids from age 2 through twelve have a great time learning Bible lessons, memorizing verses, and playing games.   Levi loves Awana, and Victoria enjoys helping with the youngest class.  Awana staff had an assignment for this week’s theme, to write some kind of tribute to farmers.  Many children also wrote letters of thanks to farmers, or stories about farmers.  All submissions will be displayed at the church for awhile.  Since I had been writing about my early life on the farm in recent blogs, this assignment was not too tough.  Here’s the result: A Tribute to Farmers Up at dawn, work till dusk, eat supper, work some more, Plow the fields, plant the crops, wait for rain to pour. Cultivate, irrigate, get it done, don’t be late! Rainy days, machine shed days, or maybe go to town; Dreaded hail, hear us wail, lay our money down. Harvest beets and beans and corn; sel...

It was another rainy, spring day on the farm.  I was three or four years old, and I'd been cooped up in the house for too long.  Mom dressed me in my coat and overshoes, and sent me outside to play in the warm, gentle rain.  I don't know if she told me to go find my dad, who was working across the lane in the corn crib, or if I decided on my own to leave the safety of the house yard and make the trek across the muddy lane to see what he was doing.  Anyway, I started confidently across the lane, savoring the heady smells of rain and flowers and freshly plowed earth.  I stomped triumphantly in every puddle, as young children always do.  But as I made my way across the lane, the mud got deeper and stickier;  it grabbed onto my feet like glue, and wouldn't let go.  I tried to keep walking, but I couldn't lift my feet off the ground.  I was stuck in the mud in the middle of the lane, halfway between the house and the barn.  I started yel...

I was barely two years old, and we had just moved from the tiny trailer on Grandpa and Grandma's farm to a house on a rented farm, ten miles closer to Bloomfield.  Farming in northeastern Nebraska in the late fifties was very different from farming today.  In fact, farms then were much like the farms still pictured in popular children's books.  Farmers never "put all their eggs in one basket."  Instead, my dad, like all farmers in that time and place, grew dry-land corn, milked a few cows, kept a couple of horses, raised pigs and chickens and even one lonely bottle lamb named Lola, who was officially my pet.  We had a dog and several barn cats, but none of them were allowed in the house.  Besides the house, the farmstead had two barns, a chicken coop, a storm cellar, a grove (or shelter belt) of trees, including several fruit trees, an old dump, and of course, an outhouse.  And that was the problem--the house had no indoor plumbing. My dad was raised...