Giving Thanks

What a weekend! I know we've only had a month to get used to having the house all to ourselves, so one would think filling the place up with family for a few days wouldn't be so exhausting, but I have to admit there was a fair share of relief in the air as I bid them all farewell this morning. A two year old and a set of 3 month old twins bring with them a lot of clutter and maintain a noise level that we're just not used to. Not that it wasn't great to have them here - I could cuddle and rock babies all day long (in fact, that's pretty well what I did yesterday).

My side of the family takes turns hosting the meals for the big holidays - what I call "staging the feast". This year we celebrated Thanksgiving here on Saturday because it was the only day that Jesse could join us. The crowd was quite a managable size for a change - only 18 of us, not including the baby boys. I never take on the job of a big family meal without remembering how my mother revelled in the role of hostess. I imagine she probably felt overwhelmed with all the people and food too, but I never saw it. She always looked the picture of poise and graciousness ... what I'm usually looking for is a glass of wine to calm my rattled nerves!

Ah well, it comes and it goes and everyone goes home happy and filled. The men talked sports and farming in the livingroom after the meal, and we women did the dishes and held babies and conversed in the kitchen. Glen got called early that morning to go to work so he missed the whole thing. He had turned down two days earlier because he had arranged to get his feeder steers off to market and wanted to be at the sale to see how they compared to other animals in the same category. He had never "fed out" beef animals for sale before and wanted to know what the buyers were looking for.

He and Jesse attended to auction in Melita, Manitoba on Friday morning and came home very happy. For someone who didn't know what he was doing, he had received top dollar and top grade for all but a few of the animals he had shipped. These were last year's calves that we had kept too long to sell as calves, waiting for the border to open last winter. Once they make it over a certain size and weight you lose money on them if you try to sell them as calves, so Glen was forced to bring them in off grazing pasture and feed them grain to fatten them up for the slaughter market. He tells me that we doubled the money we got for them by carrying pails of chop all summer. Nice pay for what the grain costs us.

Our neck of the woods got a huge dump of snow last week - there is still some laying around on the green green grass ( a startling contrast of colours) - and then it rained after that. What Glen has been doing at work is moving an oil rig. When it gets wet and mucky like it is right now, that means chaining those heavy rig trucks to Cats and pulling them where they need to go. I've never been present for this, but judging from the way his clothes look, it's messy business and just wrecks roads. Today he is gone again to push the sludge off the well site and spread gravel on the roads so that other vehicles can get around without sinking out of sight. This is the third day in a row that he's said he wouldn't be long and then doesn't come back for ten to twelve hours. Today he was pretty impressed that it was going to be double time and a half - farmers don't ever get that kind of pay!

And I'm sitting in my quiet house, doing laundry, catching up on my blog, and giving Thanks - both for the noise while it was here, and the quiet, now that they're gone.