The New Adventures of Bitsy FarmHand

It didn't take long for Bitsy to notice the harvest happening earlier this fall. Giant pieces of farm equipment were blocking us on the roads on a regular basis. Grain trucks flew by our house day & night. Lilly May was constantly barking at the windows in attempts to protect us from every Case, John Deer, and International Harvester that putted down our gravel road.


And then she discovered the combines. Every trip to town was filled with shouts of, "BOMBINE! Mama, gween bombine! Bonbine torn!" (For those of you who are not fluid in toddlereese, that's "Combine! Mama, green combines! Combine corn!") Since fields of corn & beans abound around us, she had a lot of combines to holler about.



The three older FarmHands told her they'd been in a combine with Uncle Gick when she was tiny. As you can imagine this lead to an insistence on Bitsy's part that she would be combining with Uncle Gick soon. I mentioned to Busha that when Uncle Gick was farming back in our area that I needed to call him. Before I had a chance to call, he called us. The next day, Bitsy had plans to, "Bombine if Gick! No Mama, me, Gick."



When she saw that getting in the combine involved a climb up a ladder & sitting way high in the air, she decided Mama was needed after all. Mama had never been in a combine either. Luckily, Mama had her camera on hand so I could bring you all along for the ride (as well as to document Bitsy's grand adventure).Here is the "torn" going into the "bombine" so it could shoot into the hopper behind us as "baby torn." Uncle Gick offered to let her sit on his lap & drive, but that would mean relinquishing her death grip on my arm & being minutely social....which she was not at all inclined to do. But she was happy to watch that corn fall victim to the green machine we were zooming around in (I do hope you realize that "zooming" is a relative term).



Once the hopper was full, we went back to dump the corn into the grain truck.



That was the highlight of the entire trip. All that "baby torn" went "bye-bye" into the "twuck." She's been talking about it ever since....and secretly, I'm glad she wasn't brave enough to go by herself. #1. I'm glad she still needs her Mama, even though she doesn't need pull-ups. #2. It was almost as much fun for Mama as it was for Bitsy.

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And for anyone who may have noticed the small changes in my "about me" blurb, Husband & I celebrated our 12th anniversary Saturday. We spent the day at the circus with the FarmHands & my Daddy. It was a good day and kind of fitting to finish out our 12th year together!