Volunteers

We have had a number of volunteers around here recently. They range from people and plants to poultry. I made the very hard decision to step down from a volunteer post of 11 years with the AWANA Club. I loved my time dearly with those girls and wonderful leadership, but I felt called to volunteer at my home church in the youth group this year. Now teens and tweens kind of scare me, I’m not gonna lie. I have a house full of them and I never know what to expect from day to day. Maybe the leadership sensed this and awarded me the sweetest group of 6^th grade girls!

I also recruited a friend to work alongside me and I think it’s going to be a great year. We had our first in person meeting this week, and I pulled out my craft expertise and love of competitive games with them. I already warned them that I am not a “give everyone an award” type of leader. Ha! I feel like 6^th grade is a bit tricky where you no longer want to be treated like a baby, but you still kind of enjoy younger kid things. Hopefully I can strike a balance with meeting them where they are and challenge them to rise to the next level as they enter youth ministry. I feel sort of like it’s allowing me to be a kid again, but I just need to remember that I am the adult in charge. That’s why I invited my friend along in case I need to be put back in line. I am fortunate enough to have the teaching part of our night done by the director of youth ministry. His teaching is excellent and it makes my job easier when I can soak it in, review with my own kids that are all currently in youth group, and reference back to it in our small group discussion time with the girls. I sometimes wonder how different my life might have looked if I had access to this type of youth group instead of the nun-filled fear inducing religious education of my catechism days. I never wanted to attend what I referred to as “kiddie prison” and I can’t say I gleaned much from those (what seemed like endless) hours of “instruction”.  I suppose that experience has shaped me, for better or worse, into the person I am today. Maybe that’s why I try so hard to bring the fun while we dig into the truth God has for us. So if it comes to your mind, please pray for me on this new journey with the youth group. And if you have a 6th-8th grade child in the Greenville, SC area message me and come check us out!

Other volunteers around the farm are the plant volunteers we find in mysterious places.  Usually when we carefully plan our garden and volunteer plants come up in the middle of those careful plans we pluck them out to make way for our plans. We hang on to that illusion of control with a death grip. But this year with our poor garden start, we found this volunteer squash plant and let it go. We had no idea what kind of squash we would one day see, but finally it’s starting to grow and it’s a pumpkin! We could totally care less if this pumpkin vine grows, so naturally it’s the healthiest looking plant in the garden, sprawling all over the place! Maybe it will hold out and give us some nice fall decorations.

This year I decided that I would attempt to grow an herb garden. I have no idea what I am doing; I plan on learning along the way. If you’ve read a few of my posts on this site then you know that I’m not afraid to dive in headfirst and sometimes I burn the bacon. So I did very little research, but my herb markers are so cute – aren’t they? In hindsight, I probably should have spent the time I was making my cute garden markers on researching how to start and maintain an herb garden. For my crafty friends, it’s just chalk paint on a paint stick and a simple vinyl label. They may become head stones instead of garden markers, but hopefully I’ll learn something in the process!  I didn’t think I needed markers, but one day my dill plants (that were growing very nicely at this point, thank you very much) were mistakenly weeded by one of the children. It’s hard to find decent help! This particular child often reminds me of an Everybody loves Raymond episode where Ray purposely decides to do a crappy job so that someone else will come along and do it for him and he will never be asked to do it again. It hasn’t worked for him so far, but he keeps trying. I am determined to make a hard worker out of him. The other day he was sweating. Winning! We marked it on the calendar. The other kids accused him of splashing himself with pool water, but I think it was genuine sweat. It seemed pretty obvious to all spectators that there were herbs growing in this particular section of the landscaping, but somehow reason was thrown out the window and the dill was weeded. This turn of events was sort of ironic because it was the first year ever that I remembered to plant the dill so that we would have dill heads when the cucumbers were ready to make pickles! Serves me right for planning ahead. Thankfully the dill I attempted to plant in last year’s garden volunteered by reseeding itself and is coming in between the potatoes and even one in the carrots. I attempted to transplant the dill, and then right after I had moved them to the herb garden a friend said, “Don’t transplant them! Dill hates to have its roots disturbed.” Well lesson learned, and that is why the dill is so puny. Better luck next time. I’m hopeful my volunteer dill weed comes through for me!

The last volunteer I wanted to write about was our volunteer mother hen. We had a chicken that started to be broody. This means that she gets into this trance, almost a brain-washed state, which only allows her to focus on making babies. I guess she felt her biological clock ticking? When a hen is broody she typically stops laying eggs and eating or drinking and just sits on her eggs until they hatch. So in a chicken coop with only so many laying boxes it’s frowned upon when a hen wants to permanently occupy a nest box to hatch babies. Not to mention, we really do not need any more chickens around this farm. Remember my job is to keep the word “hobby” in our farm. So the farmer decides he wouldn’t mind more ducks and wonders if the chicken will hatch a couple duck eggs. About a month later she hatched a chick, (which happened to be a chicken, instead of a duck, from an egg deposited in the nest box by one of her friends), that we put in a brooder box to dry out under a heat lamp and get her some food & water. This poor chick was so confused when separated by herself, she just continually peeped in alarm. A couple days later we had our first surrogate hatchling with the arrival of a baby duck! We put the “siblings” together in the brooder box, but the poor chick starting regretting her call for companionship. As soon as the duck entered the box the chick wanted nothing to do with it. The chick kept running away from the duck, and the duck just followed along side as close as she could get.

So the following day I checked in on them and they were starting to bond. It seemed the chick wasn’t fully snuggling with her new box mate, but had at least stopped running. They are now happy “siblings” and it’s adorable to watch them bumble along together. I wonder if they will accept the new duckling that was born today?? I couldn’t resist a side-by-side of the besties with their adopted siblings. Our little one will tell anyone that will listen that her older sister is her bestie.

I’ll leave you with my last group of volunteers, that really didn’t not volunteer for anything but we are thankful for them just the same. Enjoy the pics and have a great week!