4 Months

It's been 4 months.  4 short months since we've had snow on the ground.  As some of you may remember, we had snow on the May Long Weekend, and then we just had a good dump of snow on Thanksgiving weekend.  4 short months since we've seen that white stuff!

We had a house full of company for Thanksgiving, and I knew that they were forecasting snow, but I didn't really believe that it would happen, especially since our Thanksgiving weekend was early in October.  Alas, I was wrong, and the weather forecasters were right.  We got almost 5" of snow on that weekend.  It was cold and wet and miserable!





  The Girls were excited to get outside and make snowmen....which they did.... The worst part was that as they rolled the ball for the snowman, green grass turned up again.  Such a bizarre scene - leaves on the trees, snow on the ground, and patches of green grass everywhere.

 

Thankfully, I had harvested my garden the day before the weather turned, so my root veggies, along with my pumpkins which overtook the world (or my garden!) were all safe.  Phew! 

Being the optimist that I am, I thought the snow would disappear pretty quickly.  I was, however, wrong.  Boo for me!  We received another 2" of snow this week. 





My optimism is starting to wane that the snow will melt.... however, I took a look at the forecast this week, and it's supposed to warm up, so here's hoping the green grass will show itself again before winter sets in... for good. 

We did get to do a couple of other really fun things this fall... and have a few more to come.  We helped friends round up cows on their lease land about an hour and a half north of here.



 It was a cool start to the day, but by the afternoon it had warmed up considerably.





 I suppose cool is relative - heck, I'm thankful there wasn't snow on the ground!

The other really fun thing we were involved in is City Slickers, which is a program put on by the Stony Plain Multicultural Heritage Centre, funded by Ag for Life.  The whole idea of the program is to continue to show urban children how food is produced, since the average Canadian is 2 generations removed from a farm.  The Girls were involved in this program 2 years ago as presenters, and this year they were asked to be presenters again.  We talked about what they wanted to present about, and they decided that each of them would choose a tool that we used on our ranch, and share it with the kids.  The subjects they choose to present on were branding, roping, what we used our horses/dogs for on our ranch, and how to care for our horses.  The Girls all did a spectacular job on their presentations, and the years of 4H public speaking sure got put to good use! 





They each wrote their own portion of the presentation, and then they used props to illustrate.  We brought along 3 horses and Hannah's stock dog, as well as a dummy roping head, ropes, saddles, branding irons and various brushes for the horses.  I believe there were 900 kids, grade 3-4, that went through the program this year, so it was a full, exhausting day. 

I was sure proud of our Girls, and how they used their knowledge about our lifestyle and shared it with other kids.