pioneer-less woman

While I was off learning how to be a home school mom this weekend, my husband decided to take the kids to visit his relatives in southern Illinois.

Being the extremely supportive bloggy husband that he is, he had the excellent idea that maybe if he took a bunch of photos of cows while visiting his grandparent's farm, that it would significantly increase my blog traffic.

He's no blogging dummy. He reads Pioneer Woman. And he knows what a few hundred cow photos will do for readership.



So, we thought that if I just interjected some "photos from the ranch" (or at least the small family farm) into my regular writing, it might help.

I'm thinking that my traffic will probably jump at least a thousand fold when you see these photos. (Or, if not, that hopefully none of my current readers will unsubscribe, like someone did a few weeks ago, sending me into a depression for several days.)



So, here is the story of our life.

My name is Em. Welcome to my frontier.


You see, I grew up in a small town in southern Illinois where we spent our weekends dragging Main and hanging out at McDonald's, the only fast food restaurant in town. It was a perfect life, but as I grew older, I went away to college with the hopes of never living there again.

Years later, I started dating a boy from high school. We fell in love. Got married. And moved to the suburbs of Chicago to live our dream. (Actually, we promised to stay there for one year, just until my husband could get a little experience at his job, and then we would run for our lives toward a state with mountains or forests or at least a couple of big hills.) Eleven years later, we are still here.


We now live on a quaint .25 acre plot of land that is identical in size and shape to thousands of neighbors to the north, south, east and west.


We have never had any pets, of any make, shape or model. This is a wonderful tradition that I hope to pass down to future generations.

We do, however, spend a lot of time chasing rabbits away from our flowers and running for cover when we hear the sound of birds. The trees in our subdivision recently grew large enough to attract a squirrel. The kids reacted by saying, "What's that, Mommy?"


We drive a mini-van, which was manufactured by an American car company that is now bankrupt. This probably means we have no chance of getting it serviced in the future when it has one of its tantrums during which the electrical system goes haywire for no apparent reason.


My husband commutes 40 miles to work each day. It's a lovely drive in bumper-to-bumper traffic, which typically takes three hours round trip.


We live in a three-bedroom home, into which we are trying to determine how we will squeeze a family of six and space for home schooling.


My husband is working on a remarkable addition to our swing set, which involved a lot of power tools and many boards and screws. But that's OK. Because we can walk less than .5 miles to two different community parks in either direction.


And yes. My daughter does try to take that pink blankie with her everywhere she goes. I see from the photos that she was quite successful on this trip. Just try to get away with that if you lived on a farm full-time.

(All of these photos were taken on a Canon point-and-shoot camera and not edited in PhotoShop. I do, however, have a copy of PhotoShop and use it on occasion, if that helps in any way.)

Let me just apologize, in advance, to my regular readers if it took a little longer for this page to load due to the dramatic surge in traffic that I'm sure this post will create. A few cows can go a long way.