I loved my life at home, I feel like I had a very wonderful childhood including gumdrops, lollipops, and unicorns. All kidding aside, I feel blessed to be a part of a great family. My parents taught us how to work hard. There was always time to play games, sing songs, and we loved God. I grew up on a small farm in Hunter, Utah. Now it is called West Valley City where we raised goats, ducks, geese, chickens, pigs, rabbits, quail, pheasants and peacocks. We had a few dogs in the middle of the family chaos, as well.
    Every spring we started planting crops for our large family. I grew up on 3/4 of an acre. I would say half of this was our huge garden. We started planting peas the end of February and usually finished up with tomatoes and squash the middle of May. My dad was a little bit of a perfectionist when it came to planting, or any job for that matter. He made sure the rows were even and straight. His motto was “Any job worth doing was worth doing right”. I feel like planting was made to be fun, and I looked forward to Spring with excitement. Anything that could grow in our climate we tried at least once, including popcorn, parsnips, and Jerusalem artichokes. I was not a fan of the latter two mentioned. My mom even tried putting parsnips in the pancake batter, and calling them parsnip fritters, yuck!
    I just loved our corner of the world. I mostly stayed home. When you have 9 siblings there is always someone to play with. We also had a barn for all of the animals that included a hayloft. Once a year in late spring my dad would fill the loft with hay, stacking the bales in such a way that it would make a private little hideout for us kids. This place had a small tunnel that we would cover up with a piece of hay that blended in with the rest of the bales. It was top secret. The tunnel opened up into a small room made from the hay complete with rope going out a window. The rope made it possible for you to climb out of the loft to the ground. Everyone thought our house was pretty fun.
    Thinking back on my childhood, Spring was magical. Living on a farm you get to see life and death up close. It was so fun seeing all the baby chicks, ducklings and all the other feathered critters hatch. My dad had a 600 egg incubator and would hatch all kinds of birds for people. He would keep part of the hatched birds as trade for hatching them. Seeing goats give birth to their kids was very educational. I wouldn’t trade this experience for anything. We would sell most of the goats putting an ad in the newspaper. We children loved feeding the baby goats. We would fill up pop bottles with warm goats milk then put a rubber nipple on the pop bottle, and those goats could drink a bottle in less then a minute. I remember seeing a few still born births. That was always hard to see. This experience helped me appreciate life.