Multitasking!

On the way home from Joel’s parent teacher conference Brad was telling me they were short-handed for harvest help that afternoon.  He asked me if I was able to help.  I told him I could but only for a couple hours because I had to be home to get the big boys off the bus.  I went and picked up Cecilia and Dean from the babysitters and we headed to the field.  We had exactly no snacks, drinks or forms of entertainment (my phone only had 20% battery life and I wasn’t going to let Cecilia play with it).  The plan was Cecilia would ride in the semi with Brad and Dean would ride in the tractor with me.  Of course Cecilia decided that she wanted to ride with me.

Dean sat in his car seat on the floor, Cecilia sat in the buddy seat and I jumped in the driver’s seat and we quickly made our way across the field.  You see we were going to be doing something I had never done before.  We had to catch grain from two different combines in the same field.  There were two grain carts, two combines and the goal is to keep the combines moving as much as possible so they aren’t sitting still.  The field had long rows so one grain cart was always waiting for or loading a truck and one was getting loaded in the field.  You don’t have any extra time, a bathroom break is even out of the question. Brad was kind enough to figure out people to get the boys off the bus and Joel ended up in a semi with Brad, but that meant more time for Cecilia, Dean and I in a grain cart.  We ended up driving for 3.5-4 hours.  It was fun and Cecilia and I were having a grand time.  I kept one foot under Dean’s car seat so he didn’t rock too much.  Then Cecilia would go between sitting on my lap (when I wasn’t under the combine) and on the buddy seat.  She would also “help” me load the semis when she wasn’t busy playing peek-a-boo with the semi drivers. 

After a couple hours Dean woke up and then he got hungry.  Then he started getting mad because he wasn’t getting fed.  After I loaded a semi I started nursing him and headed out to the field to get more corn.  Before I started driving I send Bob and Craig a text message that basically said “Dean got hungry.  I can multitask if you go slow.”  I couldn’t get on the CB and say something because Bob had a passenger and I didn’t feel like that was appropriate.  The beauty of GPS is that I could multitask.   I just had to get close to the combine, and press the button and it would steer for me and I only needed 1 hand to adjust the speed and I could multitask.  When I got to the field both combines were full and close to each other so I just had to pull between them and stop and they could both fill up my grain cart.  By the time we needed to be on the move again Dean was done eating and got to sit on my lap, until I had to load a semi again.  After Grandma Diane got Vincent off the bus she drove to the field and took my spot for a while and I headed home with the kids.  Later that night I got a text from Bob that said I won the farm wife of the month award, with no disrespect to his wife.  Bob doesn’t hand out compliments very often so it made me smile!

I was so proud of Cecilia for being so good in the tractor for so long.  We had a lot of fun spending time together and being substitute grain cart drivers!