Evan and I arrived in Montana on Monday (the 21st) for nearly two weeks of vacationing through Montana, North Dakota and Minnesota! After several weeks of working our tushes off, it has been great to see the loving faces of family and friends in the lands we call home. As mentioned in my previous post, I just finished my first year of graduate school and have spent the last week and a half catching up with all that was put off during the final crunch. Evan has been working double duty with me as well—he’s a real life saver.
“Growing Up” by Jeffrey Hamilton, 1999
Kathy Barger-Harbert 
Nan Roberts 
Hey Alex, I love your wish list! I don’t see any reason why you won’t attain everything on it, and then you can start another list! Your enthusiasm is inspiring. Keep sharing your ideas and your great stories. I hope that you have an awesome vacation!
Hi Alex
Keep the dream alive ! You have fantastic visions for yourself and I can easily see you living that life, you have started doing so already. I also am still dreaming even at a different stage in life (my 2 boys are teenagers), yet I still have dreams of a farm suited especially for me, having and planting my favorite things. I have to say that yak calf is cute! Have to look into that, lol. Happy dreaming! "Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will."
— George Bernard Shaw
farmgirl blessings, Laura
I loved what you had to say about growing up. I got tears in my eyes. If you ever open that school you were talking about, then be sure and let us all know where to come and visit! When I grow up, I want to have never-ending patience, lead a not-so-hurried life and live somewhere, where I can’t hear the cars whizzing by.
You’re on a good track :o) I loved the description of your to-be children as ‘nearly feral’. That is what once was possible in this great country. I know because I lived it. Children wandered about and no one gave it a second thought … and that was in town. We lived on the fringe – very small town in Wyoming. So, ‘out of town’ meant you were Ab-So-Lutely OUT out of town probably before you saw the city limits sign. I wandered about all day in the summer on my pony…showing up only for meals. My mother knew my approximate whereabouts: somewhere around or on the outskirts of town and it was totally normal. I was packin’ iron sometimes because I carried my pop gun with me during ‘hunting season’ ;O) OhMyYes, live where you can let your children have FREEDOM … freedom to play and know what it is to be free. I think that is one reason it has lost some of it’s importance in some folk’s minds. So many have lost it little by little and now they don’t really know what it is to have it in the most real sense. You don’t miss what you can no longer remember the flavor of.
Well, I digress. Love your dreams. Go and live them! If you’ve not seen the movie ‘2nd Hand Lions’…do so. It is about this very thing … and the comment made at the end, ‘Yes, they really lived’…is what I’m talking about. shery