Well folks Valentine’s Day is almost here again. I had grand ideas that I would have this done
weeks ago, but a real life in an Iowa winter got in the way.
I discovered that the Mini Me no longer needs Valentine’s
for her 6th grade class. My
heart literally dropped to my shoes when she told me that. When did she outgrow Valentines? Did I blink
too many times? I seriously must have.
I think she still needs some to swap with friends…she firmly
says, “NO, mom!”
I am struggling to deal with the age we are leaving behind
with her. She turns 12 next week. This
will be the last year of not parenting teenagers. I literally want to put my
head down and sob. I only have five
summers left to teach all the things I think she needs to know to be a
productive and responsible human being… It suddenly doesn’t seem long enough.
While I’m freaking out about that, I still have a kid who is
firmly in elementary. I need to stop
mourning what my daughter is leaving behind and enjoy what my son is working
on. He’s learning to read and spell and add and subtract. He’s at the edge of an explosion of learning
and before I know it he will be in 6th grade… Not needing Valentine
cards for his class. Sniffle, sniffle.
Oh for goodness sake!
This year Gus wasn’t sure he wanted to have any fun facts on
his Valentine… He wanted them to just be Valentines. Kind of hard when he wanted a decidedly unValentine-y
theme – Baseball – on his cards. There
are some great things in sports to tie to agriculture and you could use any of
these facts on your sporty Agtines….
An acre is about the size of a football field.
There are 150 yards of cotton in a regulation baseball.
One cow hide can make either 144 baseballs or 10 footballs.
The NFL will use more than 6,000 footballs to play a season
of games and will use more than 600 cattle hides to supply those balls. Iowa raises 1.49 million cattle every year.
Going to a sporting event? Ag touches about everything you
can think of from the plastics in the seats that can be made from corn and soy
by products, to the food you buy at the concession stand and the fuel that
could have biodiesel or ethanol blended in that got you there. Sports depends
on agriculture.
I’ve got a Agtine for baseball included here.
I’ve also got a sweet treat for the folks who spend time
reading about our life, my kitchen and how much pride we have in feeding the
world through the beef and pork, row crops and garden project.
I’ve got a cookbook from the Iowa Food & Family Project to give away!
A good friend gave me one for the Mini Me’s hope chest and
one for my kitchen that is getting a little grubby. My mom gave me an
additional one. Three of one cookbook in
a house is probably cause for a visit from a Hoarders tv show or some kind of
organizational intervention so comment below with what recipe you’ve tried from
my blog how it went over with your family and I’ll randomly pick a comment maker and
share a cookbook with you!
If my recipe flopped… let me know. I may be able to give you some help to get it
to turn out better next time. If you loved it, I would love to have you tell me that too! If you double post, once here and on the recipe you tried, I'll double enter you in the drawing for the cookbook.
