Check out that boy on the combine! We are in full-on Fall-fun mode! We had a pretty low-key week until the weekend, when we started our Saturday morning by taking Finn to a Build-and-Grow workshop at Lowe’s. This project was building a firetruck, so Finn was pretty excited, especially with the end result!  He made lots of noise hitting the hammer and then ran around the store like a happy boy once we were finished.  We enjoyed the beautiful afternoon with lunch at Northstar at Easton and then walked around a shopped for a short bit. Later the Ackerman’s joined us for dinner and Piper came along to play with Lily.  It took them awhile to become buddies, but here they are enjoying a good game of tug. 

Sunday was a jam-packed day. After church we attended the lunch for kiddos and parents of the NPC Nursery. It was SO hot outside, Finn was a hotbox. But he enjoyed playing on the playground for quite awhile. I think we were one of the last people to leave!

Finn grabbed a brief nap on our drive to Richwood to visit Chad’s family’s farm for the fall-harvest of corn. I must say, I was really excited for this visit, and so was Kevin. Even though I work at a nursery around all sorts of equipment, I still miss the farm I grew up on.  All of the open space and exploring, driving the machines, you just can’t beat it. This was an experience I’ve never had before – riding in a combine! When we arrived, Nancy, Chad’s mom, greeted us and showed us around the main area of the farm that included barns and grain elevators, chickens, ducks, and even a pig! We watched a semi full of corn pull in and get emptied into the floor and up into grain elevator. I climbed up the back of the trailed and peaked in the trailer to see the enormous amount of grain being unloaded. The moisture content of the corn is determined during the harvest, and the corn goes through a dryer as it is being unloaded to remove whatever moisture necessary. We walked up the steps to the top of the grain silo, and, I’m not gonna hide it – I was stoked, until about halfway up. Kevin was holding Finn and he was half way up when I began following and I got a bit freaked out!  It is super high up there, and so dusty from the grain – all I could imagine was Kevin falling with Finn or Finn moving abruptly and falling out of Kevin’s arms.  Phew.  All was well and I even managed a few photos. I’m not sure where this fear of heights is coming from, but I was a nervous twit there for a minute!! From there, we all piled onto the Gator and Elizabeth and Will took turns driving us down to where they were harvesting corn for the day. Dave, Chad’s stepfather, was just coming up a row shortly after we got there, so Kevin, Finn, and Elizabeth hopped up into the combine and went down and back a turn. Then we traded, and Will, Finn, and I went on the next round. The equipment is amazing! GPS guided and electronically controlled all from one joystick that has about 22 options of things you can do! There is a screen that shows read-outs of the moisture as the corn is being harvested (it updates every 3 seconds) as well as the number of bushels per acre. Anther screen shows fuel, MPH, amongst other things. One of their new pieces of equipment is a weigh-trailer, which can drive alongside the combine and receives the harvested corn. It has these crazy tracking tires which allows it to spread the weight-load  out a lot more (versus a traditional tractor tire which would not be able to haul this much weight without creating big divets in wet ground) . The weigh-trailer weighs the load right in the field can hold a semi-worth of volume and can empty the contents into a semi in 2 minutes. Dave told me for the field we were in, it’s about 60 rows (so 2.5 trips back and forth) to fill the weigh-trailer, which fills the semi. He said they like to do about 15-18 semi’s a day.  Wow. It’s a pretty cool view from up there! I learned all kinds of tidbits, like last year corn was yielding over $7 per bushel, whereas this year he said it is right around $3, or actually $2.98, due to the overall higher production in the US. They don’t expect to have higher yields this year as the spring/summer was so wet – he expect it will be about the same as last year. Definitely not good for Ohio farmers! At the end we had an ice cream treat and Elizabeth released one of her grandma’s Monarch’s! We had so much fun, thanks to the Wiley’s and Ackerman’s for letting us tag along!

And here are a few other random shots from our week, including a video of Finn being goofy in the backyard.