Our girls have been practicing the songs for their Christmas program for church. Their Sunday school teachers kindly gave us a disc with all four of the songs on it, which was promptly pushed into the CD player in my car (because that is the only CD player we own). I love their sweet little voices singing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” but listening to the same four songs for the next three weeks is likely to make me lose my mind.

Having grown up on a ranch, I never gave much thought about what ranch life looks like to a kid. To me, it was just life – I didn’t go to daycare as a kid, and my parents both worked on the ranch.

There is something about saddling up a fresh horse on a cool spring morning, trailing cows into the corrals and getting ready to brand slick calves that compares to nothing else. Early morning jitters from lack of sleep finally give way to good morning hellos and laughter among the help.

I recently saw an ad on Facebook for The Bachelor of a bunch of very well-dressed young ladies feeding dairy calves and shoveling manure out of a cattle barn. It was like a train wreck – painful to watch, but I couldn’t look away!

Haying has lasted unusually long for us this year. Thanks to a cool, long spring and some well-timed rains in May and June, we ended up with a bumper crop of grass-alfalfa hay this year.

The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor. —Vincent Lombardi

Calving is in full swing in many parts of the country. Here in north-central Montana, we are a bit behind the rest of the country – many of our cows don’t start calving until after mid-February.

There is a tombstone that lies just off the edge of a small hayfield on the creek bottom of my parents’ ranch. It doesn’t mark the grave of the man whose name is engraved on its face, and grass and weeds show it little mercy.

“And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.” (Genesis 1:25)

Four generations. As I sit here writing this, it dawns on me that I represent the fourth generation in my family to raise my own cattle and participate in agriculture. It is more than a lifestyle – being a rancher is who we are, not what we do.