There used to be a TV program called Kids Say the Darndest Things. It’s a show where kids are asked questions such as, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and they give honest answers – which are usually hilarious. One kid answered that question with “a turtle.”
Who wouldn’t want to be a turtle?
I wish I’d kept a better record of all the funny things my kids said. If your kids are still young, I’d encourage you to keep track. I remember some, but I know there were more. When our middle daughter was a toddler, she kept telling me she needed fruity feet. She insisted that she must have them. While at the grocery store, she pointed to Fruit by the Foot – a treat you unroll. I said, “Oh, you want Fruit by the Foot? Is that what you meant by ‘fruity feet’?”
She said, “Yes. I was speaking Spanish.” That day, she got some Fruit by the Foot, even though I usually didn’t buy it.
Some of the things our children said were funny, some embarrassing, yet it was the ranch life sayings that were the most awkward.
When our kids were elementary-school age, they really wanted chickens. They “helped” us make a chicken coop and prep for the upcoming birds. We decided to get chicks in the spring so we could watch them grow and the kids could learn and grow with them.
My husband had to go into town for other supplies, so the kids readied a container that morning for the chicks to come home before we headed to school.
After school, one of our daughters had a friend come over. My husband didn’t end up going to town until later, so he hadn’t arrived home yet with the chicks. When the friend’s mom came to pick her up about an hour later, the friend asked if our daughter could come to their house now. Our daughter looked at her friend and her mother, made a face, then looked at me and said, “I can’t. My dad’s picking up chicks.”
The mother gasped and said to me, “Oh my! Oh … Are you OK? Is there anything I can do for you?”
It took me a moment to realize what she was actually thinking.
“Oh, no,” I replied. “He’s really picking up chicks – baby chickens.” And I pointed to the coop. We had a good chuckle over that while the kids wondered what was so funny.
Perhaps the worst one, though, involved irrigation. There aren’t many irrigating seasons that go by without me thinking about it. The first property we ever leased was a small pasture that was flood irrigated via ditches. There were several ditches that carried water across the pasture, and we used tarps as dams to direct the water where it needed to go. It took a fair amount of time to move dams throughout the day.
When we heard about a motorized device that helped move the dams, we were enamored. The neighbor happened to be getting rid of one and wondered if we’d like to buy it. Since the deal was better than a blue light special (I’m aging myself), my hubby agreed.
The device looks like the base of a go-kart, but the tires are wider, especially in the front, so they can straddle ditches far enough away to keep from getting stuck. Theoretically. It did get stuck sometimes. In the middle were two round discs that were joined on one side and angled out like a plow disc; however, they fit perfectly inside the ditches to keep it on track. At the back, it dragged a tarp dam. Now, instead of moving the tarp dams all the time, the device would slowly creep up the ditch, the dam would move along with it, and the entire ditch would get covered without us having to move tarps. Brilliant!
The kids were little, and the ditches were small enough that when it was time to move the device, we’d take the kids with their little floaties or tiny inner tubes and they’d “float” in the ditch. Sometimes when it was time to move the device to a new ditch, my husband would hop on and “drive” it over to the next ditch. This sounds innocent enough until you find out the name of the device: the Love Irrigating Machine, commonly referred to as the Love Machine.
Developed by Melvin Love, this machine was an irrigation lifesaver – until our kids started back to school in August and told their teachers how excited their dad was about his Love Machine.
May I just say that even in a rural community, not everyone knew what a Love Machine was? And our kids didn’t explain it. Thankfully, we knew the teachers well and we could laugh it off, but that is likely our most awkward ranch kid saying.
Now that you know even more about our family, I suppose you can also be thankful that we now get to use pivots and wheel lines, but the Love Machine will never be forgotten as the darndest thing our kids ever said.
