Bennett's Rides

Bennett has been one lucky kid these past two weekends.  Last weekend our neighbor was out riding her horses and Bennett was outside playing.  Next thing you know, Bennett was getting a horse ride and he LOVED it!  I haven't seen a smile that big on him in awhile.  He was probably on the horse for about 10 minutes.  She let him ride the horse back to her house to get it a drink so I followed to walk him back home.  For those of you that don't know, we live right on the edge of town and there is a farm right behind our house and a corn field right off our backyard.  These neighbors have 6 horses, chickens, a goat, cats and dogs.  I love where I live :-)  So anyways, that was his special ride last weekend.

Now this weekend they were combining the corn at my mom's place.  Bennett loves playing with the toy tractors, wagons etc. so now to get to watch them combine and unload the corn in person - boy, he had a fun weekend over there.  So today before they were done with mom's fields, we made sure to take him out and get him a ride in the combine.  He really liked this also and had another great experience. 

And speaking of farming at my mom's... for those that haven't heard, last Thursday, one of the corn fields actually started on fire.  It is sooo dry here in MN - we haven't had a decent rainfall for many many weeks!  They were combining one of mom's fields and somehow, something sparked which started a fire.  Besides it being so dry, it was incredibly windy this day which meant that the fire was jumping and spreading.  The fire department was obviously called out along with the neighboring town for backup.  It luckily was one of the fields behind the pasture and barn so it wasn't near the house or any other buildings.  If so, we would have had a huge problem on our hands!  It is hard to know exactly how much burned because of the fire jumping etc. but they are guessing about 10 acres.

It was hard to get a picture of what exactly happened partially because I didn't go back there when there was actually flames and a big fire.  But in this picture you can see all the black.  Most of that was already combined and the stuff that burnt was just the remaining stalks.  And the corn that is still standing on the left side they were going up and down the rows spraying it to make sure everything was out.  It was a pretty intense afternoon.