Daily inspirational quotes and reflections to inspire parents of spirited boys.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

On Organization

Raising Boys, Not Cows

There is a little farm on the edge of Tooele where my father was born.  It was on this farm, when we were teenagers, that my father decided my brother and I needed to learn how to work. He was pretty busy, but he had my brother and me working on that farm..........We had a number of cows that we were milking, and it was quite an experience. We built a little reservoir on the farm so that we wouldn't have to get up at three o'clock in the morning to take the water. We could run the water in the reservoir and use it as we needed it.

We had some great experiences on the farm, my teenage brother and I, unsupervised. I think he was more steady than I was. We had some fruit trees and a lot of lucern, a lot of hay. We grew some corn; we grew a little wheat. We had a number of things on that farm. We weren't the best farmers in the world. We were doing the best we could, but we were not the best farmers. We were surrounded by other farms, and those farms were being farmed by people who knew what they were doing.

One day one of the neighbors came to my father. He was a farmer, and he had a whole list of the things that my brother and I were doing wrong. I think I could have added more things to that list than he had. Anyway, he went down the list as he was talking to my father, and my father sat back and then he said, "Jim, you don't understand. You see, I'm raising boys, not cows."

LOREN C. DUNN

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