Cows, Spaghetti O's and Dad's Hidden Talent

For those of you that don't know, Josh and I both grew up in Tennessee. When we were growing up, we both lived in areas of towns where one minute you could be surrounded by total suburbia then the next be in complete country. In fact, when my family built their first house in Knoxville, we bought our property from my dad's barber (who had sold it to our developer) and he, the barber, actually used to be a farmer. And surrounding our property for the longest time were pastures and fields of cows or the best blueberries ever! So when we bought our house a year ago, we were delighted to see that backing up to our house was this enormous cow pasture. We thought what a great learning experience this will be for Samantha Grace one day.

Well, it has come to be extremely profitable to not only to us (we miss the wide open country fields quite a bit at times) but also to Samantha Grace. As soon as we walk out the back door now she will start pointing to the pasture and "mooing" like a cow. It is quite cute. Now I do have to admit that when we ask her what a dog says she proceeds to "moo" like a cow too, but we are working on it. Below is a picture of some of our cow friends to live behind us.

All of this is to bring up the fact that last night I discovered, after being with Josh for almost 9 years, that he has a hidden talent. You know most men pride themselves in being able to do the turkey call, the duck call or whatever call might be applicable when hunting. Well, not Josh Duke. Nope, we discovered last night that Josh has the perfect pitch and tamber to call cows. Below are a couple short video clips of his magnificent call and the cows response. I have to say that this was quite surprising to all of us.







The videos do not adequately show that the cows were quite a distance away when Josh started his cow call. Then one-by-one, the bull of course leading the way, came up to our fence. The neatest thing was that due to the tendency of cows being extremely skittish we usually can't pet them. Josh bravely went up to one and petted it with Samantha Grace like a horse. I was quite impressed on both Josh's and the cow's part. After all of this adventure our one looming question is what do you feed a cow besides grass? We don't want to hinder their completely organic diet of grass because we all now we have enough problems with some farmers pumping insane amounts of hormones into these beautiful creatures. Any suggestions would be great because I am thinking that these cows will be back for more entertainment by the infamous COW CALLER. I end this entry by leaving you with some of the most recent adventures with Samantha Grace at home. Since she will be a year in 13 days, I finally folded and gave her Spaghetti O's for the first time. I also decided to start a tradition with something that was made by her Mimi. Mimi painted a little bench with her name on it shortly after she was born, so I decided to each year close to her birthday take her picture sitting and standing by the bench. So below you can see some of the pictures from our improtu photo session. More professional pictures are to come.


As I close, I ask from the bottom of my heart that you continue to pray for a little baby boy by the name of Stellan McKinney who live in Minnesota. He is very sick and needs our prayers. You can follow his story by clicking on the button on my blog titled "Praying for Stellan."