This past year, my wife has been working a couple days a week in town. This means that while mom is off earning the bacon, the minions get to spend the day with dad on the ranch. Most days this is just fine, we feed cows, check fences, grind hay, and do a multitude of other chores around the ranch. There are days however where having my tag along sidekicks presents a problem. Once in a while dad has to get a cow in the barn that is a little less than friendly or do a job with a tractor that OSHA might frown on. In these cases, my kids know they have to stay out of the way where it is safe, be it the vet room of the barn or the cab of the ranger until I tell them it is OK to come out. These are the stories that I tell them they can’t tell their mother.

                  One day this past summer we had a windmill that had broken the pump stick. I went to town and got lumber to rebuild the broken stick, and when we got to the windmill the wind had begun to blow hard. Most days I would wait for a better day, but since the tank was starting to run out of water and my cows were beginning to feel neglected, I decided to climb the tower and put the mill back into service. I handed my son my telephone, told him that in case I fell off the mill in the wind he needed to call our hired man for help. I told him everything would be fine, but just to be safe he needed to be ready. Up the tower I went, I held onto the ladder with one leg wrapped around it, while my hands fumbled with bolts, nuts, and wrenches to fasten the new stick into place. I don’t know how many of you out there have ever climbed a windmill, but most mills leak oil for a pastime. The wooden platforms have seen years of hard winters and scorching summers. By the time you are back on the ground, you look like you wrestled a greased pig at the county fair. Now that you can picture what I looked like after doing cowboy acrobatic exercises 20 feet in the air, I arrived back down on the ground to find my son had videoed the whole thing. I asked him why he thought he needed to do that. His response, “Dad if you fell, I was going to send the video to the funny videos show.” I never felt more loved than I did that day.

                  On another occasion where I was pulling double duty, my kids decided they were going to go fishing while I was working inside the shop. I wasn’t sure where they were going to fish, since the river is off limits without mom or dad there with them, and they were taking a feed scoop and a bucket as their fishing gear. It wasn’t until I popped out of the shop for a moment that I realized where my kids secret fishing hole was. Each kid was on either side of the stock tank with their fishing tool, trying to catch a goldfish out of the stock tank in the corral. Needless to say they were not successful in their fishing trip, but they did manage to get soaked from head to toe and be entertained for hours.

                  I’m sure there will be more days where my kids will make stories that probably embarrass dear old dad when they forget they aren’t supposed to tell their mother, but I sure enjoy having my sidekicks go along with me most days. That’s all for this time, keep tabs on your side of the barbed wire and God bless.

Meinzer is a fourth-generation rancher raised on the southeastern plains of Colorado. He and his family live and ranch in Oshkosh, Neb.