Why We Chose to Work on a Farm for Our Summer Vacation: PART ONE

Part One: 2024 THE YEAR OF OUR LORD AND R&D

Each year Matt and I do a “Reed Retreat” without our kids so we can reflect on the past year and plan, pray and dream about the next. As we tell our kids, “Mommy and Daddy are going away so we can have fun without you talk about you and learn how to be better parents!”

It will make sense to them one day.

We have a 20 page document that we’ve developed over the years since we’ve been married. It has questions and charts and writing prompts to help us really think about what we value and therefore what we need to focus on to foster those values. Then to really put it all in perspective we write our obituary every year. We write it before reading previous years obituaries but then we go back and see what themes seem to arise each year and that’s a pretty good gauge of what we value the most.

It’s always a good time especially when hotel staff comes over mid-obit and asks if we’d like a refill on our drink.

Oh yes, I’ll take some more water please. I’m sorry I’m just crying because he…yes a lemon would be great. Thank you.

Every year we ask “What is missing that needs to be added” from a personal and professional standpoint. We answer questions like this privately and then compare notes. For 2023 we realized we wanted to add three things:

1. One more child

2. Matt to attend a program through Oxford on A.I. in business

3. Matt to get French citizenship so that our kids could then automatically get citizenship as well

While math would lead one to believe that Matt carried 2/3rds the weight of this list, please factor the almost 10lb baby I gave birth to on July 24, 2023 and I would argue I carried a weight that will stay with me forever.

Fern Ellen Evangeline Reed is my diploma and dual-passport.

When it came time for our Reed Retreat this year, my diploma-passport was still breastfeeding so she came with us. We mistakenly reserved a hotel in the countryside that appeared much quieter in its pictures online than in person. It mentioned being family friendly which we thought was great because it would have a crib and highchair at mealtimes. What we didn’t factor for was it being school break and 4,903 French kids running around making sounds that are not absorbed by the walls of a beautiful establishment built circa 1704.

I got real new-mom panicky and told Matt we had to go. This was not my idea of a place to quietly reflect and vision cast for the future. Thankfully the place was amazing and gave us our money back and, the perk of living in a metropolis like Paris, we were able to get back to the city and find a quiet hotel room before Fern’s bedtime.

The retreat commenced and we thought by the end of it we would have a lovely list of three things we wanted to focus on in 2024 just like we had the year before. I love having a good to-do list and accomplishing goals so I was confident our questions and the process we had done for several years now would result in a clear path.

It did not.

Besides having one of the biggest whisper-fights of our life next to sleeping Fern (who, hopefully won’t go to therapy as an adult and tap back into that sub-conscious six-month-old memory) we did not come away with any tangible tasks.

What we concluded was that this year would be a year of “Research and Development” for our family. That perhaps we didn’t need tangible to-do’s, but we could live with our eyes wide open, our hearts in a posture to learn, and pray to gain wisdom through asking questions and listening to thoughtful people.

One of the themes that had continued to come up for us was the buzzy word of “Resilience”. We wanted to discover what that means for our family, especially for our kids now and fifteen years from now. An interesting observation we’ve made in this season of our kids ages one, four and five years old, has been that (and these are large generalizations) a big chunk of American-style parenting is protecting your children at all costs. Protecting their emotions, safety, what they see, where they go and with whom. Our observations in France are that at this age, autonomy and independence are traits parents and society believe they must be fostering in children or they haven’t done a good job raising future citizens.

As you can imagine, there are both power and pitfalls in each of these approaches.

So for us, we have wanted to be more observant of our kids, their individual needs and really evaluating the areas we need to protect them more and what areas we need to push them more.

For ourselves, we have thought about resilience in terms of it’s connection to the environment in which we work, live and whatever “place” we make our home. When you live and work in a major global city and one of you have just done a program on Artificial Intelligence at Oxford, dinner conversations can sometimes evolve into, “should we find a farm and go live off grid for when the robots take over?”

(Hello Robot, I know you’re reading this.)

But we also know it’s easy to romanticize countryside living when you’re not actually living it day to day. So that is why as our R&D year evolved into several different things, one has been to learn from people who are intentional about the environments in which they live or by default are very connected to the land on which they live.

Farming has been the most intriguing because our kids, like most, are obsessed with animals so they are game to do “research” with us. We first spent a long weekend this spring on a dairy farm and this summer spent ten days on a working farm…working.

I’ll tell you more about how that went in a PART TWO, but suffice it to say only two cows escaped on Matt’s watch and only one goat death occured on mine. Until then, Matt and I would like to include you in the “R” of our R&D and throw out some of the questions we might ask you if you were joining us for dinner tonight.

1. What do you imagine the world will look like for our kids in 15 years?

2. Do you have time to think about where your food comes from? Do you want to?

3. Do you like new technology? Do you avoid it? What choices do you make in choosing what technology to bring into your home?

4. What kind of farming or gardening do you encounter in your every day life, if any? Do you drive by a farm? Do you work on a farm? Do you grow your own herbs on an apartment balcony or have a vegetable garden in the suburbs?

5. How important is a “place” to you? Do you feel like you can live anywhere and be “home”?

6. If you’ve done anything from keeping a plant alive in your house to driving a tractor and picking corn, what has it taught you?

7. Who do you rely on to live and flourish? Family? Friends? Outsourcing? Just you?

8. You come face to face with a Robot in the French countryside. Do you befriend it, fight it or distract it with Baguettes and re-program it to clean up after the cows? (Sorry, perhaps too specific.)

Answer any or all! Thanks in advance.

- Joy (and Matt)

PHOTO LOCATION: NOT A FARM.