A few weeks ago, our whole family went to the ocean. Three hotel rooms later, we gathered at the hotel pool. Scott and the kids love to swim. I am not a pool person. Especially in Bodega Bay where the fog rolls in thick and gray and cold. Snug in our sweaters, Oma and I watched from the lawn chairs, sitting beside an older gentleman who took a fancy to our family.

“You don’t see big families like this anymore,” he said, torn between a smile and frown as Bicknell kids took over the hot tub after splashing the water out of the pool. “How do you afford all these children?”

“Everybody works, even the three-year-old,” I told him. He didn’t believe me until I explained we’d gone into farming as a family. “We used to do our ocean trip in the summer, but that’s harvest season for us now. We sell fruit all summer long.”

“I’m the oldest of ten kids,” this man in his seventies confessed. “I liked having a bunch of brothers and sisters, and we all had to work growing up. My mom worked the hardest raising us, but she lived to a ripe old age, we had a good life.”

Other folks arrived at the pool and stared at our children like they were zoo animals when the man informed every new person the kids were siblings and I was the mom of this crew.

“That’s her with all those kids,” I heard a lady whisper to her husband as we walked around the hotel later that evening. “She gave birth to all of them!”

Not all of them, I wanted to say. Tall, dark-haired Drew came to us through marriage, the other dark-haired boy is Jake, Lacy’s boyfriend. And by the way, we dominated on that chicken fight in the pool this afternoon. If you want to win chicken fights, you should have a lot of boys.

If you want to find live lizards and frogs in your laundry basket and your bathtub, have a lot of boys.

If you want wet toilet seats and slippery bathrooms, have a lot of boys.

If you want to cook and clean and do laundry until the cows come home, have a lot of boys.

And when it comes to farming, have a lot of boys.

Luke, John and Joey spent the summer working in the walnuts and fruit orchard. Even Garry James(G2) and Christian (Cruz) did their share picking and packing fruit for the farmers’ markets. Oma ran the operation, Scott was the head fruit picker, and John and I covered sales. Drew works year around in the walnuts for Opa and Uncle Patrick, and Cami does speech therapy for a local school district. Lacy has sidestepped the family farming business for now by working at California Family Fitness in Roseville, becoming a physical trainer while studying nursing at Sierra College. She starts Simpson University’s nursing program come January. We’re very proud of her perseverance.

All the kids are doing great, and I loved watching them play a football game on the beach together in November. Scott is still teaching high school history, and was quite happy to return to the classroom after nearly three months of picking peaches, pluots, and nectarines every day this summer, except Sundays. Sitting in an air-conditioned church feels heavenly when you farm in the Sacramento Valley heat. Thank the Lord for Sundays.

We lost Scott’s dad, Grandpa Tony, to cancer this year, which left us very sad. Life is a gift, and it’s easy to get so caught up in living that we forget to cherish the time we have with those we love.

My funniest memory of Grandpa Tony happened when we picked him and Granny Joyce up at the Sacramento Airport one year for a visit. If you read my blog, you’ve heard this story before, but it makes me laugh every time. Luke was about four-years-old, sitting in the back seat with his sisters. Grandpa Tony and Granny Joyce– the East Coast grandparents– were in the middle seat, and Scott and I in the front seat of our SUV. We were having a nice conversation as we headed home on Highway 99, when Cami informed us, “Luke has to pee.”

“Help him use the pee pot,” Scott called to the backseat.

Grandpa Tony cried foul. He didn’t want a kid peeing in the seat behind his head. Too late, Luke couldn’t wait. Cami was trying to hold the pee bucket up for Luke, an old silver champagne bucket I’d picked up at a San Diego Goodwill for our tenth wedding anniversary. Polished it up all nice and shiny to surprise Scott one night with a special anniversary dinner. After using it just that one time, without telling me, Scott turned the silver bucket into a pee pot for the kids. “It has a perfect rim for the girls to sit on,” he told me when I spotted the pot in the car with one of our girls peeing in it like she’d done this all her life. “Oh my gosh!” I cried. “That’s our champagne bucket!”

“No, it’s now our pee pot,” Scott corrected me. “We never drink champagne. I hate champagne,” he said.

“This is just like our marriage,” I cried, smarting over all the work I’d done polishing that bucket for our anniversary. “From champagne to pee!” I wasn’t joking when I said this. We barely made it through our tenth year of marriage with the champagne bucket becoming our car’s pee pot.

For years, we had this pee pot in our vehicle. It lasted longer than several SUVs we’ve owned. The champagne bucket had a broken handle from when it fell out of the car one day at school, horrifying Cami because it was her campus and now all the kids would know she used a pee pot in the car. “He’s missing the pot!” Granny Joyce screamed as we zoomed down the freeway with Luke standing on the backseat trying to pee in the pot Cami held with outstretched arms. Grandpa Tony started yelling too, which frightened Luke, and Luke began spraying the car. Mostly the middle seat where his grandparents screamed and cussed with Luke peeing all over the place. Scott didn’t even slow down for this ruckus. I think he drove faster if my memory serves me correctly. At the time, this seemed like a disaster to me, but looking back, I love this memory.

The beauty of life is found in our messes.

Raising kids is messy. Loving people is messy. Christ’s death on the cross was messy.

Blood, sweat, and tears change human beings.

Wishing you all the warmest Christmas and happiest New Year.

Much love from our family to yours as we celebrate the birth of our beloved Savior Jesus~

P.S. I apologize if guns bother you. The boys shoot rattlesnakes (only the big ones, little ones get the shovel), ducks we eat, and Luke puts a deer in our freezer every fall. For us, this is farm life and I’m a well-protected woman.