Our Island Story Part 2~Life Jackets & Safety

Safety concern was our first priority. The ages of our children were 10, 8, 5, 3, and 1 when we first moved here. Our rules no matter the season, winter, spring, summer, and fall were that the little ones HAD to wear a life jacket at all time. Even if mom and dad were outside with them they still had them on. I'm surprised their little arms didn't begin to stick straight out during those years of wearing them so much!! Our 2nd form of safety was our door locks. We designed them up high on the door where they couldn't be reached and they were locked from the inside so as to not let anybody out rather to keep people from coming in!!! If my memory serves me correctly after our 6th was born we bought one of those dead bolts that a key is needed to unlock and we put that on the inside of the door in place of the other one we had. In this way it would be more difficult for a little one to escape without being noticed which is easy to happen in a large, busy family!

We had a natural spring that was in our side yard. The pumphouse is to the left of the drain. Here daddy and Christie are gathering our drinking water. Not from the trough as it looks but from the water coming out from the ground. (click on any picture to enlarge)

Christie and Robyn are seen here playing in the snow and as you can see the river is still not frozen yet. It wouldn't matter yet as they would have been wearing them anyway.

Here Kim is posing for the camera. (they grow so fast)

In the rear is a good picture of the railroad tracks that occasionally our family would get on to cross the river during pre-freezing of the river and between the melting in spring. Quite the trick in getting 5 children, soon to be 6 across these tracks!! But always a wonderful adventure!!

Vance Jr. and Christie enjoying some time outside. One time we took the kids into the little town here and bought them an ice cream. On our way back to the house we were about to pull the boat into the dock area and Christie fell off the boat into about 6' of water I'm thinking. She had her life jacket on and ice cream cone still in hand. She plucked under the water for a second and when she popped back up she still had hold of that ice cream cone!! Must not have frightened her too badly!! It was the summer I was expecting Aaron and I was big preggo and I jumped in after her (instinct I guess) and I ended up catching the edge of the pontoon with my big ole belly and got a pretty good long scratch on me! Ouch! Those bellies are always bumping into something. She was probably almost 3 when it happened.