It was a sticky Sunday night before the state fair—the kind of night where you didn’t even have to move to sweat. I was rushing around the house, doing laundry and ironing stiff show jeans, when I realized the sun was slipping away. My window of opportunity to join my family in the barn was closing.
Throughout the summer, Sunday night is the most important night of our week. We call it “weigh night.” It’s when we weigh the show pigs, and my husband, Dan, and the kids study each animal to figure out how to adjust their feed for the week ahead. It’s a weekly ritual of reflection—assessing what worked, what didn’t and determining what needs to change to get each animal to be its best.
When our kids first started showing, they would walk their pigs for miles around the pasture while Dan stood back and studied their progress. Over the years, the dynamic shifted. The kids began trading off who was driving the pigs so everyone could take a turn analyzing them. What used to be Dad’s solo call on feeding strategy slowly opened up to everyone’s input.
With time, the process modernized. Show-countdown calculators, weight projection formulas and spreadsheets entered the mix to keep everyone on the same page.
But from my perspective, watching from the barn door, weigh night has never just been about monitoring weekly gains. Here are five life lessons our kids have learned on those Sunday nights.
1. Your voice matters.
One of the things I appreciate most about Dan is how he seeks input from everyone. Our kids have learned that their opinions and perspectives carry weight. They’ve learned how to speak up, articulately state their case, and defend their theories. By constantly asking questions and challenging them, he taught them to think for themselves.
2. It’s OK to make mistakes.
When it comes to feeding livestock, human error is inevitable. A feed board gets misread. A scoop of supplement gets forgotten. Sometimes, our best-laid plans for a specific pig simply fail. But there is a lot of grace in our barn. We’ve all messed up. In the barn, our kids have learned how to pick themselves up after a setback and, just as importantly, how to forgive others when they mess up.
3. Swing for the fences.
It’s easy to play life safe and stick to what you know. But we’ve always encouraged our kids to take risks. Sometimes that meant buying a pig that was “out there"—maybe a bit extreme in one part of its look—hoping the risk would pay off in the show ring. They’ve learned that big risks can bring big rewards, but they’ve also learned the sting of a swing-and-a-miss. Either way, they know that if you don’t try, you’ll never win.
4. The details make a difference.
Weigh nights teach practical math like calculating average daily gain or projecting weight curves. They also prove that micro-decisions dictate macro-success. When you are feeding show stock, the plan changes often. Knowing exactly where you’ve been and where you need to go is the only way to carve out a path for what you need to do today.
5. You aren’t alone.
Perhaps the greatest part of this tradition is the quiet, devoted time they spend together, talking and dreaming about the future. There is nothing quite like the security of knowing your mind and your presence are valued. In a world that is fast and loud, the consistency of the barn reminds them they have an anchor. No matter where they go in life, they will always have a team in their corner.
The older our kids get, the more sacred opportunities like weigh night become. I suppose to them, it’s just an essential part of caring for their animals. But as I watch them turn off the scale and shut off the barn lights, I see it as something far more important: the quiet shaping of who they are meant to be.
