spring is...

Filling the greenhouse my teen son built.

Bunnies! Guess what's all cozy beneath that rabbit fur?

Little baby bunny buns! I moved the fur over really quick to snap the photo and then moved it back. That little pink thing in the center is a nose.

Here are her neighbor's baby bunnies. They were just born the other day so are still pink. She had just 3, the one above had 8.

Easter egg hunts. It was so, so very wonderful that we got to have our little hunt outside in the sunshine. The 5 years we lived in Oregon it was always pouring down rain on Easter. I am just .  so  .  glad  to be out from under those dark, gloomy clouds. We dyed lots of our own chicken & duck eggs, plus added some plastic ones filled with goodies.

The cat enjoying the sun.

Here my husband was out cooking the ribs from the goat we butchered (that will be another post). The calf is grazing in the background, and the sun is shining on all those chickens and guineas. I had to step outside to get a picture of it all.

Finally the spring newsletter is ready to go. Our copy machine gave up the ghost just before I needed it for the newsletters so we had to scan and print each page from our computer. You wouldn't believe how long it took... but that's neither here nor there now- I'll be taking them to the post office on Monday. Yay!

My son wanted to snap my photo after I had taken the one above.

And here he is, planting seeds in egg cartons. He's using the stick to poke a hole in the soil for the seed.

A very handsome rooster in the sun.

Dust baths! It was so fun to see all the birds go crazy for dust baths as soon as the snow melted & the dirt dried. I watched them & laughed. This stuff is so much better than tv. :)

Isn't it neat to see The Man Rooster, as he's called around here (he's the king of the barnyard), watching over his bathing ladies?

I caught this guinea in a hilarious pose, rolling around in the dust.

And I love this one of a guinea yelling at me! They are such funny birds.

Spring is also little boys playing in mud!

And following the path of mud puddles:

Spring is also:
Lots of muddy laundry.
Lots and LOTS of chicken eggs.
Trying to potty train our 2.5 year old now that it's warm enough for him to run around half naked.
My bread rising in warm window sills, yay! All winter I had been putting it in the microwave our house came with, then adding jars of hot water in the microwave as well to keep it warm in there. It's the only thing we've ever used the microwave for. :)
Dusty dirt roads again!
Frogsong, lots and lots of frogsong all night. I stop just to listen.
I've started to find bugs floating in my milk when I get back into the house with it. I have not missed all those bugs & flies landing in my milk pails all winter.
And green, fantastic fabulous green. I'm just beginning to see it peeking through all the brown grasses surrounding our homestead here.


And you know what else spring is? Projects! Spring cleaning, gardening, fence work and rotating animals through different pastures, eggs (did I mention eggs?), and more projects. But yet, still homeschooling, cheesemaking, and all the usual home keeping chores- dishes, laundry and stuff to tidy up all the time. I struggle with finding a balance. I wonder how others do it? Or do they? Do we all sit around wondering how other busy mothers keep up with the housework, helping their husbands, and caring for the kids when really none of us actually ever "keep up"?? I also wonder how the pioneer women did it. They had a lot less stuff, that's for sure. Sometimes I am tempted to just empty whole areas of the house, just throw whole shelves worth of stuff out, get rid of 2/3 of the dishes (doesn't it seem a little odd that I need as many dishes as we have so that we still can have enough for when the dishwasher is washing all the rest??), and otherwise simplify in the most extreme ways. But then.... I start looking at the stuff on the shelves and on the floor and think to myself, "but that's a really cool book/toy/item/thing, it'd be stupid to just get rid of it....". I have ruthlessly decluttered a whole, whole lot in the past few years. But still, why is there always so much stuff to clean, scrub, sweep, pick up and put away every single morning before I can begin all the other projects? Am I not disciplined enough with the dish washing? I don't go to bed with a clean kitchen, perhaps that's my problem.... is my schedule not a good one? I mostly follow the same one I created back when we were in suburbia, but I had far fewer outdoor & farm projects back then... are my standards just too high & I should try not to look when the dresser drawers are empty because I've not folded anything in 2 weeks and there is little boy pee everywhere but the actual toilet bowl? I guess the pioneer women didn't even have toilet bowls to scrub! lol 

Anyway, I am sure I am far from being the only mother out there who battles with this very thing.

And in totally completely unrelated and extremely vague news, LOL, I am positively bursting with excitement at a certain announcement that I can't share quite yet. :p Stay tuned until around the 25th and look for a blog post that is exploding with joy and wonder. :)

And now, I must go do more dishes, laundry, cheesemaking, and take my goat stew from the canner.
;)