This blessed life

snowfall

2012-01-18T14:54:00.000-08:00

It just keeps falling! Big, fluffy, wonderful flakes!

Notice how Edgar has himself scooted right back into the cozy corner and there are no hoof prints in the snow. ;) He is not snow loving sheep apparently. The pregnant lady sheep next to him frolic all around in the snow and their paddock was nothing but hoof prints.

I couldn't convince Gertie to raise her head out of her hay bin for even a second so I could snap her picture. Snow makes her hungry, munch munch munch.

This is all that's left of our Christmas tree after the sheep and goat had their way with it.

This is what the Littlest Farm Kid does on snowy days. Gets all bundled up on the couch and smiles.

A little bit of everything.

2012-01-17T18:57:00.000-08:00

We have a big snowstorm coming. In preparation my husband drove over and bought some grain from a nearby farmer this morning. We're now stocked up on 1600 lbs. of grain and here is my husband out unloading it pail full by pail full from the truck on our very blustery afternoon.

Since our sheep ladies are expecting lambs soon, we needed to move the calf and sheep out of their paddock. So now they are in a pasture just outside the windows of the room we do our homeschooling and warming by the fireplace. It's so fun to get to see the calf go frolicking across the field several times per day!

He's about 8 months old now, and still so mellow and friendly. He's a Holstien/Hereford cross and will be our beef next fall. I banded him myself a few months ago. I never did get to tell that story, but lemme tell ya, that was a nerve wracking event! I ordered this big, scary banding tool and the tiniest, very thick rubber bands from Jeffers Pet. My husband tied the calf up to a fence panel, then I approached him with my big scary banding tool. I had to squat down behind him and get the tool that had the rubber band stretched open in it, between his huge beefy legs and around his testicles. And then release the tool which left the rubber band behind to cut off circulation to his manly part. All the while making sure he didn't freak out and slam me in the face with his big beefy hooves. OY!

The biggest problem for me was that I was imagining the pain I was going to inflict on him! My stomach was in knots, I even got dizzy a few times. I thought the event was going to be extremely painful for him and I would be eaten up with guilt watching him kick and run in pain with that rubber band on his parts. So I got the band around him and removed the tool as gingerly as possible, then jumped back expecting him to freak out in pain. And then? Nothing! How weird is it that he never even seemed to notice the thing was there?! That teeny rubber band cut off the circulation to both his testicles, eventually causing the entire business to dry up and fall off. It took weeks and weeks and he never even seemed to notice.

So now he's a steer instead of a bull. They say you shouldn't ever keep bulls around unless you have a very good reason to (breeding) and you have very strong fencing. They can be dangerous, they can & do trample and kill people now and then. That doesn't sound like something smart to keep around when we have young children about the place, and very not strong fencing. So the deed had to be done.

Anyway, the photo above is from today, with the calf wandering about investigating the snow, and his little goat buddy in their shelter. Nearly all our winds, rains, and snows come from the south. That little shelter is just right for them and keeps them out of the winds, etc. since it faces the other direction. We purchased that goat to butcher for meat, but he fast became the calf's best friend, so, now his job is calf buddy instead of goat burger. They curl up together at night.

Here are some of my silly boys doing silly things while the winds howl outside.

Some pretty clouds from a few days ago.

And a pretty moon!

My poor husband is allergic to Planet Earth and everything on it. He seems to be especially allergic to timothy hay which is highly unfortunate for a farmer. He needed new handkerchiefs to carry around and be sniffly in. I whipped up a quick batch using my new rotary cutter tool that's for cutting out quilt squares. I love that thing! I have no idea how I got by without it.

I just cut out some squares and stitched around the edges. Here is the finished product. All ready for my poor, cursed, sniffly husband.

At the same time I was also whipping up another batch of canned broth (I did pressure can it- that water bath canner in the background was being used by my husband for some husbandly project). Long ago I started making soup stock/broth using the recipe from Nourishing Traditions. Over the years I've just tossed together whatever veggie parts and pieces I have laying around, and/or some onions, in with random animal parts and bones and simmered them all day. No measuring of any kind goes on. Often, I just stick a hunk of meaty animal - bones, organs and all, in my pressure cooker and pressure cook it at 15 lbs. pressure for 15 mins. When it's all cooled I remove all the meat, strain what's left, and can the strained broth without even bothering with the veggies. It's yummy & contains all sorts of great nutrients either way.

Cheese draining. I can barely keep up with the cheese making! I'm super grateful for all the cheese I'm stocking us up on, but it sure is a constant time consuming project. I make a batch about 5 days per week. And sometimes 2 in one day because there is no room for food in our milk-filled fridge! I'm still using the Farmhouse Cheddar recipe from "Ricki the cheese queen's" book. Once I really have that perfected and I'm feeling adventurous, I'll move on to another recipe.

We've been looking into selling some milk. Groan. Why is it that selling raw milk is practically like selling pot in the eyes of the law?? It's crazy! We would have to become certified in order to sell raw milk. That takes veterinary visits and tests that would equal more than $400 every year. But without certification, people can can be sued and sent to jail! For sharing awesome, nourishing, wonderful FOOD that humans have drank for zillions of years- raw cow's milk. Pretty discouraging.

We've been able to begin butchering our own roosters! And a few given to us by a generous neighbor. So that makes us officially self sufficient when it comes to our chicken meat, our milk, cream cheese, cheese, and eggs. I love it! This is a picture of a recent rooster, obviously butchered ourselves- how do you like all those feathers still in the legs? lol

I have some bad news about Brown Rooster. Remember him? The one that walked around in the snow like a weirdo. The other day he attacked our 2 year old! The darn rooster. Poor him, he doomed himself the moment he decided to viciously attack our son's back. Thankfully our 2 year old was wearing his pig, puffy winter coat and wasn't harmed by those mean rooster claws. That rooster was so pretty, and fun because he hung out directly under our windows and crowed. I loved hearing him. But when I saw him attacking my son's back, my mama bear instincts raged and I wanted to kick that rooster across the sky! But instead, he had a nice, instant, humane death and became rooster soup. In fact, I made Cream of Rooster Noodle Soup and parmesan-rosemary biscuits that I brought with us to a friend's house for dinner. :) Which was very fun, by the way. A local homeschooling family with 7 children. It was great!

We live in the most beautiful country. Each time I leave my house I see postcard perfect views and I'm awestruck by the vast prettiness of it all. (This photo is a little dark)

Driving into town.

I need to go back and edit the photo I posted before about our first guinea egg. It turns out it wasn't a guinea egg after all but a little Banty's who had just begun laying small, grey eggs. Here is a guinea egg! It's the one on top in this picture. Teeny tiny! The one in the middle is a big hen's egg, and the bottom one is from that little Banty.

Isn't this such a neat array of eggs?? These are all chicken eggs except the tiniest one which is a guinea's. I love having such a variety of chicken breeds so we can enjoy the rainbow of their eggs!

But still, even with this wide variety of hens and their eggs, almost all the ones that we hatch out in the incubator look just like that one Silver Americana rooster! He is truly the king of the barnyard.

My 6 year old & today's craft project.

Kids eating peanut butter and jam sandwiches are cute.

While I was out milking recently, my husband and kids created this hilarious card for me. My husband drew the farm animals and moon and the kids cut them out and colored them.

And back to the topic of cheese...... Our house is too humid! I'm having mold problems on my drying cheeses. Yum! Doesn't that look appetizing!

We have a bizarrely large bathroom. It doubles as a storage room for us. On the counter here is a bin full of aging cheeses and a couple bins of worms busily composting stuff into super fertile soil. A thoughtful friend gave us these vermicomposting bins as a housewarming gift! How cool is that. Most people get wine and a houseplant... :p Also, in the mirror you can see our towel covered bucket of sauerkraut fermenting rather stinkily on the counter. I won't show you the chaotic bathtub. It's too cold to take baths (we shower) and the oversize tub has become my holding tank for the zillions of clothes all the kids are constantly growing out of, or clothes we have been gifted or cute girl things I picked up at thrift stores for years down the road... Clothes clothes clothes that need to be sorted into their appropriate bins in the garage.

Let's see..... besides all that I thought I'd mention a few things in response to recent blog comments:

My sicky munchkin that had the seizure at the end of December is doing much better, thank you all for asking.:) He had some digestive issues for several weeks afterward that confused the heck out of me until I ended up bringing him to a doctor. We are awaiting test results now to see if perhaps our son has/had a parasite or a bad bacteria. Since our doctor visit last week though, he has been improving, thank goodness. The poor kid had such painful stomach cramps there for awhile.

Regarding all the jars of canned food, I didn't can all those just this year. ;) I've been canning for about 5 years and am constantly adding to and subtracting from my stash. We don't rely on our jarred foods as much as our bulks, but I do love to can up good stuff while it's in season, and have plenty of good foods that don't keep in a bucket like our bulk foods. Some favorites around here are applesauce, venison stew, broths (I use in cooking all the time), and I adore pickled beets.

We do live on a county maintained road. We're so grateful that the county sends plows all the way out here! The USPS won't even send a mail carrier out here. :p We have a long driveway though that we have to maintain ourselves.

Well, Gertie awaits her milking. I'd better go drain my cheese and get super bundled up. Blustery snowfall here I come!

2012-01-12T14:49:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone. I apologize for posting yet again about the newsletter. I need to get all the details about it in one place. Please leave me a comment if there is anything that I am unclear on or if you have suggestions.

Here is the winter issue. Complete and ready to arrive in your mail box. I sent out the first batch to subscribers this past Monday. I will be offering the winter issue until sometime in March when I will announce the spring issue.

My "newsletter" is essentially a "zine" with a more grown-up name. It is entirely handwritten by me, plus any volunteer contributors. Although my friend Brett, whose wonderful story can be found in the winter issue, may want to mention that her "volunteering" came after my harassing her via email. ;)

The title is "This Blessed Life, a seasonal newsletter of simple living and radical gratitude". Some of the topics you may find in it are stories on living simply, close to the seasons and the land, finding joy in mothering and homemaking, reverence for God and nature, recipes for homemade remedies, meals or snacks, ideas for simple crafts or children's activities, instilling gratitude in our children (and ourselves), and just about anything related to today's "homesteading". Along with quotes and black & white pictures strewn about.

Although I had planned to create a newsletter that ranged from 10 - 20 pages in length, the winter issue ended up a whopping 34 pages long. I think perhaps I am too chatty for a mere 10 page newsletter...

In the winter issue you can find stories written by myself and also 2 contributors: my aforementioned friend Brett, who built her own home with her husband and lives off grid, and Samantha of WoodlandWoolens.blogspot.com . Also, recipes, ideas, quotes and simple photos. All with a winter theme.

I put them together by hand, photocopied them here on the same machine I prepare our homeschool work on, and drove them through the snow to the post office myself. :)

Feel free to contribute a story, letter, or other item! You will receive the issue your writing is included in at no charge. I think it's so fun to get to know each other through our own handwritten word. Much more personal, and more fascinating and educational than just listening to me all the time. ;) I want the newsletter to be an encouragement. And a breath of fresh air in the midst of our face paced, consumer-crazed society that seems to have forgotten how abundantly blessed we all are, and who gifted us with those blessings. Please do share your thoughts or experiences on any of the topics that relate to simple living, gratitude, joyful mothering, do it yourself ideas, etc.

The newsletter won't ever be a substitute for the blog, just something fun and encouraging on the side. I really enjoyed Tonya's handwritten newsletter, Plain and Joyful Living, while she was able to create it. My newsletter will never replace her wonderful one. I think of it more as the younger sibling of hers. I am extremely grateful to Tonya for allowing me to borrow her idea.

A new issue will be mailed out each season. So, four issues per year. The subscription cost is $15.00 per year. Or, you are welcome to purchase just one issue for $4.00.

If you are interested in subscribing and wish to pay by check, please leave me your email address and I will send my mailing address to your inbox. Or, you may pay via PayPal. I have inserted a "buy now" link on the right hand side of this blog. Or you may click here:

Thank you! :)

Newsletter, febrile seizures, Baby Sweets, chickens and Christmas. Whew!

2012-01-03T22:22:00.000-08:00

I snapped this picture tonight. When I said the first issue of This Blessed Life newsletter would be sent out by January 1st, I honestly thought it would be. Then I sat down with the scanner, printer, and copy machine to simply put it together. I mean, it can't be that difficult, right? LOL! Gee did we have a lot to learn about the simpleness of getting pages to line up just so, the ins and outs of getting things dark enough to be readable.... It is a very good thing that we invested in extra copy machine ink and white-out for this venture! They will be done very soon, though.

This is a picture of a miserable boy. This happened on December 20th. We had a cold virus moving through our family. Just a regular, minor one. On this day my just-turned 4 year old woke up feeling ill. I got him comfy on the couch, gave him vitamin C and D3 and juice with some garlic in it. About an hour later he began seizuring. I've been truly terrified down into my bones only a few times in my life. This little son of mine has had 2 febrile seizures now - this one that was the day after his 4th birthday, and another one the day after his 1st birthday (how weird is that coincidence?!). And those were two of my most terrifying moments. I know what febrile seizures are, I know that they are almost never permanently damaging. I know how to treat them and that they are not normally an emergency. But when you are watching your baby convulse, drool and roll his eyes unconsciously in your arms, you have to fight to recall all these things. It's terrifying! I felt like I had post traumatic stress syndrome for the next 4 days.

That's all for the sad and scary news.

Here are more adorable chick pictures! :p

And here's little miss farm girl. She's kind of an adorable chick, right?

More apple canning helpers.

My 13 yr old son and one of his many, many K'Nex creations.

And his Christmas cookies.:)

Our record breaking enormous egg. It weighed exactly twice as much as the other large eggs.

A chicken egg on the left, a guinea egg on the right. The guinea egg is very gray.

The kids helped me take inventory of all my canned foods I had stuffed in the back of every cupboard. There were quite a few stuffed back there!

I snapped this picture out the van window as I was driving recently. The ice covered trees were so pretty in the sunlight.

Our own ice covered trees, with guineas below.

These are the Christmas cards we made this year. Each member of our family put an orange thumbprint on the paper. Then I and the kids added antlers and painted eyes and noses. They were a lot of fun & I was pleased with how they turned out. :) My favorite part is the little miss farm chick's teeny tiny thumbprint on the far right of each card.

Grendel during a rare moment that he actually held still for the camera. Our one year old Leonberger.

Now I must go fetch all my littles' toothbrushes and get bedtime stories underway.

time keeps marching on

2011-12-30T17:24:00.000-08:00

A neighbor's son showed up one day during our big snowfall and generously offered to plow our driveway for us. How awesome is that! We really are blessed with great neighbors. We paid him with gratitude. He came in for a visit, some home brewed beer, and to share advice with us on living in snowy country.

The little miss at 2.5 months. This gown is my very favorite piece of baby clothing we own. I received it as a gift 4 babies ago and dressed each one of them in it.

Bread n' broth. The word "nourishing" comes to mind. ;)

Chunky Monkey at 2.5 months.

I love the way she looks up and smiles with joy at all her brothers.

My apple canning helpers.

I love gazing at canned food. Any home canned foods. I love seeing pictures of other people's pantries full of canned food in blogs. They are just so pretty and symbolize food security and hard work. I love them so much that I pose them in my windowsill with chickens in the background just because. ;)

Go, Mr. Apple Canner, go!

Apple pie. Yummy! I also made an apple crisp. And have plans for making apple muffins tonight. We had apples & almond butter for breakfast. Would you like to come over & have some apples??

We had some birthdays around here recently. Our 3 youngest boys turned 2, 4, and 6. It's funny, now that I don't have easy access to a store, I sure do buy less! This is just one example of many: If we'd still been in suburbia I'd have run to the store to buy candles & cake decorations. Instead, I made do with what we had at home. And it turned out just fine! The kids certainly didn't notice they had candles from our box of emergency candles, or sprinkles from Christmas cookies I found in the back of a pantry from years ago. And thankfully they didn't care that I hadn't purchased little candy letters to spell out their names but instead wrote them in the weird gel frosting I found in a cupboard. It ran all over the place. LOL

We had a combined party for our 4 and 6 year olds. Several weeks before we celebrated for our 2 year old:

My husband made up a new batch of sauerkraut. I love sauerkraut!

Mr. Man Rooster. It is amazing how *busy* he is with his ladies. Nearly everytime I look out the window I see him hopping on top of another hen. That explains why most all the chicks that hatch out in the incubator look just like him! The lady-hens love him though. They trail after him, sometimes by the dozen, giving him googly-love eyes.

A hen next to Mr. Man's big, handsome tail.

Pregnant sheep ladies. I had to giggle to myself when listening to certain Christmas carols. Several of them mention "silent flocks" of sheep. It gives you a picture of a peaceful, silent group of sheep. I don't know if our 2 sheep are odd, but they're not silent. The way sheep cough is pretty funny. They toss their whole heads way up & way down and sound like they're cough-barfing-choke-yelling. And they very frequently fart while they cough. And their constant slobbery cud chewing isn't silent either. :p

Guineas enjoying the view from atop Gertie's manure heap.

Gertie having a snack.

My son had left his bowl of pasta & cheese next to the box of chicks. Apparently that was a mistake, LOL! We got a box with taller sides after this.

Homeschooling is still going along fine & dandy. I've been wanting to do a homeschool post for awhile. I've already typed in my head. Now to find the time...

My 13 yr old son is enjoying Apologia's biology text for science this year (8th grade). We've had a lot of fun with the microscope. He got to collect & view amoebas from the creek on our property. That was pretty cool.

My art loving kindergartner been working his way through the Usborne Art Treasury book.

I put the little miss in front of "blanket TV" when I shower. She loves blanket TV. ;) I drape an interesting baby blanket over the laundry hamper & she's mesmerized by it long enough for me to shower.

And now to get to those apple muffins........

late Fall walk

2011-12-29T21:42:00.000-08:00

Trying to catch up here. Like most of you, we've had a crazy-busy Christmas season! I had wanted to post these a few weeks ago. Better late than never. :)

Our big snow had melted. We were expecting more any day so we decided to take the kids on a walk through nearby countryside. It was so pretty outside with that late Fall shine. And so many fun things to discover- frozen creeks, animal bones, wildlife tracks. Plus sticks, of course. Boys always need a good stick for beating things with. The frozen waters, the trees, the grass, invisible coyotes.

Hangin' out with Brother.

Misc. animal bones of unknown origin. Cool!

Yummy for dogs!

I love this photo. It would make a good header photo! Except, oh wait, it's not Fall anymore. Bummer.

We were following a trail made by deer, coyotes or both. The tall grass was all laid down and there seemed to be wide sleeping areas where a herd of some creatures had lounged. You can see a trail leading up to and all around this bush up the hill. Why do they circle that bush like that? Who knows! Perhaps that's what coyotes do for fun. Woohoo! For a good time, circle the scraggly bush all night! It's like a disco partay!

Pretty pretty Fall time.

Cool! What creepy crawly lives in there?

look what we found in the incubator!

2011-12-08T13:29:00.000-08:00

Chicken TV right on our kitchen counter!

This was the very first time we have ever used an egg incubator. These guys came from the first batch of 11 eggs we tried out. All the eggs came right from our own chicken coop, fertilized by our own busy roosters. How cool is that! Of the 11, just 4 hatched. We were actually expecting the worst and were happy even at this small success because, this being our first time, we had to fiddle around with it trying to get the temperatures regulated just right and work out all the kinks. Many incubator related YouTubes were viewed. ;)

So, three of them are great. Cute cute cute little fluff balls that have made themselves right at home under the super cozy heat light on our kitchen counter. It is amazing how soon the teeny little things act like regular ol' chickens- running around, pecking, scratching, grooming themselves. Within hours of emerging from the egg!

But, the fourth one. There could be no other name for him but "the poor little guy". He came out with his beak all wrong and appeared to be missing his right eye. He was all messed up & lethargic. I didn't expect him to last the night. And when he did, and was even up walking around the next morning, my heart kind of went "uuuuhhhhng, he's still alive.....the poor little guy." With a beak like that, he'd never be able to eat.

Hens and chickens are a pretty fascinating design. It takes 3 days for a batch of eggs under a hen to all hatch. She stays on them all, keeping them warm & cozy & awaits all of them hatching before she takes them out of the nest to eat & drink. So chicks are designed to not eat or drink for 3 days while they wait for their siblings (which is how chicks can be sent through the mail without starving).We knew the poor little guy wouldn't be able to eat with a beak like that, but had some kind of hope that maybe magically over those 3 days he would either work his scissor beak out or figure out how to eat, or even just fall asleep & not wake up because he was a messed up little guy.

But alas, 3 days went by. He acted like a merry little chick doing all the normal little chick things until the 3rd day when we knew he'd start getting hungry. Like clockwork he started pecking at the feed dish on the 3rd day. Pecking & pecking. And I watched him closely to see if he could get any food but there was no way. His poor little beak just couldn't grasp a thing.

There are many millions of male chicks killed every year in the hatcheries because they can't lay eggs so no one wants them. Millions, usually ground up alive or suffocated in a dumpster at less than a day old. Those little guys are totally expendable according to our culture. And yet seeing this one poor little chick that I knew was doomed was just so sad. :(

He started getting lethargic again, and watching him peck & peck was so sad. We couldn't just watch him slowly starve to death, that would be cruel. So, we sent the poor little guy to little chicken heaven this morning. He was just one little chicken out of billions born every year, but it sucked to see him wanting to live & be a normal chicken. But with that beak it was not meant to be.

Poor little messed up guy.

This Blessed Life, a handwritten newsletter of simple living and radical gratitude

2011-12-06T10:02:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone! Here is the reason I've been missing in blog land.

I've created a handwritten, seasonal newsletter that I am offering for subscription. A newsletter is basically the same thing as a "zine" if you are familiar with those. A "zine" is a mini magazine created by a person. It is something that I create at home, make photocopies of, and send to the mail boxes of subscribers. Each will include stories are articles I've written that relate to the season and the theme (which I describe below), along with some simple pictures. Also stories, articles, recipes, etc. that are written by other folks that enjoy writing and send their handwritten work to me. I will put together a newsletter to send out each season of the year. I expect each issue to be in the 10-20 page range.

The Winter issue will be sent out before January 1st. Two contributors have also written for this issue. Now before you go thinking that I'm ohso clever for creating such a thing, recall that it was Tonya Gunn that introduced her wonderful newsletter, Plain and Joyful Living, a few years ago. :) I enjoyed her newsletter very much as did many others, but she is unable to continue it at this time. With Tonya's blessing I am adopting her idea.(Her blog, also called Plain and Joyful Living, can be found here). I'm very grateful to Tonya for being supportive of my endeavor and I hope she doesn't think my newsletter is dumb! ;)

I'm really excited about this new project. The theme of the newsletter is simple living and radical gratitude. What I picture this encompassing is things like living close with the seasons, striving for self sufficiency, cooking & baking from scratch, gardening & food preservation, working with our hands, being aware of how consumer driven our culture is & striving to avoid getting caught up in that... Also, being grateful for all our blessings, even when things are not going as we'd like them to be. And, related to both of those themes - the joys of mothering. Simply enjoying, appreciating, and raising up our kids with purpose and instilling gratitude in them.

I will be putting one issue together for each of the 4 seasons. Subscriptions are $15.00 per year (4 issues), or, if you'd just like one copy of the current issue, $4.00. If you are interested in contributing your own article, story, recipe, simple craft, or other idea you may think relevant, please do email me at aubreys_happy_home@yahoo.com .

If you'd like to subscribe, you may do so with a credit card or PayPal below. Or, you may send a personal check to my address. Send me an email & I will give my address to you.

I'm excited about this and think it will be really fun!

Ps. Stay tuned for my next blog post called "look what we found in our incubator!" Hint: It's really, really cute! heehee

just a regular ol' 'what's happening on the homestead' post

2011-11-25T22:24:00.000-08:00

We have this really goofy rooster. His fantastically original & creative name is "Brown Rooster". We have somewhere around 50 birds that call the coop home. During our awesome snowfall we had recently, we barely spotted one bird outside of the cozy coop. Except for this weirdo. He wandered all around & hung out just outside the windows of our house like he always does. The snow reached his chest at times but he just trudged through it. He crowed and acted like all was well while the rest of the birds (chickens & guineas) cowered in fear inside their coop.

The snow flew. It was so pretty!

Grendel had a grand time pulling the kids in the snow. I've read that Leonbergers are used for rescue in the snow. They're cold hardy and have webbed toes to keep them up on the snow.

My Husband has been working on learning how to tan sheep hides...

and gathering wild apples for canning...

and building feeders for the animals...

and taking pretty pictures of the guineas at dusk...

and adding nest boxes to the chicken coop (which these hens appreciate)...

and bringing home goats! Actually he's only brought one home so far, but you just never can tell with that man. You never know what he'll bring home next. This was a goat he found on Craigslist for a low price. He's a whether ("neutered") and is a nice little goat. He is part of our plan to never have to purchase meat from the store anymore. But he's so cute! Goats are so great because they look like they're smiling. Look at him, doesn't he look like he's smiling? I hate eating cute things that smile!!

Here is Little Miss Grumpsy Flumpsy in her favorite position with her big brother. She likes to take walks all around the house like this & see the sights.

Here is what my kitchen sink looks like on cheesemaking days. Which are very frequent. :p The jars are what the milk came out of. The big silver pails are my milking pails, and there's cheesecloth being soaked in the pan in the foreground. They say you can wash & dry it, but I have a hard time believing that it would last half as long going through the washer & dryer constantly. So I just hand wash it. That plant there is my one & only houseplant left! I had over 50 houseplants for many, many years. And then I had a bunch of kids. And then they played in them like a sand box. And then I vacuumed A LOT. And then I went through my ruthless decluttering stage. And I actually got rid of all my beloved plants & trees! Ten years ago I wouldn't have believed I'd ever do such a terrible thing, I loved my houseplants & pretty indoor trees so. But then I decided I loved having bunches of kids more.

We have something new on our kitchen counter:

Here's what's inside. We'll let you know how this little incubation experiment goes. :)

Look at this crazy-huge egg! Every now & then we find these behemoths under our hens.

The guineas are growing. And they're loud! It's neat, you can tell which ones are female because they yelp this weird noise that sounds like "buck-wheat! buck-wheat!" while the boys just make single syllable sounds.

Here is a hilarious sight I saw in a front yard in our area:

Another hilarious sight - Edgar. He thinks I am his sheepie-mama. He clings to my legs & follows me around.

"Pay attention to me, sheepie-mommy!!"

The kids & I recently visited some new friends. It was a great time had with great people!

How gorgeous is this spread?! Our hosts had put this together out in the grassy field near their home. We had tea and wonderful homemade snacks.

We were just over this hill and it was so neat because you could barely see any sign of civilization in any direction. It was just us, the grass, hot black tea, and the forest. SooOooo pretty.

Some of the older girls pulled all the little kids behind the ATV in this sled. They had a lot of fun. I just adore moments like this one was. It fills me with all kinds of warm fuzzy joy to see my kids having such fun in ways we never would have in our suburbia home. And how super cool to meet families like this family. My husband & I have laughed about how weird we are, but how we actually aren't that weird here! There's a lot of other weirdos in Idaho! I think we might actually fit in! I knew it was the right place for us. ;)

And back to the farm... ;)

Here is a rooster and his women. He is the manly black & white one in front. We call him "The Man" or "King Rooster". He waltzed right in here & became king of the land. The other roosters run in fear when he struts up. He doesn't like sharing hens & will chase the other roosters away from them. It's all very fun to watch. I love Chicken TV. ;)

"Mmm. chocolate graham cracker for me?"

"Hmm, looks intriguing but I am too manly for chocolate graham crackers."

In the brooder these days we have some Jersey Giants & Buff Orpingtons that are 6 weeks old now, and some Leghorns & Americanas that are about 2 weeks old.We're going to experiment with offering pullets on Craigslist in the spring. They'll just be reaching egg laying age in early spring.

So since I'm washing our own cloth diapers now, I figured I might as well start washing my own wipes as well! I've used cloth with all my children but always disposable baby wipes. I cute up a few flannel receiving blankets & put them in the old disposable wipes boxes. Some people get all fancy with tea tree oil & soap & such but I just get the wipes wet with water. Not so much water that they leak all over my bed when the kids toss the box there I learned the hard way. They work wonderfully. And believe it or not, I think I finally managed to figure out how the heck to wash my diapers! What a pain & a challenge that was. Apparently my homemade laundry soap is no good for cloth diaps. The kids got rashes almost instantly after peeing and the diapers smelled awful. I tried all sorts of different ways & products searching for what wouldn't burn the kids' skin & took that terrible smell away. It was like wet dog drowning in ammonia odor. But anyway, cool rinse, then hot wash with Country Save detergent & Sun oxygen cleaner, then a warm rinse with 2 cups of vinegar. Whew. Finally got it.

And last but not least, here is what our chair looks like after my husband sits in it. HAHA. I went to sit down to use the computer but had to get the camera instead. Straw & feathers. I must be married to some kind of farmer.

Our homestead winter preparations

2011-11-18T18:13:00.000-08:00

When we lived in our previous home near Portland, Oregon, we had one "big" snow in the 5 years we were there. It reached about a foot deep & stayed for about a week. It was exciting and a bit challenging for sure, but we still walked to the big grocery store that was 2 blocks away! LOL Now that we live about a 10 days hike from civilization, and expect far more snow, we have to be prepared.

We've always been interested in keeping canned and bulk foods around but this year we tried to be sure we had what we need to survive in the middle of nowhere should we be snowed in behind banks of snow.

One thing I stocked up more of is hearty stews and nourishing broths that I canned in our pressure canner.

My husband travels to nearby farms to purchase grains in bulk for our animals. Where we used to go down to the feed store and buy a bag of chicken feed, now we drive our pick up truck with a bed full of empty trash bins to fill with the bulk grains freshly harvested & prepared by local farmers. Purdy cool! :)

In suburbia, keeping a few dozen plastic water bottles around was sufficient. Here, with livestock that includes a dairy cow that can drink 15+ gallons of water in one day, some bottles of Arrowhead are just not enough! We have a well that relies on electricity to get the water pumped out of it & into our pipes. No electricity = no water. Or, frozen pipes = no water. OR, crazed rabid well eating zombies from the north = no water! So we stocked up on water barrels. Here are a couple plus a random squash.You never know when that fat squash might come in handy. We could throw it at the zombies!

We've been gifted an enormous quantity of apples this season! They've come from all over the place - friends, nearby abandoned apple trees (also pears from Azure Standard)... I have quite some more canning to do! In the meantime the kids have been juicing them by the dozen. Fresh apple juice is soooo good.

After snapping that cozy fruit scene, I turned and snapped a picture of the dog laying in the snow just outside the window. Crazy dog! He's prepped for winter as well, with that hefty winter coat.

The wood pile by the house, chopped by Husband & teen son. The boxes on the left are cat carriers. I wrapped one up in cardboard & plastic & put a cushy cat pillow inside. Now our kitty has a fine, protected spot facing away from the wind for her cat naps. The other carrier has her food dish in it to keep it protected from the snow and the naughty dog that prefers her food to his.

The rest of our wood is hiding out under that tarp that blows like mad in the winds. We don't heat exclusively with wood or we'd surely have more. But we have a good amount should we need it. And for playing board games in front of a flickering fireplace every time the mood strikes us.

Today's snowy landscape. About 5 inches of fluffy white fell from the sky today.

We've got a barn full of hay and alfalfa for the cow, steer (I haven't had a chance to make a post about his banding [I "neutered" him basically]. He is no longer a bull but a nice little steer thanks to me & my scary banding tool with ultra tight rubber band.), 3 sheep and smelly boy goat. Plus straw for bedding for everybody. Most of our straw was hand cut by my 13 year old from our fields.

We're stocked up on gasoline for the small snow plow we also bought in preparation, and the generator.

Full kegs of beer brewed by my husband. A necessary provision for the long winter ahead!!

My sea of bulk foods. They make me so happy. I feel secure when I look at them. We're nowhere near as prepared, food-wise, as many that live here in the wild & snowy north. Many folks are set for years & years. But we've got a good stash that I've been slowly adding to over the years through Azure Standard mostly. I feel so, so much more secure now that we've got our own dairy producer, good old Gertie. And meat producers (sheep, steer) as well. Now if only we had an orchard! ;)

I began searching the thrift stores for winter gear for our whole family before moving to Idaho. I started a fine stash of good, used snow pants, hats, etc. that way. And I found the best, most soft & cozy snow boots for myself at Goodwill the other week for just $12! I love them. Now my toes don't try to freeze off when I'm milking. That's nice. :)

We each have about 98 pounds of quilts & blankets on our beds. Okay that's a slight exagerration. Gah I can never spell that darn word. And our super duper rural people satellite internet is slllooowwwwwer than frozen molasses so I'm not going to bother going & looking it up.

We also of course have prepared ourselves with first aid books, supplies & knowledge. I gotta say, my favorite books on first aid are the "Where there is no doctor" , "Where there is no dentist", and "Where there is no animal doctor". Awesome books. So full of helpful & practical information. I found all of them on Amazon. I recommend them to anyone!

The kids have their sleds, and Grendel to pull them, so, they're all set for winter. ;)

captured baby smiles

2011-11-18T15:17:00.000-08:00

Our Little Miss at 7 weeks old:

I was trying to capture a smile on camera here. She's 6 weeks old. But all she wanted to do was stare at her fascinating brothers. :)

"Ohhh my fascinating big brother makes me smile!"

In other cute children news:

Our 2 year old finds video games (played here by my 13 yr old) about as enjoyable as I do. ;)

Our 5 year old wanted to show me "his baby". He'd even put a diaper made from a washcloth on it, complete with Snappi.

hand milking, cheesemaking

2011-11-16T14:47:00.000-08:00

After a very rocky start 2 and a half months ago, during which I questioned whether I would ever learn HOW on EarTH to hand milk a cow, I can now say that I find milking our cow to be a pleasant daily experience. What began as a very stressful hour and a half to 2 hour chunk of time that I had to be away from all my kids in the house twice a day, now takes me only 40 minutes of milking time every evening. After weeks & weeks of practice that included my hands cramping up and aching 24/7, somehow I finally managed to get the hang of it. I was not born a natural cow milker.

Cows love routine, and thankfully so do I so our nightly ritual flows peacefully & naturally. I look forward to hanging out with, and under, my warm cozy cow. I've read about how many people back in the day questioned why in the world anyone would want to ride around in the icy cold, new-fangled things called automobiles when you could be sitting atop a warm cozy horse. I never really grasped what they meant until I began hanging out under a cow when it's 17 degrees outside. Our 915 pound beast of a cow radiates heat! My hands & lips might freeze on my walk down to the barn, but I take my jacket off when I'm milking so I don't sweat! I'm perfectly cozy down there, but the wet washcloths I cast aside after washing her udder freeze solid by the time I'm done milking.

Gertie is in a paddock right next to our calf, 2 sheep and our new goat. So I have plenty of company. I get to enjoy the milking with my mellow cow-lady whilst enjoying the sounds of the calf & sheep chewing their cuds, and the sheep coughing & farting. Who knew that sheep cough & fart all the time?? Not me.

Here is the face I commonly see when I look up from my steaming pail of milk. She stares at me like this, unblinking. I laugh.

The smelly boy goat cuddling up with the warm calf's behind. :)

This is how Gertie likes to be presented in my blog because anytime I go to take a picture of her, as I mentioned in my last post, she rushes up to smell my camera. Here is her big slobbery cow nose:

She gives a gallon and a half per night. I milk only once per day, and her production went down when she suffered from bloat, but a gallon and a half is plenty for us! Here's a recent half gallon. It is cream all the way down to the arrow:

So, I ordered a cheesemaking kit that came with small, simple recipe booklet, and also a full book on cheesemaking. I knew absolutely nothing about cheesemaking. I'm so glad that I started by following the simple recipe booklet before cracking open the big book because it seems totally daunting in the big book! The small recipe booklet contains some of the same recipes but in a very simple format. I followed the recipe for "farmhouse cheddar" & found it way easy. I've been throwing together a new batch every 3 days or so. This is the big book full of overwhelming amounts of information, and the booklet that tells you how to throw a cheese together simply. :) Plus some cottage cheese on the right.

Some completed cheeses. The 2 on the right have been waxed & are now just sitting around being "aged" 'til we feel like eating them. The longer they age the sharper the flavor. The 2 on the left are sitting around & "drying" in preparation for waxing.

I've had to get creative in seeking good spots to hang the cheese to drain. lol

This was my very first batch. This is funny because all those blobs of curds are supposed to be fitting in that cute little cheese mold. :p

Cream cheese! It is sooO good. I love cream cheese & now I never have to buy it from the store again. Yay!

A meal made up of homemade cream cheese on a homemade bagel with squash from my father-in-law's garden.

A cheese aging above my milking pails that are sitting on the fridge in the kitchen.

One of the very few ingredients in cheesemaking (at least for the simple recipes I'm following) is "mesophilic culture". It came as little tablets in my cheesemaking kit. I learned that you can make your own culture very simply! You don't need to be ordering it online all the time in order to continue making your cheese. All you do is leave a jar of milk sitting out on the counter, with the lid slightly ajar, until it becomes thick like yogurt. I read that this can take only a day but our house is super cold & it takes 3 and a half days for my milk to thicken.

Then you pour it in ice cube trays & stick them in the freezer. Once they freeze I put all the cubes in a ziploc bag & store them in the freezer. One cube is equal one ounce of mesophilic culture. The farmhouse cheddar recipe calls for 4 ounces.Groovy!

Frozen culture cubes on the right, a drying cheese on the board:

I didn't realize how easy it is to make butter. You just put some cream in a jar & shake it 'til it's thick. Then pour off the buttermilk and add salt to your butter. And it's yummy! You can also make larger quantities in a blender or food processor.

A cute little stick of butter. :)

Homemade butter on homemade raisin toast = MmmmmMMMm.

A busy scene. On the left is crackers I'd made for the kids, there's cheese being pressed under boxes that weigh zillions of pounds in the back, my Ball Blue (canning) Book open to the potato canning recipe (I got a great deal on organic Russets from Azure this month!), a cookbook on top of that with that night's dinner recipe (flaky broccoli pockets), my day planner (if I don't write stuff down it never gets done), the 2012 Rod & Staff homeschool curriculum catalog I was drooling over, and a pot full of potatoes! :) I love taking pictures like this because I fully expect to smile over them someday when I'm a wrinkly old lady that's no longer busy, busy, busy.

The votes are in, our farm has a name. Plus, our first snowfall!

2011-11-15T19:03:00.000-08:00

Besides asking you all here to give your vote on our farm's name, I also posted over at the Homesteading Today message boards. All combined here are how the votes added up:

Family Roots Farm 19 votes (I'll admit that this was my personal favorite all along)

Folk Roots Farm 9

Round Cow Farm 29

Fat Sheep Farm 7

Friendly Calf Farm 2

Other suggestions that were given were 3 votes for Rootsong (my online username & also the name of our homeschool- my favorite name ever but it's not my dear husband's cup of tea) Farm, Roots Farm, Peaceful Acres, Fat Calf, and This Blessed Farm.
:)

That was all really fun. Thanks for adding your votes & ideas!

Our farm is officially named Round Cow Farm. And here is our round cow:

LOL!

Not really much resemblance to our REAL round cow:

It's not always easy to get a picture of Gertie because she comes up to sniff my camera. Hahaha.

It's gotten chilly here in north Idaho!

Good weather for staying in & baking bread.

We had our first snowfall. Our kitty's prints:

All bundled up:

It was a light snow. But that didn't stop the kids from playing in it for hours...

... or my 13 year old son from building a hilarious snowman!

This was the snow we experienced 2 nights ago. The snow was flying straight to the right in the icy winds when I snapped this picture. It was crazy looking! At least it was for me who's never lived in area that really gets snow. About 3 inches fell but was melted by morning.

Bundled baby! Have I mentioned how much I'm loving the pink clothing lately?? ;) It's so fun. We went over & had dinner with some new friends the other night, so I had an excuse to dress her in her fabulous fuzzy pink coat. Teehee.

For my next post- baby smiles! :) I finally managed to capture some on camera.

Milking time!

please add your vote to name our family farm

2011-10-25T11:19:00.000-07:00

Please share which of these choices is your favorite:

A. Family Roots Farm

B. Folk Roots Farm

C. Round Cow Family Farm

D. Fat Sheep Family Farm

E. Friendly Calf Farm

Thank you!

Ps. We're making our decision within the next 24 hours so no dawdling. Vote now! :)

just a bunch of farmy pictures from around the homestead

2011-10-24T16:04:00.000-07:00

Edgar:

I canned up a bunch of venison stew with white & purple potatoes and carrots grown in my father-in-laws garden:

Cozy chicks beneath their cozy heat lamp. We went with buff orpingtons and jersey giants this time. I look forward to seeing those enormous jersey giant roosters!

We are now officially done buying eggs from the store. Can I get a Hallelujah!? :)

Handsome rooster man:

It really is amazing how much easier cleaning out Gertie's stall was before we had so many chickens. Before the chickens, it took one simple pitchfork swipe to grab up the neat & tidy cow pie. Now the chickens all go to work pecking at the delicacies, AKA cow pies, and spread them out a good 2 - 3 feet. Then the mess has to be scraped & shoveled.

Autumn colors up our backyard hill. I love fall & the colors that go along with it.

The stinky guinea keets are growing up! They're now living in the coop with the chickens instead of in our garage. I visited a family that had 6 full grown guineas wandering around their yard. OMGoodness they were LOUD! LOL! We have around 23 keets. I laughed out loud upon hearing this other family's guineas. I can't imagine how loud our flock is going to be. I think guinea fowl are just so funny looking. Their heads are so small. Their brains can't be larger than a pea. And they act like it! :D

Establishing the pecking order is no fun for the hens at the bottom! My daughter dubbed this one "Patricia". Patricia's not very pretty.

Speaking of fall colors, here is a photo taken from the same vantage point as the one in my header. Summer's green is being replaced with fall's browns. I will never take each season's change for granted. I love seeing it, feeling it, and living amongst it all. It's all incredible. The handiwork of God for sure.

Another new farm toy, er I mean tool. Snow plow!! Now we will be able to get from the front door to the barn for Gertie's daily milking & barn chores.

I know I just posted this picture yesterday but I'm adding it here again for any new readers that stop by from the Homestead Barn Hop that I'm linking this to. :) Amazing cream given by our Jersey (there is more cream than milk in these jars):

Barnyard beasties enjoying each other's company. :) There's a chicken on Meatball's back:

I just couldn't snap a clear picture of our awesome new rooster. He wouldn't stop chasing his women around! :) He's huge & gorgeous & crows often. I can't tell you how happy it makes me to hear it. I live on a farm!! Complete with rooster crows in the background!! I love it when all my dreams come true.

Edgar: "MMmmm, there sure are tasty things in the center of this straw pile, munch munch munch."

Gertie sayin' hi:

One of the Bantam babies appears to be growing up into a fine rooster:

Me n' Gertie :) .

Edgar spends a lot of time here, at our front door. He stands there looking in with a sad "oh where are my humans and why don't they ever invite me in??" look on his face. (See the broom on the ground behind him. That's what we have to use constantly to sweep his little presents off our porch.)

These surroundings never cease to fill me with awe, peace & gratitude. I am one happy, dusty farm chick. Even though all my hoodies smell like cow.
:)

my half dozen kids

2011-10-23T14:44:00.000-07:00

My oldest daughter came to visit us from sunny Arizona this past week. She got to meet her brand new sister for the first time. And I got to enjoy the fabulous rare treat of having all my kids together at once. It was so very much fun hanging out with my young adult daughter & having conversations together. She's such a mature, thoughtful & interesting young lady! And of course much laughter was shared amongst us all. A week goes by much too fast. She is on an airplane right now, heading back to 100 degree weather. The day she arrived had been 92 degrees in her home town! I told her that it hadn't reach 50 here in quite some time. Her desert bones were chilled. But she's not a complainer & jumped right in for barn chores & cow milking.

Me & my little miss 4 week old.

My half dozen really wonderful kids. <3

Breastfeeding Little Miss out in the wind yesterday with Mister Always Entertaining.

I like this picture. I'm out nursing a baby on what appears to be the prairie, skirt blowing in the wind, and toddler handing me a flower he'd just picked for me. <3

Oldest Daughter hanging out with Gertie.

Making cottage cheese.

And cow milking!

Sisters born 20 years apart, saying hi to each other.

Speaking of nonstop laughter... We were all walking back from the barn. Mr 2 year old asked Mr 13 year old brother to hold his hand. Mr 13 year old brother says, "Sorry but I can't hold your hand right now, I'm holding Edgar. But you can hold Edgar's hand!" So they started holding Edgar's hands, er hooves, and walking back to the house that way.

A Gertie The Bloatey update

2011-10-23T12:57:00.000-07:00

I can't figure out that cow! Do cows normally just stay bloated for weeks on end? All the things I read seem to indicate that it's a very short lived problem. It's been 3 weeks since we naively fed her the lush grass that she gulped down. She inflated like a balloon 24 hours later. We tried sending a hose down her throat - no way was she having that. She fought so hard I thought she'd break her neck. I sent soybean oil down her throat, she didn't like it but I got it down her. Next I gave her baking soda in water with a giant syringe into her mouth. She loves it, goofy cow. She shoves her big gooey cow lips through the fence bars for more.

I shake 1 cup of baking soda in a quart of water & give it to her roughly every other day or whenever her bloat intensifies again. It never goes away, just fluctuates. Here she is on a day her bloat was less. Her left side isn't extremely puffed out. On bad days her left side is taut & sticking way out.

Same day as above. The "triangle" on her left side is where I see the greatest fluctuation. On her bad days you can't make out the triangle at all as opposed to her left side where there is always a sunken triangle over her stomach. When I press on the bloated triangle area I hear frothy sounds & she burps. She burps a lot.

When the bloat first set in her milk production plummeted. But it has since gone right back up. She's eating, acting normal, and seems perfectly happy. She's such a great cow. Mellow, sweet, loves her humans, and is absolutely perfect for us couple of urbanites-gone-country to learn to milk on. I'm amazed at how she stands there & puts up with us tugging & yanking on her teats, trying to figure out how the heck to milk a cow. We're very lucky to have her.

And look at how much cream she gives us!! More than half of these jars are filled with cream. Her milk is so, so good.

She gets as much grass hay as she wants per day, a leaf of alfalfa hay, and a coffee can of grain twice daily. We give her the occasional apple or corn. Her pasture is brown & grazed down. I can't imagine that anything she's still eating is keeping her all bloated up.

On a non-bloat related note, I never mentioned what flippers our cow's feet came with! Here is a picture from just after we brought her home. Look at those terrible flippers, I mean hooves! We had a farrier out to trim them. He was shocked at how easy it was for him to go about sawing, trimming & shaping her hooves while she was loosely tied to a fence post. He actually gushed throughout the process what an amazing cow she was, how tame & sweet. Did I mention how lucky we are to have her?

We were told by her previous owners that she is bred & due to calve "in April". I have no idea when in April! Also, her previous owners had her for only one month and didn't know a great deal about her history. And yet she's such a sweet cow even after being passed around so much. From what I understand, we can possibly tell she's for sure pregnant when she's about 5 months along because we will see & feel calf movement on her right side. I haven't seen any signs of heat & neither did her previous owners so that's a plus (being in heat would show that she's not pregnant). What a crazy adventure that will be! I have a lot to read about cow midwifery. :)

So far I've made & loved: vanilla ice cream, chocolate ice cream, custard, and cottage cheese from her milk.
Along with enjoying an endless supply of cups full of delicious, cold, nourishing raw cow milk. Yum.

just a quickie

2011-10-22T14:21:00.000-07:00

Hi all. We're still alive & well. I've been away from the computer the past couple weeks because I have been a meat canning maniac. Deer & elk meat, stew, and broth. Yum! And this week, my oldest daughter has been visiting us from Arizona! A wonderful treat. Gertie The Bloated is still alive & I will post an update about that in the near future. The darn cow is still bloated though, three weeks later. I don't understand. I have so many fun pictures to post when I get the chance. Now I need to go play Mad Libs with my hilarious kids & finish making my first batch of cottage cheese. Then I'll start on hard cheeses.

Seven days old

2011-10-04T00:15:00.000-07:00

Taken yesterday (Sunday):

BABY LOVE!! <3

Ps. Guess why I'm up so late (it's after midnight). We're trying to save our cow from dying of bloat! Woo Hoo the homesteading party never stops around here! Have you ever tried to shove a garden hose down a stressed out cow's throat? C'mon down & give it a try! Cow bloat party, yee haw!

Introducing our new baby...

2011-09-30T19:55:00.000-07:00

GIRL!!

Girl girl girl!

:)

Born at home at 5:41pm, Sunday September 25th, after a 44 minute labor. Honestly, from first contraction to baby girl in my arms - 44 minutes.

She weighed 8 lbs, 12 oz. Three of my other babies weighed 8 lbs, 13 oz at birth. Am I consistent or what?

Our 3 year old was very interested when the midwives were checking the placenta. That is where I actually birthed, behind Mr 3 year old, kneeling, facing that sink.

The sunset on the day of her birth (my 13 yr old was a great photographer for the whole evening):

My wonderful midwife weighing her.

Getting her newborn exam on my bed:

Our perfect new baby girl.

The next morning, with her 3 yr old big brother:

And her 5 yr old big brother:

And her nearly 2 yr old big brother. I love how he's checking out her hand so closely here:

I'm missing a picture here of her in the arms of her 13 yr old big brother. I'm sure he was busy doing something extremely helpful as he has been so much lately. My barn chores, making me meals, caring for all the other kids... I don't know how I would have functioned without him! He's leaving tomorrow for a very well deserved vacation at his dad's house in Arizona for 2 weeks.

Here she is on her first day of homeschool. ;) This was yesterday. Husband & I made a big decision to start milking our cow only once per day, in the evening. We put the calf on her overnight to take care of her morning milking, then separate them again for the day. That meant that I got to have a nice, relaxed homeschool morning for the first time in a long time.

She looks impressed with her first school day. ;)

Bunny slippers!! How cute are they! I've had them for years. I get so excited every morning when I get to dress her in all the soooo cute pink stuff I've been collecting for the last 4 babies that turned out to be boys. :D

So, as for the actual birth story, I've sure gone over in my head a million times how to write it. My blazing fast labor definitely was ... fast. And overwhelming. And scary at times. It went like this:

I was lazing about on the couch reading a book. The new one by the Duggars called A Love That Multiplies. I had no real obvious signs that labor was around the corner. Suddenly I felt 2 bizarre popping sensations down low on my belly. With previous deliveries, my water had never broken until I was pushing the baby out. I recognized the strangeness that felt like a couple rubber bands popping because I've read so many birth stories in my time & read how women described their water breaking that way. I walked to my bathroom in a daze to wonder what that popping was and suddenly I was dripping hot water all over the place.

OMG!

I grabbed a towel & dripped my way to the front door. I called outside to my 13 yr old to go tell my husband, who was down at the barn building a chicken coop with my father-in-law, that my water broke. Suddenly I was gushing gushing gushing, sitting on a pile of towels my son brought me, right in our front door way. lol No doubt about it, my water had broken.

So, uh, what do you DO when your water suddenly, unexpectedly breaks? lol! I had no idea. I wandered into my bathroom & began filling the tub. I sat there for a few minutes. I told my husband to call the midwife & let her know what was going on, but that I wasn't having any contractions. About 15 minutes after that, I was slammed into by a scary labor train. Just, SLAM. Pressure, the urge to push, hard contraction right on top of another hard contraction. And I'm all alone in the bathroom, my husband down with the chicken coop, all my littles jabbering at me through the bathroom door.

Suddenly I can't stand the water. I'm just not a water birther! I jump out to sit on the toilet. I can't get into any sort of breathing, coping, moaning groove. There just wasn't time! And I was alone with the pain & not able to communicate to my husband how intense it all was, and how I needed all my birth supplies laid out NOW and I knew I needed to push but there were no pads or anything on the bathroom floor....

My husband had no idea that my labor was moving so fast. He asked my 13 yr old to "help me" and I tried to scream that he didn't know how & I needed my husband but I was overtaken by another extreme contraction & my scream was cut off & he just wasn't quite aware of what was going on. That part was scary. I felt totally alone & was having such trouble coping with the pain due to the lack of time to find that labor groove every woman needs to find. I started pushing my forehead against the wall next to the toilet and later, against the sink. I still have a painful lump on my forehead from that weird pain coping technique!

My midwife appeared & was able to lay down the birthing supplies I needed. She could tell how fast things were moving and was asking me where to find things & how to get things together but I was too deep in labor, I was in transition by that time (already!) to answer & I just really needed my husband. He was busying himself at the barn cleaning up his tools in preparation for the night of labor we were just beginning...

I ended up kneeling in front of the sink, punching the inside of the sink just like in my other homebirths. I kept my eyes open through each contraction for focus. If I closed them I would immediately be consumed by fear & panic due to the suddenness & painfulness of it all. AND needing my husband! So my eyes were open & I stared at the gold hinge on the cupboard door in front of my face. LOL In past births, because I had the time, I repeated hymns and lovely birth affirmations in my head. I had time to think of them, find the ones that worked best for me, and get into that labor groove. This time, there was no time for thinking. So I completely focused on that hinge with all my might.

And then I was pushing. And yelling. I'm loud when pushing. And even louder when I'm totally freaked out and pushing at the same time! That's when my husband heard it & asked himself "huh, she can't be pushing already can she?" and joined me in the bathroom to catch our new baby daughter. And there she was.

I checked to make sure she was a girl- remember I had found out her gender this time at my 18 week ultrasound. ;) I never told anybody besides my husband & 20 yr old daughter.

And then I cried happy tears & announced her gender to her 4 older brothers that were right there in front of me. And then I stared and stared and stared at her in joyous wonder. Which is exactly what I've spent much of my time doing in the 5 days since. Falling in love with new babies is so so so much fun.

Oh yeah, her name. :) We don't post our family members' names online. If I know you well enough to be sure you are not a crazed internet stalker, please email me so I can share her name with you!

And that's the story. I would never claim that crazy-fast labors are "better" than longer ones. Of all my labors I'd say the 2.5 hour one was just about right. (I've experienced labors that are 24 hours, 7 hours, 90 minutes, 2.5 hours, and 5 hours, in that order).

One more part of my birth story that's just not happy-jolly is how much I miss my mom. She has either been at or come directly after each of my births. This time, she is experiencing some serious health problems that weigh heavily on my heart every day. She was actually recovering from surgery in the hospital the day I gave birth, and won't be able to visit us from California for quite some time. And I really, really, really miss her.

And now, I go milk the cow.

baby

2011-09-25T16:47:00.000-07:00

my water just broke!!

no Equinox baby

2011-09-24T15:16:00.000-07:00

Alas, Baby has not been rustled from its cozy cocoon inside. Yesterday I tried walking it out. Walking has brought on many contractions, but it was way too hot! We (including Edgar of course) made it down one dirt path and had to turn around because we were all melting. It must have been 90 degrees. How is it that we live so close to Canada and yet we've had such a blazing hot summer, all the 8 weeks we've lived here?? lol My preconceived notions about chilly north Idaho were all wrong apparently.

But ask me about that again in 2 months & I might be singing a different tune. lol

Look at this cool guy we found yesterday! He's at least 3 inches long.

Husband is hard at work on the chicken coop. It's coming along nicely.

And that's about it.

C'mon Baby!

Life. Love.

2011-09-22T19:17:00.000-07:00

My due date is in 6 days. I started feeling pretty weird yesterday & thought it might be the day, but no labor yet. Tomorrow is the first day of autumn. That would be a lovely birthing day!

My hair has nothing to do with my pregnancy. But here's a picture of it anyway.

Homebirth supplies are ready. Will we use the blue gown or the yellow flowery gown?? Here's our keepsake birth certificate, and the embroidery thread braid I made to tie the umbilical cord.

We are swimming in delicious, fantastic cow milk from our new family cow. We have about 10 gallons in the fridge right now, plus lots in the freezer. Our cheesemaking supplies should be waiting in our PO box right this moment. I made ice cream out of it and it is DeLicIOuS!

I can always tell which boots are mine by all the milk splatters.

This was yesterday morning's milking. I milk twice a day. Haha, so much milk!

Here is Edgar. Edgar is always with me when I'm milking. He's the surviving twin premature lamb I've typed about before. I'm still bottle feeding him and he's thriving. He has no idea that he's a sheep however. He thinks he's one of us, or a puppy. He sleeps on our porch, cries through the windows when we all go in the house, and is under our feet constantly when we're not. He really is very, very cute. He's chewing my boot here while I milk.

And then he's chewing my zipper. After that it'll be my hair, then my pants, then my elbows. It's all pretty tolerable until he comes around to the front side of me & tries to chew/nurse on my belly button protruding from my giant pregnant belly while I'm milking!! Agh, what an annoying feeling that is.

Here is where Gertie eats her grain while I milk. And below her are where the chickens & Edgar hover & wait for all the tasty tidbits she drops. Gertie's very careful to never stop on any of them even though they're all frequently right under her enormous body.

Ahh those lovely Jersey eyes.

I need to figure out how to take those big orange tags off her ears.

This is her calf. I named him Meatball because that is what he will become next year. He's not technically her calf, he's a Hereford/Holstein cross. He's about 5 months old & is also very tame. He's a good little calf.

The other morning Gertie decided to scratch her face on me. She loves to do this but this time my son was there to capture it on the camera.

Guess what! We got a truck! It's really not easy to be proper farmers with a minivan. lol We had to have our cow delivered to us, and pay extra to have our hay delivered to us... Now we can drive all our farmy stuff around ourselves! Plus we needed something to get us around when the roads get icy. I love it. I love looking at the truck & laughing at how far Husband & I have come. From San Francisco partiers to truck driving cow milkers. We have a truck! That's just funny! :D

Home. The view from up the hill behind our house. I love home. I'm so happy to return to it every time I have to leave. And how about all those autumn colors!

Here are some of our guinea keets. They're about 3 weeks old. We have around 25 left. They'll be great once they're old enough to be out from the heat lamp & feed themselves. But for now, they live in our garage. They stink bad, they fill their waterers with filth pretty much instantly, and they love to trample each other to death.We got them for their fantastic bug eating skills (we have lots & lots & lots of bugs- and ticks!), and they provide very yummy, dark, gamey meat apparently. In the meantime though, they are crazy-wild little stinky things.

This is Mr Gimpy Guinea. His buddies tried trampling him to death too but he managed to survive. He's got paralyzed feet now though for some reason. I have no idea what we'll do with him. He just lives in his own box, hobbling around on his elbows.

During my nesting extravaganza the past several days, I managed to put the laundry room together. We still have so many boxes to unpack & so much organizing to do! My laundry room is decorated with kid pictures, gifts to me for Mother's Day & birthdays. :)

And speaking of nesting, it was so funny. One night recently my husband comes into the room, it's 11pm, and goes, "So, uh, you just decided suddenly to move all the bookshelves around?" It struck me as hilarious at the moment because I realized how silly moving bookshelves around must seem to him (there are so many other more important things I *could* be spending time on). But in my super nesting, pregnant mind I was positive that I couldn't possibly have a baby when the bookshelves were all wrong!! I mean seriously!

Here is Mr 23 month old, so very proud of his creation:

And Mr 5 year old, napping on the trash can.

It's so much fun living somewhere full of wildlife. Last night I was awoken by a loudly hooting owl outside my bedroom window, and this morning brought this cute little frog!

And then a cute little garter snake.

Huckleberry pancakes made from wild berries picked by Husband & 2 oldest boys. Giant yum.

Wood chopped & brought home by Husband & oldest son. It will be enjoyed in our fireplace this winter!

Those little barn swallows were soo fun to watch grow up. And geez do they grow up fast! In the 8 weeks we've lived here, we watched the pair build the nest, sit on the eggs, then feed the babies constantly. One day, the very full nest was empty! The babies came back again for 3 nights to sleep crammed in the nest, then they were gone for good. For another 2-3 days there were about a dozen swallows darting around our home, gobbling up bugs. And then? Nothing! All in one day every barn swallow left. Apparently they felt a chill in the air & took off to warmer parts. I miss them & will be so excited to see them return in the spring!

What sort of a weird, feral child falls asleep in the sun directly in the middle of a gravel driveway?? Oh yeah, MY weird child!

And here's the dog that didn't work out. Hmph. He's gone to live with our neighbor. She says he's really happy & working out there. He was listed in the paper as a Great Pyrenees. All he ever did here was bark at my husband, bark at the cow, chase the chickens, and NOT ever bark at a coyote or anything else we'd actually want him to bark at. And worse than anything, he was the most destructive thing you can imagine. If it could be picked up, he would drag it off & destroy it. Shoes, boxes, towels, tools, ladders, beer bottles, anything. You would be amazed at the number of pieces he tore towels into! I couldn't put one thing on the clothesline, he'd have it off in seconds. OY. But he is a really cute dog. And I'm happy he's having a jolly time at the neighbor's place.

Some neighbors took all our kids in their combines when they harvested the wheat field next door. How nice was that! Our neighbors are all great.

We went to the North Idaho fair a couple weeks ago. It was so much fun & there was so much to see! We only got to see a teeny bit of it. I'd never seen a rodeo before. That was fun too! I really liked this cute guy:

I hope to raise some turkeys next year. It was suuuper hot. All the poultry were panting.

I LOVE roosters with big, giant, manly combs. ;)

And there we have it. During the middle of putting this post together I went to a midwife appt, checked our PO box (no cheesemaking supplies! darn!) and discovered a new sign of impending labor that I won't post because it is too personal. LOL But believe me, I was excited to discover it! Perhaps we can have an equinox baby after all.....

Someone new on our little farmstead

2011-09-06T11:52:00.000-07:00

No, it's not the wee teeny pink belly baby. :) That one isn't due for another 22 days or so (wow so close!).

Here's a hint:

There's lots I have to say about this. But instead I'm spending way more hours per day than I care to admit on learning how to milk a cow. Seriously. It's embarrassing.

Random pics of recent adventures

2011-09-02T18:33:00.000-07:00

Here is something I never had to deal with in suburbia. Scalps full of grass seed! Ew!

I've never seen such filthy tubs before moving here. It was so amusing to me that I snapped this picture after one of the kids' first baths here.

We found a mousey thing. Here the kids are examining it in the box.

Is it a mouse? Big head, shortish tail.... I wasn't really sure.

I love my new pantry. Love love.

What are these flowers? Our pasture has tons of them, especially where there is any old manure build up. They have a strong, distinct smell but it's not chamomile. I like the smell and wonder what the heck these are (& if it's OK for livestock to chow down on them).

Look at this cool swallow's nest that's on the ceiling of the barn (or at least I think it's a swallow's nest...).

Mr. 13 year old getting busy on putting in a garden bed for fall:

Apparently we live in one of the few places left in the country where field burning is still legal. This was the first time we witnessed it, it was right next to our property. It was crazy to see all those flames just on the other side of our dry pasture grass & barn! Sure made me nervous. But the farmer guys sat right there with all their equipment watching it carefully. We've seen many fields burn since. The smell is intense, especially when it's billowing in your windows, but I really love it. I have such a strong association with my childhood and the smell of fields burning in the summer. I grew up in a house in the center of a wheat field that was burned every year. The scent brings me right back to happy childhood memories in the country. :)

Did you think I would post without adding a sunset picture? ;)

Not long after moving in we took a day off to play at a nearby lake. Here my son is going on a ride with his little slug buddy.

Little Slug Buddy:

Oldest son giving log rides to his brothers. They had a great time doing this for most of the afternoon.

The dog was hilarious. They don't lie when they say Leonbergers love the water.

On my first trip into the "big city" (Spokane), I had to snap a picture of this truck. The light turned green & I had to rush off so I couldn't get a better one. It says Tri-County Septic on the side, and "Surrender The Poo" on the back with the skull & crossbones. Haha.

We have a zillion grasshoppers in our grass (at least, until we unleash the guineas!). The kids play with them all the time. Here Mr. 5 year old is hanging out with one.

Mr. Grasshopper even enjoyed a game of Connect Four. He's on the upper right of the game. Heh heh.

Hooray for diapers! We'd only ever used a diaper service and so I didn't own my own cloth. We used weird smelly disposables for a few weeks during our move. Thanks to advice from a friend (thanks, Danielle!), I ordered diapers from Green Mountain Diapers. I got cute little bitty newborn diaps too, heeee! I've been trying to figure out exactly how to best wash them ever since. Right now they suddenly stink really bad the moment my toddler son pees. Not with the scent of pee, but some totally yucky smell. So far I've been washing them in cold with our homemade laundry soap, followed by a hot wash with the same soap & drying them in the dryer. We have hard well water. I guess I need to add vinegar at some point in the process? And/or bleach?

Last but not least, I love this photo. :)

I've been multi-tasker extraordinaire this evening! :) As I waited for photos to upload here, I'd hop up & check my pressure canner as I'm STILL working on finishing up every last bit of that sheep. Tonight I'm doing 2 batches of soup stock made from the bones & fat. Although at 36 weeks pregnant, "hopping" is really more of a grunting roll and a sluggy waddle. I also finally helped our fridge recover from the whole affair. I won't even describe the grossness of sheep blood that had accumulated everywhere.

There have been many times that I have wandered past my husband who's busy doing whatever task he's working on, and announced simply, "Everything is disgusting." LOL Between the sheep fat, the blood pooling in the fridge & mixing with the rotten spinach juices, cleaning maggots from lamb heads, the smells of decaying meat, infections, & diapers in a pail in the summer sun, discovering that we have mice (hello mouse turds in my toothbrush drawer), the dog taking to crapping just anywhere (as opposed to the small spot he was trained to go in at our old house), our toddler playing in composting horse poop like it's a sandbox, having to search for ticks on the kids each night, and having to saw through the long, exposed bone of that 3 legged sheep so it could heal appropriately - sometimes everything seems really disgusting.

LOL! I love our new baby homestead.

On tonight's agenda: Trying to figure out exactly how much hay we need to buy for winter. Packing up for leaving early tomorrow because we're going to look at a cow/calf pair for sale (OMG am I excited!), and doing one more batch of soup stock My husband & oldest son are off at the neighbor's picking up some wood to build a chicken coop.What I need is more time for is lesson planning! My son & I have gotten some laughs over how crazy our homeschool year has started out. Our first day of school was Monday. This is our 12th or 13th year and definitely rates up there with one of the least organized ever. I've worked on putting together my and my son's schedules over the past couple days. We function so much better with schedules in place.

That reminds me, all our heating/AC vents are located on our floors. Something died under our house. The smell of Dead Thing has been wafting up through all our vents. I had to cover them with books. One of them being my son's history book which is why I was reminded of it.

HAHA. And on that fantastical note, I must go multi-task in the kitchen now.

So much happens everyday

2011-08-30T19:20:00.000-07:00

I know I say it all the time but by golly I wish I had more posting time. I would love to post every single day!

I uploaded these pictures last Thursday. I haven't had a spare moment for adding any words to it until now. And even now I am running out the door to a midwife appt & only have half a moment. :)

I will never ever tire of the nightly Sunset Show. It's funny how I have to fight taking pictures of it every single night! lol

This was an early morning shot over our side hill. So pretty.

I told you all about our 3 legged little lamby. I had thought I would name her "Lucky" per a reader's suggestion, but unfortunately, she wasn't. The poor little thing just never thrived, never seemed to grow or do much of anything. She was never an eager eater. Late one night the sad little lamb was just suffering so badly, and started bleeding from her mouth, we decided to put her out of her misery. ): We asked for farm life! And it's not always easy or fun.

Just a couple days after she came to us, we got her twin brother as well. Being so premature (a week at least), he was having a tough time having the energy to nurse & his mama wasn't coming into milk on time. So we offered to bottle raise him. He is so cute! And the difference between him & his sister was amazing from that first day. This is a lamb that is growing & thriving & LOVES his bottle. He's about 2.5 weeks old now and doing great. He's still teeny tiny for his age, and he's got some funky twisting of one of his front legs going on, but he's growing. For being so tiny he sure has an enormous Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa when he wants attention. This was the day he came to us:

My husband & I have learned something very important since being here: No matter what your plans are for the day, something will always come up, AND, everything takes forever.

One Saturday I awoke with a great list of things I would accomplish that day (I mean, we still have dozens of boxes to unpack!). Then, our sheep got out. Our neighbor was helping us move some temporary electric fencing around & figured the mama sheep and her baby (the little one with the big head wounds I was cleaning out) would stay nearby while we did so. Funny thing though- they took off! Mama & lamb went on a hike over the hills & far away. Story summary is, Neighbor came back with her horse to go scout the land for the missing sheep. The neighbors & my husband spent the entire afternoon searching the blue yonder for the darn sheep before giving up & coming home. I was feeling huge disappointment that I'd lost the lamb that I'd spent so much time on trying to save from her head wounds. And then, we all turn & see both sheep, standing in their pasture, looking right at us with "hey, watcha guys doin' ?" looks on their faces. They'd come right back home while everyone was out searching the hills. OY.

But, the kids all got to ride the neighbor's horse which was super cool!
Neighbor holding Mr. 22 Month old, me & belly baby on the right:

Rocky the horse had the coolest eyeballs you ever did see. Blue striped through brown, like a marble.

Husband also took a ride. I opted out as I didn't want to jostle anything out of my uterus that shouldn't be jostled. :)

And my 13 yr old son took a turn as well. So fun!

Here's a cute picture of the twin lambs, before the girl died. Awwww.

This was his first walk, at several days old. He's on our bedroom floor and kept wanting to go into the closet. He was all wobbly & adorable.

While my husband was out searching the land for the dumb sheep, he found these bones for the dog. Some of them are huge- big ol' deer or elk or something. Doggie loves them.

The mama of the twin preemie lambs came to live with us. I can't remember why... LOL. I think we bought her for meat? Haha, things happen so fast around here I can't keep up. :p Anyway, we've been milking her & bottle feeding it to her itty ram baby. She's much more mellow than the brown one. We may try to breed her again & see if she can manage to not have premature babies. We'll also breed the brown one in about 2 months. My son has dubbed the brown one, "Crazy Jane". Since he's the one that usually does the milking, he would know. ;)

Those 2 mama sheep really like each other. They're a mini flock that run together, eat together, and freak out & dart across the pasture together.

So, I guess I'll share my bad news about little "Hazel", the lamb in the foreground above, the one with the nasty head wounds that I worked hard on to save. Her wounds were so bad, but I battled them daily & finally felt like they were actually healing. She was super strong, stocky, robust, and had great color. We'd hoped to breed her one day. And then, suddenly as could be, she went downhill. My husband found her laying in their pasture last week, totally unable to get up. She never stood again. Just like that. We did everything we could for about 4 days- medications and bottle feeding (force feeding, really), keeping her in a cozy box in the house, turning her since she couldn't even roll over herself. It drove me crazy that we couldn't figure out what the heck her problem was! White muscle disease? Pneumonia? Some brain problem due to being kicked by the horse that gave her the head wounds?

She seizured like crazy. I think that's what was turning her eyes totally white- she would violently seizure with her eyes wide open & rub them all over her bedding.

Well anyway, one morning she just seizured for most of an hour, then stopped breathing right there while I was watching her. Such a bummer. I liked that lamb! And she seemed to be doing so well...

My husband had been working on some good old fashioned hide tanning on a big wooly sheep he'd just butchered. We figured we shouldn't waste Hazel's nice pelt either. When I went to retrieve the brain (needed for traditional brain tanning), the very first thing I found in her skull was a gooey blob of green stuff the size of my thumb! There were several more spots of it. SO, as it turned out, now we all think she had a brain infection, almost certainly caused by the infections on her head. Her poor little brain. That's what was causing all the seizuring.

Big fat sigh.

And in happier news, look! Remember the barn swallow nest on our porch right out the kitchen window? Babies!

Fuzzy caterpillar!

More weird-cool tractors doing weird-cool stuff on the land next door!

Our goofy dog just sitting around in the kid's pool:

Mr. 5 yr old shooting some arrows (just another fun thing we didn't have room to enjoy in suburbia):

I'd never milked a sheep before about 2 weeks ago. Their teats are tiny & take some getting used to but once you get the hang of it, it's super easy.

Here's the baby ram (I call him "Hungry Mungry") peering up at his mama's milk:

We were given a Bantam & her 7 chicks. This mama chicken is so fun to watch. One day the dog was getting too close to her babies so she positively charged him. I've never seen such a puffed out, squawking, angry mama chicken. She rushed at him which freaked him out (it would have freaked me out having that little crazy thing come at me like that), then she darted back to her babies & instantly put her wings out & sat on all 7 of them. Every one of them disappeared within about 2 seconds beneath her wings & poofy feathers.

So, the sheep butchering. Husband went to the neighbor's house to do it since they were already all set up to do such a thing. We bought the pasture raised tasty organic ram from them, butchered it, and spent the next zillion days (at least that's what it felt like) trying to figure out how to preserve it.

Every single darn tiny thing we do around here is this huge learning experience. During this particular experience we learned this: wooly sheep have tons & gobs & heaps of fat all over the place. Mixed into every inch of meat. It was a giant time consuming production to get the meat from the fat & bone. But we finally managed thanks to Carla Emery's encyclopedia of country living. ;) She told us to pressure cook the carcass and that would melt the fat off the muscle & bone. Well it wasn't quite that easy, I still had to hand pick out a lot of fat, but it worked out.

Another thing we learned- never attempt a butchering of a large animal carcass without a bone saw. Hacking apart a sheep with a dull axe is really & truly just not easy. :p Yes, feel free to roll your eyes at us.

We started out with a fridge full of sheep parts.

And I slowly but surely separated fat, meat & bone & got to canning.

Here was my view down to the right:

The first batch. It took so much work but you just can't beat home raised, home butchered organic meat.

Here's the grill Husband put together for grilling up some of the ribs & stuff. The legs of the grill are made of some miscellaneous bones of large wildlife found nearby. ;) We all enjoyed sitting around that fire under the manymanymany stars one night grilling our meat.

We barely wasted a thing. We saved all that retched fat even, for soup stock (and by retched I just mean difficult to deal with- I know it's incredibly healthy for us & am grateful to have it). And the dog got the feet. ;) This was Husband's first attempt at traditional brain tanning of a hide. By the large number of times I heard him groaning & cussing during the process, I'm going to guess that it wasn't easy. We still can't figure out exactly how to clean the deep wool without damaging it... Just another learning experience under way.

Oh hey! I got to the last picture! Here's where Hungry Mungry gets to hang out during the day now since he's outgrowing his box.

My husband's sister got married on Saturday. And the rehearsal was the day before. Since Mr. Mungry needs feeding every few hours, we had to bring him with us. LOL During the wedding ceremony he was stashed away in the church bathroom. Teehee.

So now I'm kinda sorta caught up to Saturday. Although I didn't post about the 30 guinea keats we picked up from the post office Friday morning just as I was rushing to get the kids out the door to the wedding rehearsal. Ha. Sunday we went to the North Idaho fair, yesterday some neighbors showed up in enormous combines (tractors) & took all the kids along while they harvested wheat. And today we brought home a Great Pyrenees! I'll post about those next time. I also want to post about my awesome but crazy-different "country" midwife compared to all my past "city" ones. It's so funny how different everything is up here.Which reminds me, while my husband was on his way to pick up the Great Pyr this morning, he had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting a moose that was taller than our van & standing in the middle of the road. The big moosey guy was just down the road from our house maybe half a mile. What a crazy place we live in now.

yesterday's canning, today's sheep

2011-08-12T14:44:00.000-07:00

Since we're brand new to the area I've yet to find the spots to find organic produce. It doesn't look like there's a store less than an hour away that carries a single organic food! That's definitely something different about our new home. But I've have several farms recommended, we'll get back on our monthly Azure Standard bulk food deliveries, and one day we'll be producing much of our own food. So, there's hope.

I found a store in Spokane that was selling 57lbs of (inorganic) tomatoes for $30. So I grabbed them. Last year in Oregon the weather so wet that there weren't enough tomatoes to be found for pasta sauce. I LooOOvE home canned pasta sauce. I had to do without for the past year. Fifty-seven pounds isn't a year's worth, but at least it's something.

I follow the recipe in the Ball Blue canning book, although I peel my tomatoes before hand. I prefer that (& my food processor) to the food mill.

Boiling & boiling pasta sauce for hours is very messy. It splatters from the ceiling to the floor.

I managed to get exactly 12 quarts. And aren't they pretty. ;)

So that was yesterday, here is today. A truck drives up our driveway. It's our neighbors that gave us the last pair of sheep. Today they brought me another one. She was just born this morning. Awwwwww.

The neighbors joked with me that pretty soon when I see their truck coming up the drive, I'm going to hide everybody & pretend we're not home. lol

This baby was one of twins born this morning. Upon birth, she was either chewed on by a coyote, or trampled on by a ram. Apparently birth smells similar to the ewe being in heat so the rams can get a little too excited around the birthing mama. So, this baby lost a leg. Her rear leg was chewed/trampled beyond saving. She has several other little small wounds. But she's eating & trying to stand up & baaaa-ing the cutest teeny little baa you've ever heard.

She's a Katahdin also, a "hair sheep". The neighbors explained how very resilient they've found Katahdins to be. They said if this were a wooly sheep they wouldn't bother trying to save it because wooly sheep are so wimpy & prone to dropping dead with every injury.

Aww, look at that sad 3 legged thing.

Does it get more pathetic looking than this? ;)

And so here she's living for now. In a bin next to yesterday's sauce in the kitchen. I put a heating pad on low under half the bin. She's having a hard time staying warm.

She's so cute & brand new! I was wiping up her leg & it felt almost floppy in my hands. Her hooves are like gel, not at all hard like a hoof normally feels. She feels like a fetus! Oh yeah, I forgot to mention- she was also born a week prematurely! So, she's got problems. ;)

So now I'm bottle feeding a gooey little 3 legged preemie sheep around the clock. :)

Now what would be a good name for a 3 legged bottle baby lamb?

The sheep

2011-08-10T16:18:00.000-07:00

What I really want to do right now is respond to the many great comments on my past few posts. Thanks everyone! But my time is so limited. Even at this very moment I'm running between the computer & canning up 60lbs of tomatoes I turned into delicious pasta sauce. So I've decided to delay comment responding & post about the sheep, since I mentioned them & keep telling friends & family that ask about them, "I'm going to post all about them in my blog soon!" And then a week goes by. :)

We'd been here about a week and a half. A neighbor gave the 2 sheep to us as partial payment for some work my husband is doing on her website. It's a year old first time mama, and her baby that was 3 days old when we got them. They're called Katahdins. Katahdins are "hair sheep", meaning they don't grow wool. They grow hair instead which falls out naturally & we don't have to ever worry about sheering. The funny thing is, besides their long tails, they look just like goats to my untrained eyes!

Baby sheepie who has yet to be named, at 3 days old:

This is inside our big shop/barn/building full of potential that we've yet figured out exactly what to do with.

Awwwwwww.

Here's the mama the day we got her. I've never touched her, she's super wild. I'm pretty sure her name will end up being something like "The Wild Mama". :p

For the time being the pair is living in this little paddock. The baby had a little mishap with a horse's hoof on her first day of life. Apparently the poor thing was welcomed into the world with a sharp kick to the skull and the wound needs lots of attention. So they needed to be somewhere small where I could catch the baby easily for her twice a day head cleaning.

Also, we don't have the correct fencing for sheep in the pastures and needed something temporary while we work on that.

Also, I was going to possibly try milking the mama. The neighbor that gave them to us milks many sheep & sells sheep's milk soap & all sorts of other lovely concoctions. She even lent us a milking stand & dairy sheep book. And gave us a quart of sheep's milk. Which was, OMG, reeeeeaally delicious. But after thinking long & hard about it all I decided not to bother. For one, the mama sheep's really wild & it would be such a pain to catch her everyday, but more than that, our family drinks a gallon+ milk per day. A sheep only gives a few ounces or may a few cups (if you milk 2x a day). As delicious as sheep milk is, I only have so many hours in my day and a few cups of milk wouldn't be worth the time commitment.

Let me just tell you, that first day when I cleaned out her head wound for the first time, was so so so so so gross. Thank your lucky stars that I didn't have the camera with me. As soon as I poured the cleaning solution in the wound, an endless raging sea of maggots came waggling their heads out at me. And the smell.....ugggggccchhhh. I battled against those maggots for a long time. Over the first 3 days I think I plucked about 200 maggots out of her head wounds. After that first cleaning I came outside to tell my husband that "that was the most disgusting thing I've done in a long time". He said, "you have no right to complain, we're still paying off your veterinary technician student loans every month!" LOL It's true, $200 every month most likely for the rest of my life. I guess I should put the degree to use somehow. Even if it is going to war with pus & maggots in a sheep's head.

I wish you could see how fast her tail goes when she's nursing! It is sooo cute.

She started out with 3 holes in her skin. There are 2 on the left in this picture, and one really big one on the right. The one on the right is huge & open & that is actually her skull you're looking at. It's now 11 days later & I've won the war against the maggots. The 2 smaller holes are healing up nicely but the huge one is still huge and infected. I still wash the stinky pus out from around the edges of that one each day. It's all weird & discolored due to the betadine & antibacterial ointment.

I get so used to looking at her from above into her nasty wounds that sometimes I forget how cute her face is. lol

Their paddock is located down there just to the right of the shop/barn. So they get a front row seat for The Sunset Show every night.

As for what we're going to actually do with them, they're going to be providers of homegrown meat. The neighbor is going to breed the mama again in about 5 months. Or was it 3 months? I'll have to check my notes. ;) And eventually the baby can be bred & we should end up with a nice little supply of good, homegrown meat. That is if the coyotes don't eat them all first. Sigh.

The first 48 hours

2011-08-01T15:15:00.000-07:00

I have 2 cats, both 8 years old. One of them, the poor little princess, is acting bewildered and scared half to death by her new countryside surroundings. She hides in the brush most of the time. The other cat we knew was a hunter because he loved to torture & torment all sorts of little creatures at the home we lived in many years ago, in the Oakland hills in CA. The house we just moved from had no wildlife to speak of, really. We lived there 5 years & we never knew him to catch one little creature. Our suburban neighborhood just came without fuzzy little things to torture & torment.

On our very first day here, about 5 hours after pulling up with our exhausted crowd & moving truck, that cat had a mouse dangling from his mouth! LOL! And we've found dead things in our lawn & on our doorstep near daily since. Just yesterday I think my husband found 6 dead fuzzy little creatures. That cat hasn't wasted any time, in fact I think he's making up for lost time. My happy hunter. :)

In some ways I think we're like that cat. So happy to be free of suburbia! Which probably can explain why barely a week away from it and we already have a couple sheep. ;) But anyway, here are some of the fun things we did & experienced our first 48 hours on our rural property:

There are giant bugs out here, including this moth.

Part of our backyard.

Kids & dog exploring.

Playing on the bailing twine swings we found.

Building a bonfire area.

Our "forest".

Fun in the "forest"! :)

Snackin' at sundown.

The first sunset. We were in awe.

All the kids watching The Sunset Show.

Bonfire fun.

Fireworks.

Kite flying!

Oops.

On his first day in the country, the dog found a deer shoulder blade to munch on. A few days later we found him gnawing a coyote skull. Not something that happened in suburbia much. ;)

More giant bugs!

Watching bugs.

Then it was time to return the moving truck. And a chance for me to see where the heck we lived now since my only drive through so far had been in total darkness the night we moved in.

And here is some of the scenery from our own road plus nearby roads. This beauty is our new neighborhood! I got teary again, realizing that THIS is what I get to see every time I drive to or from home.

I just can't believe I get to live here!

Another bonfire, this time with marshmallows. I'm pretty sure the kids were having a better time than their expressions show here. :p

The kids found this butterfly caught in a web on our ladder.

How neat is this picture my husband snapped? These are a couple of barn swallows that are nesting right on our front porch.

This is the view from the window above the kitchen sink. I used to look into our neighbor's garage window from my kitchen window. Now I get to watch these swallows build their nest! I love it. They added mud for a few days, and now the female (I assume) is sitting there day & night. I wonder if there are eggs! In this picture the nest is on the left, and one of the swallows is sitting above the window on the right.

The field next to our barn is rented out by some neighbors. It's something called Bluegrass they grow there. Here they are doing... something with that big .... tractor. LOL As if we city folk could even make a guess about what they're doing over there or what sort of machinery that is.

Cool moth!

Fun with a big green tarp! This was so funny, I was watching the kids & laughing & laughing. We had a wind storm one day & I told my son to go fly the tarp like a kite. It was great. That wind was strong! It blew the glasses right off my son's face.

I will never tire of seeing The Sunset Show every night.

S'mores!

Goofy S'mores- faced baby.

The place I (and helpful Mr 13 yr old) hang our laundry faces into our little "forest". A superb view. :)

Husband was doing some weed wacking over there on this day. We city folk learned about ticks real fast. We learned that we don't like finding them climbing in our bed. Ew. Or on our bodies. Ew. And that the country is full of ticks. And that to avoid them we should stop traipsing around in the tall grass! Duh you ignorant urban dorks! ;) So Husband has taken to wacking areas of grass down. And some neighbors might be bringing a couple of their horses over to let them graze some of our fields, too, to help do away with some of that grass. AND give their horses some tasty new snack time. I really want to go on some hikes around our land, but at this point in the season we'd bring home enough ticks to fill all our beds. COZY!

We're here, gorgeous crazy-rural north idaho. Where do I start the story?!

2011-07-31T18:45:00.000-07:00

I've been creating blog posts in my head constantly. I think the first 48 hours we were here I could have written an entire post per hour. What a life changing, incredible thing we've done. And oh how many years I've been dreaming of this. And OMG how different everything is living way out in the country. And more than anything - wow do we have a lot to learn!

So I'll just start at the beginning. When we were packing up the truck to escape our suburban house located nearish to Portland, Oregon about a week ago. Will I get all the way to today where I washed & plucked about 200 maggots from my new baby sheep's head? Probably not. There's just too much story to tell in between the Budget truck & the maggoty sheep. Let's just start here:

I couldn't believe it was my last day in our suburban house. The house I sat in for years and dreamed about this day, the unknown date in the future that we'd make our escape to the country.

The 3 youngest, sleeping in on our last day. Not me! I was too excited. :)

The really pretty hydrangea bush I thought I'd miss and wished I could take with me. Have I even thought about it since getting here? Of course not. But it is pretty, isn't it. lol

Our old backyard. There were several windows belonging to neighbors that looked down into this yard, and our house. I would be conscious of sending the kids out to play if they were still in their pajamas and had dirty pb&j sandwich faces. You just never can tell if a stranger/neighbor will assume you are neglectful and/or be bothered by the very loud noise my herd of kids made out there. We were by far the loudest house in the neighborhood.

The truck is here! It's funny sifting through my pictures of the move. I took an overkill amount of pictures of that Budget truck. It's just that I had been dreaming of this day, okay maybe obsessing a little, when there'd be a moving truck in front of our house. The day is here! The truck is here!

There's a moving truck out my window! Yahoo!

Moving day was crazy. The last few hours of the move were downright horrible. But first things first. Husband brought the truck home, he & Mr 13 year old began loading it. I, the big pregnant lady, made snacks & kept the kids as entertained as I could in an empty house. Some great friends showed up & suddenly things picked up speed. And thank goodness (!), otherwise I'm not sure how we would have gotten out of there the same day. Which we did. Which was crazy.

We left with our jam packed moving truck at about 5:30pm. Husband in the truck, and I and all the kids & pets in the minivan. We expected it to be about a 7 or 8 hour drive. I tried really hard not to think about how long and late the drive was going to be.

One of 2 miserable cats on the trip. That cat ROWLED & meowed allllllll the way there. The other cat was so quiet I had to keep checking to be sure she wasn't dead.

Dogs are always good sports. Even though he was sitting on uneven piles of crap that didn't fit in the truck.

Goodbye Portland!

Husband in moving truck behind us.We passed the city & all the rest of the drive we could see before the sun went down was pretty.

In the beginning, they were all having a good time. You know, for the first 5 hours or so.

Scenery while heading north toward our new home. Which I had never seen before, by the way.

And then, it got dark. The 3 youngest kids fell asleep. I was fine, everything was dandy, until midnight hit. By then my oldest son had fallen asleep, and I was just so so so tired. I'd taken caffeine pills even but I was in miserable tears with how difficult I was finding it to drive & stay awake. We stopped at a rest stop. By then the poor cats had peed in their carriers (wow did that stink up the van for the remainder of the trip!) and I just didn't know what to do with myself. I'm way, way too light of a sleeper to nap in a van like that. I couldn't fathom how we could check into a motel with 2 smelly cats & a giant dog. So, I decided to let my husband lead in the truck so I didn't have to think about where I going anymore, and we forced Mr 13 year old to stay awake & talk to me. Thankfully, I got a second wind. My son & I talked & talked about the goofiest things, ANYthing to keep our minds on something. I would get desperate to keep the conversation going & ask things like, "Umm, sooooo, what color curtains does your dad have in his new house?" :p We spent the longest time trying to remember which scientist it was that had had his nose cut off (Tycho Brahe!) among other off the wall things.

Finally, we're close. Really close. But we get lost. Why? Because now we are in serious rural territory. Do all the streets have signs? No. Do the signs even match at one end of the street to the next? No. And sometimes, there are 2 signs on the same street with different spellings of the same name!! First lesson? Google Maps does not work out in the sticks. Second lesson: Old farmers that've lived in the sticks for generations don't care if there's a street sign on the road. Afterall, they've probably lived here since before the stree even had a name & they got along fine thankyouverymuch.

So it's around 2 in the morning. Husband calls his sleeping mom & asks her to please look at the map online & guide us to where we need to be. Funny thing- I tried to find maps for this area, like actual paper maps, well before we moved, but guess what! I couldn't find one anywhere. Not online, not in stores. I have YET to find a map to buy for this area.

His poor mother spends an enormous amount of her night trying to give us directions. But again, it's not easy when streets have no signs, the names are all different than Google thinks, etc.! Geez, such craziness to be having in the dead of night with a stinky minivan full of pets and kids, who at this point had all woken up by all the commotion. We kept stopping so my husband could get out of the truck and read the funky street signs with the flashlight.

The kids were crying. My five year old was begging to go home, "to our old house", because this trip was not fun anymore. My husband was about to explode from frustration and I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. Then it just gets more bizarre. His mother's directions guide us to a certain road, only this road was nothing we urban nerds had ever seen. I SO wish we could have taken pictures of this last leg of our journey, because NOW we would laugh at it. The road was a grassy dirt path, really. A deer path through some farmers field. We're nowhere near a home. We are in a minivan crammed with depressed kids & miserable, wailing cats, and an overstuffed Budget moving truck, at 3something in the morning, driving down an extremely dusty dirt deer path in the center of Farmer Joe's lentil field. But the dirt path/road DID have an actual, real street sign!

AND, to top it all off: The moving truck was on empty. Lesson #3: Don't trust the gas gauge on your moving truck, OR that you will find a gas station anywhere outside of the center of town. We know the truck is just going to stop at any moment. And Farmer Joe is going to wonder what the HECK this ridiculous load of city folk is doing in his lentil crop come daybreak.

And we stop again because we're still not sure if we're in the right place and we don't want to waste any gas. And I'm getting used to this feeling of being unsure whether to laugh or cry. And then! I look at the sky. OH. MY. GOD. I've never seen so many stars. There were billions, trillions, and things that looked like entire milky ways, and it was just amazing. I was struck dumb standing in the middle of the gravel road we'd just managed to pull on to, staring at that sky like the city dork I am. You just don't see that in the city. At all. Ever. The city lights block it out, your neighbor's houses block it out, your curtains block what few stars there are out because you're tired of every single passersby on the sidewalk staring into your living room so you shut them at dusk every night.

Then we see a twinkling in the distance, a light on a home. Maybe that's ours. It's gotta be. What else is out here? It is. We pull our by now near crazy selves onto our new land, our moving truck running on fumes. Then we all get out & marvel at the stars. Wow, just WOW. It's about 4am. Good Lordy, what a trip.

The next day! AKA a few hours later. Husband & I get up before the kids and walk outside to view our property. I can't help but cry! It's just amazing. Hills of pastures and trees and grasses blowing in the breeze. And sunshine. HOME!

The kitchen & dining room are one long room. Here's looking to the left into my new dining room. That's our barn/shop out there. These awesome windows face perfectly west. A plan I'm sure. We get to watch a glorious sunset every evening out all the windows on this side of the house.

More with the moving truck obsession:

And to my right, looking into my dreamy kitchen. That's a big ol' pantry to the right of the fridge.

More west facing windows, from the family room. This will be our homeschool room.

The view from one of the above windows.

The first day of their new lives as country kids. :)

Ahh. Here we have the tub I plan to labor in come late September. :) How lovely is that view? This is facing out the back of the house, east.

I didn't exaggerate when I said that truck was jam packed!

And here are the windows from the living room, most of which also face west toward that awesome sunset.

The kids, frolicking in their new space.

We have 20 acres and are surrounded by many hundreds more. The house came with a really great barn/shop with electricity & water to it. Plus several fenced pastures. There is so much potential here! It's SO much fun fantasizing about all that we can do here.

There is so much more I want to share. I didn't even get to post the pictures of the sunset that mesmerized us the first day. :) But this post has taken me hours to put together. One reason is because we have satellite internet out here which is much slower than we used to. I totally took for granted how quick & easy it was to load pictures here. Each one now takes several minutes. My husband let me know that others out there with slower internet will have the same problem just waiting for my blog to load in order for them to see it. I had no idea. Duh! I guess I'll have to start resizing. Anyway, I really must tear myself away from this fun glowing device & go check on Ms. Stinky Maggot Head.

quickie update, response to comments

2011-07-13T10:53:00.000-07:00

Thanks for the comments on my last post. :) Instead of replying I'm just going to make a new post.

As far as I can tell, the inside of the house is great! It's only about 6 years old, and has several fancy-pants goodies in it like a jacuzzi tub in the master bath, fireplace, a big pantry in the kitchen (oh hooray!) & oh all those dreamy windows. Plus it has that enormous 2 car garage & shop so we have plenty of room to store all our bulk foods n' stuff. I also really like that covered porch so the kids can play out there even in rainy weather, like we've loved doing at our current house. I won't actually see the house until move-in day, but my husband & father-in-law have. It really sounds lovely & I can't wait!

Since yesterday I learned that the mail box down the road is a mystery, mail is not actually delivered out there! We'll have to get a PO box in town. That'll be an adjustment. No more instant mail receiving gratification!

No landline out there, but there's a cell phone tower just over the hill. :p That was kind of a shocker for us. After learning about wireless stuff probably increasing everybody's odds for malignant brain tumors (fun), we did away with our cordless phone & have used a regular old phone with a cord for years, rarely use our one cell phone, I never carry it close to my body, and we removed the radios from next to our beds to avoid radio waves eating our brains. And yet here we're going to move & every one of our phone conversations will now have to take place on a cell phone! Ecch. I can't say I'm happy about that. Even our kids will have to use it! We've never allowed that before. Sigh. But what can ya do. Hopefully all that fresh, farmy air will offset some damage. :p

We will have internet. My husband requires it for work. It'll be satellite though, a first for us. We're hoping it's going to work well...

Idaho is not as cold as Minnesota! We'll definitely have 4 seasons, but no minus 40 temps. ;)

On today's to-do list, figuring out what the heck people do with their trash & recycling out there. I suppose we'll be making trips to the landfill on a regular basis... Also, no diaper service out there of course. I've cloth diapered all my kids, but only ever washed my own diaps with my first baby, 20 years ago. lol We've relied on diaper services ever since. So, I've got learning how to wash our own diapers down there on my ol' to-do list, too. :)

Anyway, my "quickie update" turned into a long blabbery thing. Which is perfectly typical of me & should always be expected. :)

Some recent pictures of the 3 youngest (Mr 13 Year Old will be home in a few days from his 3 week visit with his dad in Arizona):

Kids & Husband on 4th of July:

Twenty-seven weeks in these pictures. I am 29 weeks today!

Now - boxes & phone calls, boxes & phone calls........!

moving to the country gonna eat me a lot of peaches

2011-07-12T11:03:00.000-07:00

It's officially official. We have a house! I'm excited & nervous & thrilled & overwhelmed. It took alllll day long yesterday to finalize everything regarding renting this house. I was an anxiety laden mess. And then when I got the news that it is officially official - it's ours!, I wandered around in a state of shock for a bit. :)

I'm sorry that I don't have any amazing pictures to share yet. But don't you worry, there will be PLENTY as the move progresses. ;) What I have are pictures that my father-in-law took for us, and a video that my husband took when he made a quick visit up to the property.

So, pardon my total lameness, I am going to show you pictures I took of the pictures. LOL At least they will kinda sorta give you a taste of the awesome green ruralness of this dreamy place. :)

The house itself. Aaahhhhhh I love all those windows.

This is a view to the right, standing in our front yard. If you squint you might make out our closest neighbor there in the center. There's a barn & shop there on the right of the photo.

This is the view straight ahead, from the end of our driveway. THIS is the kind of scenery we get to drive past miles & miles of on the way to our new home. Overwhelmingly awesome.

Standing at the end of the driveway, looking down the road leading to our house. It's about 4 miles of gravel road leading to our driveway. Our mail box? It's somewhere around 2 miles down that gravel road. LOL!! Our current suburban mail box, that we share with about 20 other families, is located mere feet from our front door. My husband & I have shared laugh after laugh at just how rural we are going. In fact, the place is so rural it doesn't even have a landline phone. I didn't even know places like that existed! haha

And here is what you see from the road. Our house is hidden in those trees, the barn/shop on the left, our 20 acres surrounding us, and untold hundreds & hundreds & hundreds of acres of pasture & trees surrounding that. The 20 acres the house comes with are fenced & cross fenced. The barn has stalls & a water pumping station.... the place is absolutely set up for farming. There's a perfect garden area, great rolling hills for sledding in the winter, and total seclusion. HOW COOL IS THAT. I have to fight back tears when I think about how long I have been dreaming of this. I grew up in something similar to this, super rural, until my very early teens. I've lived in urban or suburban surroundings ever since, allllll those years hoping & dreaming that one day I would get back to the country. I've wanted my kids to experience the rural living & fun running amok through endless pasture land that I did through my childhood. I'm sorry my daughter, who will be 20 in a few weeks, never got to enjoy all that. But I can't wait for her to come visit! We can still run amok in the pastures together. :)

And just to compare ;) , here is what we see from our windows currently. Suburbia. Other people's vehicles, other people's trash bins, an endless stream of cussing teenagers walking to the skate park or school, speeding traffic......

And the view from the back of our current house- the neighbor's house! This would be their bathroom window looking into our bedroom:

So there ya have it. It's officially official. We are moving waaaaay out in the country, looking forward to having our silly little urban minds shocked & confused many times as we learn the ins & outs of country living. We'll stay in this rental until we find a piece of raw land & build up our own house on it, to live in forever & ever until we're buried there. Right next to the chicken coop perhaps.

We are moving to north Idaho. Idaho! We will be living near the Canadian border while my daughter is now living alllll the way down in Phoenix, near the Mexican border. Good thing we'll both live near airports. ;)

We're moving to the outskirts of a town that has a population of fewer than 300. We'll be within less than an hour drive from the "big city" of C'oeur d'Alene, ID (population 45,000), and Spokane, WA (population 200,000), so, there will be homeschool activities within easy reach. Idaho has about 1 and a half million people in the whole state. Five years ago we lived in the San Francisco bay area, my husband in SF proper. The bay area has about 4,335,400 humans living in it. California's population is over 37,000,000. The area we live in now is part of the Portland metro area, population 2,226,000.

This all amuses me to no end.

My husband & I spent a great deal of time partying in San Francisco. Goth clubs, bizarre parties I wouldn't describe here because my mother reads this blog ;) , you name it, we've seen it. And here we are on our way to being Idaho country bumpkins. I love it. As crazy as my lifestyle was, there was never a moment that I wouldn't have told you that my lifelong dream was to "have some land in the country".

It IS really quite nice when your dreams come true. All of this never would have happened if it weren't for my husband, another dream come true. :)

So, when are we making our move? As soon as we're ready! Meaning, every moment that I've spend on this blog post is a moment that has delayed my being an Idahoan. :p I need to go make phone calls & stick things in boxes!!!

The title of this post of course, comes from the song by that silly old band Presidents of the United States of America. The song has been our box packing soundtrack. The kids sing it everyday now, lol.

And so it begins...

2011-06-20T11:38:00.000-07:00

...the moving process that is!

Thank you all so much for all the thoughtful comments to my last post. Each one made me even more excited than I already am! :)

So, the area we're looking to move to is North Idaho. Specifically within commute distance to Coeur d'Alene. My father-in-law lives near the area & so has graciously offered to go view properties for us. He's looking at the first one today, a great sounding rental on 20 acres in the middle of nowhere. In fact, I was told that there are no neighbors near enough to even see from this house. Just your own pastures, barn, hills, trees...... Ahhhh. Can it sound more dreamy? But I'd better not get carried away, the house may be infested with leaky rats & rabid monkeys for all I know.

He'll take pictures of all the places we send him to & send them to us. We'll pick our favorite property & put down our deposit. So, not only am I moving to a state I've never set foot in, but we'll be pulling up our moving truck to a house we've never seen in person before. Sound like an adventure? Weeeeeee!

We've been saving boxes for years, tossing them on the top of Box Mountain in my daughter's old bedroom. We knew that eventually we'd get to make this move & they'd come in real handy!

Now I get to put stuff in them! Hooray!

And here is an example of the craziness I let the kids partake in while I am busying myself with the very deep decluttering & filling of boxes. They took my entire bed apart & used it as a trampoline/slide/entertainment device for several hours while I got stuff done. It was worth it! :)

Our hallway, that normally is empty as could be, now looks like this:

We've done an enormous amount of decluttering & downsizing in the past couple of years but now we're taking it to the extreme. We have so many large pieces of furniture now- beds for all the kids, book shelves, the big ol' dog crate, that we didn't have when we moved up here. We're concerned about not fitting in our moving truck. So we're downsizing as much as we possibly can. It'll sure feel good once we get there & haven't hauled a bunch of clutter & unneeded ThInGs & StUFf with us.

Like, how many frying pans do I really need? I use our cast iron skillets for nearly every meal, why have I been hanging on to the 5 other pans just because there's room in the cupboard to store them? There were so many things stashed away in the backs of cupboards like that. Just there because there's room to store them, not because I actually use them. Same thing with my clothes! Just a couple months ago I actually did away with my own clothes dresser. The thing was full, and had been full my whole adult life, of clothes that I rarely or never wore! I just kept the dresser "because it has all my clothes in it", and I kept the clothes "because they're just hidden away nice & tidy in my dresser." Silly! Now all my clothes, maternity and not, fit in my closet. Hanging up or in one of those closet thingies (although I got mine at Goodwill for $2.99 of course ;) ). Getting that dresser out of my room freed up great space. I also did away with my shelf of knick knacks above it. In fact, there is nothing at all left in my bedroom that is my stuff, except for my bed, and a cool puppet on the wall that we got on our honeymoon in Europe.

It's tough to let go of stuff that you think you have all these reasons to hang on to, like, "but I've had it forever! I can't just get rid of it!", or "but it's really cool", or "but someday I might totally want to use this thing!" or, "but I just can't throw this away..... ." Once I close my eyes and just TOSS the thing, I'm way too busy enjoying my new, awesome, clean & clear, clutter-free space to sit around & pine for my "cool" piece of clutter or thing I never used! And life is busy. I quickly move on the next thing & forget all about that thing I used to have cluttering up my existence.

I love empty wall space. And I love closets that have free space, that aren't jam packed with stuff just because they're a closet. You know what, I had NINE fitted sheets stacked in the top of my closet! Who in the world needs nine fitted sheets, just for one bed! They had been there so long that I just didn't really see them anymore. lol

We've already brought entire minivan loads to Goodwill. Several more will go, I'm sure!

So, we're busy busy box packing, decluttering bees around here. Well, most of us anyway...

fun, fun, fun, wonderful, crazy-awesome exciting news :)

2011-06-13T10:56:00.000-07:00

After dreaming about it my entire life , and moaning about it just recently........

We are moving to the country!

In two months time.

When I am 7 and 1/2 months pregnant.

To Idaho. Where I plan to spend the rest of my life. And I've never set foot in Idaho.

Crazy? Totally. Awesome? Absolutely. I can't sleep, I can barely eat. I'm so excited that I ride this roller coaster from giddiness to numb shock, back to giddiness. Is this really happening? YAHOOOOOOoooooo!

My 13 yr old son is leaving in 2 weeks to stay with his dad & help him, my daughter, and her boyfriend move to Arizona (they live just down the road from us now). Mr 13 Year Old will be spending 3 weeks helping his dad load, unload, carry heavy things, and clean up for 3 weeks. Then he's going to take a plane flight back to us where he will be greeted by 4 more weeks of loading, unloading, carrying heavy things, and cleaning up. He's a positive thinker though. He's mentioned more than once how great a workout he'll be getting this summer and, even more exciting- how he won't have to do much schoolwork for awhile. :D

We're going to rent a house on a big chunk of acreage. Then we can begin our search for land to buy & start building up our little forever homestead on.

Wow.

(I borrowed this picture from a random "Idaho farmland" Google images search)

(and this one is borrowed from city-data.com. Idaho moose. :) )

yesterday's sun

2011-06-05T16:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we had our first real spring day. Cloudless, very warm, no rain! Superb. We spent most of the day outside just soaking it all up. The kids spent the day soaking up mud.

It's even more fun when the dog joins in!

Our crazy blackberry bush is looking like it's going to produce its greatest number of berries yet. I'm so glad the bush didn't die the first couple years we were here when we hacked away at it with an ax. It didn't produce one berry for years so we chopped it down to ground level several times to get rid of the darn brambly thing. I guess that stimulated it to grow berries.

I spent a good portion of my day here, enjoying my tea & book of the moment: Hard Times in Paradise. Pretty fascinating book about homeschooling homesteaders. The kids had their breakfasts there on the picnic table. I love days that are warm enough to have breakfast outside!

I mentioned that we're not doing major gardening this year, for a variety of reasons. We do have plenty of potatoes, and here are sunchokes and garlic:

The view when I look down, belly & dog smile:

And after all that mud absorption, a bath was definitely in order. Here the baby is actually pointing at a huge housefly. lol Those just come along with nice spring days in which the doors & windows are tossed open.

a mishmash of neat new finds

2011-06-04T16:51:00.000-07:00

First of all, we recently watched a couple really great videos. One, called National Geographic's Braving Alaska can be found on Netflix. The other, Alone in the Wilderness, I was only able to find at our library. The movies are similar, both about amazing-crazy folks that brave "America's last frontier"- Alaska, and live extremely remotely.

Alone in the Wilderness is mind boggling. It's a documentary about Richard Proenneke, a man who traveled to remote Alaska with a few tools, and built himself everything using what was around him. His skill was amazing! Who knew you could just carve yourself a coupla hinges right out of tree & have a nice, swinging door!

Braving Alaska followed 4 remote Alaskan families for a short time. Totally fascinating. I wish it were 4 times as long!

Another cool find: I discovered you can watch all episodes of Frontier House on YouTube. This was the reality TV show deal people like to call "Little House on the Prairie meets Survivor". Don't watch just the first couple parts & give up because some of the participants are so unbearably whiny. It's gets a lot better once they're actually out in the valley building up their homesteads. The whiny people are still terribly whiny, but it's fascinating to imagine how the early settlers lived.

Another super nifty recent find were these market bags I purchased from Old Gates' Farm Etsy Shop.
Here are mine. I love them. One has replaced the snazzy black diaper bag I've been carrying with me everywhere I go for the past 5.5 years. I'm just not feeling the shiny, black bag love anymore. It probably has something to do with my slowly floating more to the hippie side than the gothy side. :)

Another little nifty goodie: my cast iron skillet grabber from the Etsy shop of Mountain Hearth. She actually held a drawing on her blog that I won. :) I was excited to get it in the mail & have been using it ever since.

Another awesome find? The Duggars have a new book! A Love that Multiplies. I cannot wait to read it!

Annnnd, today I watched this interesting 10 minute video about a family that lives in a 320 square foot house. Thought provoking!

And there they are. My mishmash of neat new finds.

a weekend outing

2011-05-30T14:36:00.000-07:00

A couple weekends ago we had a sunshiney day smashed in between two rainy ones. We decided to burst out of the house into the sun & play in a nearby nature area. It was great fun.

Grendel emerging after a swim:

Too bad this one turned out blurry, it would've been a cool picture:

Mr. Cute 18 month old. Funny, you can't tell from the pictures that it was a sunny day. But the sun really did come out. I actually got burnt! 'Course it only takes about 8.2 minutes of sun to crispy-fry me, but still.

Baby & his dandelion:

I laughed out loud upon seeing this picture once I loaded it into the computer. Just after snapping it I told my husband, "I think I got a really cute picture of Baby blowing on his dandelion." I looked forward to seeing how my "cute" picture turned out. HAHA! Apparently I snapped the picture a second too late, because all I got was the post-blow slobber drip.

It must be Spring!

Husband & three youngest playin' around:

Mr. 3 Year Old. He had a grand time tossing grass & leaves into the creek & watching them float away.

And Mr. 5 Year Old had a grand time "fishing" for gooey green creek goop:

They say Leonbergers love water. Hence our dog being named Grendel Von Vasser Bär, translated from German to Grendel the Water Bear. He IS a water bear! Loves the water & is the size of a bear.

Canadian geese family!

This was the most awesome sight of the day. There was a Great Blue Heron nest at the top of this tree! For the longest time I'd been hearing some bizarre noise that sounded like a train clacking on the tracks. I discovered it was the weird noise that baby herons make when begging Mom for food! I snapped a dozen pictures, but you just can't make out the babies' beaks in any of them. Too bad. We could see their wide open beaks waving around & the mom feeding them. The nest is huge!

This is her right before she took off to go gather more goodies to feed her big nest full of big babies. Soooo neat.

Okay so the rest of these pictures are from a totally different day. But I'm sticking them here anyway. We went to a homeschooler's park play day last week and made a new friend. His name is Peanut Butter and Jam Sandwich Crust Stealing Squirrel. He'd come up to within 18 inches of where I was sitting & snatch pieces of the kids' sandwiches right off the cutting board next to me. Then he'd run up the tree to eat it, or just hang out next to it, munching away.

Here is the sight often seen after my 13 year old son brings the dog in after a walk. Grendel does well off leash at a nearby field & forest, so my son romps & runs with him there. Then they come home & immediately do this:

One more dog shot. He's actually asleep here in his crate, upside down with his jowls flapping backwards. What a dork.

I sure do love my marriage

2011-05-25T20:17:00.000-07:00

In five days, on the 29th of this month, it will mark seven years since the day my husband & I met. Not long at all in the grand scheme of things. Or compared to people like my grandparents who were married for something like 70 years. But what an incredible time it's been so far.

I had a creepy dad. He was a man obsessed with women's looks, pornography, and pointing out how "sexy" my friends were when I was 12. I also watched way too many hours of MTV as a teen. I think I can, to this day, recall Motley Crue's "Girls, Girls, Girls" video in its entirety. Between the messages I got from my dad, the ones I got from the loser boys I hung out with at school, and my beloved MTV, I had no doubt that "being sexy" was the most important part of a woman's life.

I discovered feminism in my late teens. Being so full of anger, feminism was a perfect fit for me. It gave me an outlet for my rage at men (my dad & his messages, the loser boys I dated, the greatest loser of the entire bunch that I had a child with at 16) and also helped justify my thinking that using my body to get what I want was perfectly acceptable. How many, many, many times I yelled along with Ani DiFranco and her many angry, feminist songs. One song I'll never forget included the lines:

Don't ask me why I'm crying
I'm not going to tell you what's wrong
I'm just gonna sit on your lap
for five dollars a song
I want you to pay me for my beauty
I think it's only right
'cause I have been paying for it
all of my life

I definitely thought I deserved something from men for all the evils they'd done in my life. And taking money for my looks was a perfectly acceptable thing to do. Feminism told me so.

I had a first marriage. I was a radical feminist. I refused to be monogamous. I refused to accept anything but my way. Feminism told me that's what I deserved. My husband was an alcoholic & had other tendencies similar to my dad's. He's gone on to be a fine person, he is sober, and a great dad to my older kids so I won't share the sordid details or anything so tacky. But we did not have anything resembling a healthy relationship since long before we walked down the aisle. But I didn't want any other woman to have him. And how on earth could I have known what to strive for in a healthy marriage? I didn't know what one looked like! Feminism told me to laugh heartily at the Biblical marriage model. So I did.

And then you know what happened? I found my (now) husband. On May 29th 2004. And my anger went away. Here was a man that I found myself so drawn to. I have no doubts whatsoever that we were meant to be, that we were created just for each other, and that God had placed us in just the right place at just the right time so that we could begin our forevers together. There is no other explanation for how powerful our union was from the first moment. And how I somehow knew that this was It, the beginning of the most incredible thing I was ever going to experience- forever with this man. Before we'd barely traded a few emails!

And in place of all that anger, selfishness, and feminist rage towards all men, I found a crazy-intense-deep love, and selflessness - I just wanted to take care of him & our home like some kind of ~gasp~ housewife! And I also discovered that some men were absolutely worth respecting! Who the heck knew?!

And who the heck would have ever guessed that I would morph from that radical, anti-traditional everything believer, to the most blissed out, NOT feminist, traditional housewife in a marriage that comes pretty close to being a model of "Biblical"! (minus that whole divorce thing, children of mine born out of wedlock, and, well, not being Christian ;) . The point is, it's a model that works for us. No wonder all those feminists hate it! They really don't believe a man deserves a love like that, or at least that was my experience with feminism) It's all enough to make a person laugh out loud. Which I do. On a semi- regular basis.

I certainly didn't try to end up here, in this wonderful traditional marriage. It is just what happened naturally. All of this loveliness just slowly but surely fell into place as the years went by. As shocked as it's made me, I couldn't be happier! I have so much love for that man of mine. So, so much. He deserves it. He gives me just as much love back, is a wonderful provider for our family, is a smarty-pants genius, has his priorities set right (family first!), and is not a man obsessed with women and their looks, pornography, or any of that crapola. How freeing that has been for me! I had No.Idea how freeing that could be. He has earned my total respect, my lifelong devotion, my Super Corney Adoration to the Extreme Forever & Ever.

Honestly, I just had no idea a world like this existed. THIS is not something I ever saw on MTV. ;) I sure am grateful for that husband of mine. Now, onward into the next 70+ years I plan to spend in Super Corney Adoration to the Extreme for my husband! I know he's going to be soo cute when he's old & boney & krinkley & grumpy & gray.

So, I fried some octopus for dinner

2011-05-20T20:10:00.000-07:00

My husband brings home from the deli, a package labeled "baby octopus". "BABY octopus??" I say, "Why in the world can't they call it something else? We call all the other babies we eat by different names! Veal, fryer, chevon (or cabrito), roe, suckling pig..... We're a nation that likes to live in denial! I can't cook a baby!"

I was kidding of course.
:P

So, how appetizing does it look to you?

Yum yum, right?

But wait, it gets better! Doesn't this little fried blob with tentacles make your mouth water?

Hahaha. They were actually pretty tasty. They tasted like the ocean. Fishy.

A 13th birthday and a decapitated Teletubby cake

2011-05-20T19:55:00.000-07:00

Until August 1st, I have two teenagers! :) My first two children are 6.5 years apart. My daughter will turn 20 on Aug. 1st, and my son joined her in teen-hood on May 9th.

He had requested a "decapitated Teletubby" cake. I figured I'd easily be able to find a tutorial on how to shape a Teletubby cake online. But alas! Weirdly enough, I couldn't really find anything helpful at all. So, I decided to wing it, draw a simple outline of a Teletubby on paper that I had traced my cake pans on, bake a couple (3) round cakes, and try to cut out the pieces to match my simple drawing. After my total cake catastrophe last year (in which I'd attempted to make him a lizard cake that failed beyond all reason so we piled it all up in a heap & slathered it in frosting), I did not have high expectations but figured we'd all get a laugh out of my attempt at a Teletubby. But actually, my cake accidentally turned out awesome. :) I still laughed & laughed at it though, because it was so great!

First, my naked Teletubby cut-out. I followed a recipe for basic chocolate cake from my trusty Good Housekeeping Cookbook:

And the completed, frosted, decapitated Teletubby. Thanks to my smart daughter who knew exactly how to whip up the perfect frosting shades! It could have used more red gel frosting, but I ran out.

I stuck 13 candles in the screen area thingy on the tubby's stomach. Here is me, Daughter's boyfriend, and Birthday Boy himself waiting at the table while we sang the birthday song.

Birthday Boy and his dad, plus all my Littles:

(That long white thing in the background is our timeline)

Daughter & her boyfriend:

And presents! :)

All in all a fine time celebrating with family & laughing with my new teen, who has always had a great sense of humor. He is clever, funny, smart, thoughtful and generous, so well behaved, and an all around awesome son. I couldn't ask for a better one! ;)

our baby's gender :)

2011-05-13T09:59:00.000-07:00

So guess what I did? After agonizing over it for many months (since before we even conceived), I made the decision to find out our baby's gender at my 18 week ultrasound. I didn't find out during my last 3 pregnancies, all of which turned out to be boys. So, this baby is going to be either my fifth boy in a row, or, finally my first daughter in near 20 years. And the suspense was keeping me up at night! LOL My impatience was pretty intense. But, I reallyreallyreally enjoyed keeping it a surprise the last 3 times. Wondering whether I would be meeting my new son or new daughter that night was such a magical, fun feeling to have during the work of labor.

I finally gave in. And I learned the gender at my ultrasound. But, we're not telling anyone what it is!!

So there ya go. You just read through the whole post & learned nothing. Heeheeehahaha. :D Stay tuned and find out in about 4.5 months.

Here's the mystery belly baby yesterday, at 20 weeks, plus grumpy toddler who didn't want me to set him down so I could take the picture:

How I lesson plan for my 7th grader

2011-05-02T14:58:00.000-07:00

We've homeschooled 11 years. It's funny, but I swear it took me the first 10 years just to figure out how to organize our materials & lesson plan in a way that actually works for me. Sometimes I am a very slow learner. ;)

I got the idea to lesson plan like I do currently, last year on The Well Trained Mind forums. And what a wealth of homeschooling information that site has!

So here's what's working for us. First I order a cheapy teacher's planner off Amazon every year. We've started homeschooling year round. We still do the typical 36 weeks for every grade, just spread around the calendar. That way, the kids never spend more than 7 weeks in a row schooling, and have one - four week vacations in between. It's during those vacations that I lesson plan for the next batch of weeks.

Here's our calendar for this year. The yellow weeks are our vacation weeks.

So, I figure out how many weeks of school we are heading into, and begin planning for that. This works so fantastically for me. I am a constant tweaker. When I've tried planning out whole school years at a time in the past, by mid-year I'd be doing everything differently. I'd have figured out that certain subjects were taking longer, or certain curricula weren't working & totally tweaked all my original plans. So all my planning would go out the window. Now, I only ever plan three - seven weeks out at a time. Then I am free to tweak away for the next batch of weeks.

Here's my planner, open to this week's work (we're on week 27 out of the 36 in our 7th grade school year).

Before I start filling it out, I've already decided how much time I want my son to spend on each subject. I jot down the time in the corner to remind myself how much work I'm trying to allot for that day for that subject. We have 4 hour school days for 7th grade so I divide his subjects up to fit into that. Right now he's in a Dungeons & Dragons group on Monday afternoons so his Monday school work is short.

I do one subject at a time. So, if I'm planning out history for the next 7 weeks, I'll get out all his history curriculum, my planner, and the colored folders I tuck all his weekly worksheets in. He has one colored folder per week of school. Then I just start plowing through, and filling in his assignments for the 3 days per week we spend on history. I make any needed copies on our handy dandy copy machine in the garage and add them to his folders.

Here are the folders I just filled with his worksheets during the past week of vacation, for the next 7 weeks out, and my teacher planner. I keep a binder clip on it so my son can quickly open to this week's assignments (and paperclips on it because the cover fell off, lol).

A typical lesson planning day scene. I have his Writing Strands binder, and the sheets I copied for him from his Growing with Grammar & Megawords (I tend to photocopy almost everything. That way I can either sell it later, or use it for the next kid). I looked at each one, decided how much of it all he could do in his alloted language arts time, wrote the assignment in the planner, and stuck the worksheets in the colored folder for him to find later. Kid craft & snack time also happening.

So, my 7th grader gets up in the morning. He's scheduled to begin schoolwork at 9. He pulls out this week's folder, cracks open the planner, and reads what today's assignments are. I draw little boxes next to every assignment for him to check off as he completes each thing. He works mostly independently, but I write down when he'll need me. Like, "go see mom for dictation" or, "go tell mom you'd LOVE to take your science test now".

The folders & planner are kept in our "homeschool bin", which happens to live on top of the dog crate these days. There's a hanging folder labeled his "weekly stuff" that the folders & planner are kept in. Behind it is the hanging file labeled to be his "finished work". He puts his stuff in there that's awaiting my correcting it.

Here's this week's folder opened up showing his worksheets for the week.

I mark what week each sheet is for so my son can't possibly get confused or mix up his weekly work. :)

His weekly time schedule hangs on the bulletin board. His four hours of schoolwork are scheduled in here, plus breaks, lunch, dog walks, "glowing screen time", TaeKwonDo classes, etc.

So there ya go. :) This is working so fabulously for us that I don't have any plans for big changes next year. Although, I am thinking about adding an hour to his school day for 8th grade. We need to get a daily 30mins of Spanish in there, plus I'd like another 30 mins for either language arts or science. Another thing on my mind is figuring out how better to organize my 5 yr old's work, who will be officially a kindergartner in August!

And on a sidenote, I was adding up the years the other day & came to a funny realization. If this is our last baby, and assuming we homeschool him/her through high school, I will have been homeschooling for over 27 years by the end of it all! :)