Weekly Winners: Zoo Addition

I did the annual trek to the zoo last week. Jessica and her clan came too. I love going to the zoo (imagine that!) so I get excited for the yearly trip. I try to instil that excitement into my kids by really pumping it up to them. So all last weekend I was telling them how much fun we were going to have, how they'd get to see some really cool animals and maybe feed some. They seemed excited. Then Monday rolls around and 20 minutes after we get into the zoo Wesley starts with the "I want to go home". *sigh* It was frustrating how much time and effort goes into preparation for these little outings just to hear that phrase repeated ten times in five minutes.

I have to admit that the zoo was an utter madhouse. I believe every school in the area was having their last field trip that day. We were, literally, herded through the buildings like sheep and it wasn't as fun as usual. So I kind of see where poor Wesley was coming from. He's got a little of his Dad in him, that's for sure. It's just disappointing. I finally had to con him into being good by threatening no visit to the zoo gift shop if he kept up with the whining.

Maybe zoo visits will become fun again when the kids are older than 1 and 3 years old.

Got some cute pictures though (even if I was making Wesley smile for them).

Greta thoroughly enjoying the penguins.

Two happy boys in the petting zoo.

Every year the kids get to pose for the camera at this spot.

Feeding Giraffes.

Posing with the Gorillas.

Want some juice?

Free at last

This is one of those blog postings that get labeled with the "things I blog about but shouldn't". Can't say I didn't warn ya.

Now if you missed the exciting story about the vasectomy go here.

Then if you missed the follow up story about the sperm count go here.

So our story continues. Almost exactly nine months have passed since that fateful day that Sean had his "man surgery" and consequently was taken to the hospital via ambulance. Per orders of his doctor he has been returning to the doctors office every two months to make his "man deposit". In most cases it only takes two months (or less) to get a sample that is free of sperm. My husband? It took nine months. Nine months of going: "Ah crap, they must have botched the vasectomy".

This week he dropped off his sample and the nurse called with the all exciting news that there were indeed no swimmers! It was kinda funny how excited she was.

The doctor was going to give it a year and then figure out what had to be done. We are so glad it didn't need to come to that, what with the whole initial experience and all. Never again. So we are officially done with kids. It's nice to know there will be no accidents, no oops, no botched vasectomies. Lord almighty we're free at last!

Weekly Winners

Greta and Aunt Jessica. Greta loves her lap and is always in it.

The goat family has been released into general population, and all is happy.....after the pecking order is established. GoatMan (goat on right) is the King.

Thanks Noni and Papa for the big box / playhouse.

Look at that face! That is a little boy who is in love with his "new" garage sale toys.

Give us food. Now.

Garden 2011

Do you ever read those articles in magazines where they give every day ideas on how to burn calories? Things like vacuuming or mowing the yard that burn as many calories as a work out. Well gardening is always on those lists. I now know why gardening is on those lists. Oh my gosh did I get a work out this past weekend! I got the garden completely planted. Maybe this doesn't sound like a big feat, but it was. You see the garden grew from last year. This year it's 30 X 40 feet. That's 20 rows, each 30 feet long. I planted 500 seeds of corn alone. If each one actually grows and produces an ear of corn we might be a bit overwhelmed. I'm ready to be overwhelmed. Bring it on!

I took last years garden and improved it. For one, I took out all the crops that didn't grow to my satisfaction. I took out all the crops that grew but I never wanted to eat. And I added some new and exciting crops. Last years seeds that didn't return: broccoli, tomatilos, eggplant, okra and cauliflower. This years new and experimental plants: sweet potato, hot peppers, butternut squash, pumpkin, radishes and white cucumbers. Last years winners that are back for more: Sweet corn (trying new varieties of Kandy Korn, and Peaches and Cream), pole beans, carrots (a carnival mix with different colors), onions (red and yellow), zucchini, yellow squash, tomatoes, bell peppers, watermelon and cantaloupe. And flowers! I planted a whole row of zinnias, nasturtium, marigolds and many many sunflowers (I'm super excited about the sunflower forest for Wesley). If that doesn't bring the pollinators to the garden I'm afraid nothing will.

This year I also did quite a bit of research on plant companions. What are those you ask? It's the task of pairing plants with other plants that help one another out. For instance I planted a row of carrots and onions together. They are beneficial to each other. Same with planting peppers close to tomatoes and beans with corn. I'm trying a suggestion I found online to conquer the squash beetle problem from last year: sow radish seeds among your squash. Supposedly the radish will help deter the blasted beetle. We'll see. It's cheap insurance. Maybe I'll end up liking radishes too.

I've already got beans poking up through the dirt along with corn and squash so it looks like the 2011 garden is off and running.

Estelle

Well we bit the bullet and got a house keeper.

Yep, you read that right. Between the dogs and the kids, this house was in need of a regular deep cleaning that I don't seem to have the time to accomplish. It took awhile to convince Sean but since he doesn't even know where the broom is kept I eventually wore him down. Her name is Estelle and she's cleaned once now and I'm really happy with her work. She's very thorough, even cleaning under the crib.

The best part of Estelle? She tells me when her canister is full.

Estelle is a Roomba 560 vacuuming robot.

I've wanted one for some time now, constantly drooling over them on Amazon. I read all the reviews, weighed my options and savings (along with some Birthday money-thanks all!) and bought one last week. Happy Birthday to me!  It came yesterday, I was so excited. I charged it for 8 hours and it went to work cleaning the floors last night after the kids went to bed. I, for some reason, don't trust my kids around my expensive new toy. I wonder why. Anyhow, I was told by my parents (Roomba owners) to clean the floors before letting it loose for the first time. By cleaning the rugs and sweeping I was preventing myself a huge headache of emptying the canister every 4 minutes. So I swept the rug and hardwood floors and then let Estelle loose to buzz around vacuuming like crazy. Even with my pre-cleaning it still had a stuffed canister after about 20 minutes. It did a great job, I can't wait to erase floor cleaning from my stuffed daily schedule. Thanks Estelle!

a mom

Happy Mother's Day to all the brilliant, loving, witty, beautiful Moms out there. Being a Mom is what I am and what I do. It's my number one job. I can't imagine doing anything else than care for these two tiny little people. They make me laugh, cry, scream and smile all in the span of an hour. It's the best and hardest job I've ever done.....and will ever do.

Being a Mother at this stage in my life means: dealing with flying food at every meal, helping a little boy learn to wipe his own bottom, the constant search for the beloved "Bunky", knock down hugs, helping Greta put on shoes then take off shoes then put on shoes, don't eat that, take that out of your mouth!, putting baby dolls hat on 233 times a day, where did your pants go Greta....please stop taking off your pants, quiet time with just Wesley, shopping with Greta during preschool, pushing both kids on the swing set, planting seeds with Wesley, no more unauthorized viewing of YouTube by Wesley, watching Curious George every morning, seriously why don't you have any pants on?, Wesley taking his sister for a ride on his motorcycle, digging sand out of diapers, ecstatic kids running to Sean when he gets home from work, marco polo, long wagon rides down dirt roads, soaking up every. single. moment.

Happy Mother's Day all!

The making of a mud pie.

Step 1: Use cat water dish to scoop water from horse tank.

Step 2: Carefully take water from horse tank to planter full of dirt.

Step 3: Dump water.

Step 4: Look up to find Mom taking pictures....briefly wonder why she's allowing this to happen.

Step 5: Shrug, then proceed with mixing of dirt and water...making sure to get as much on new sandals as possible.

Step 6: Show Mom what she'll soon have to clean up. Victory!

A New Project

My Hubby is in hog heaven right now. A few weekends ago he got a new project. A car project. He loves car projects! My parents had a massive hail storm come through about a month ago that did a job on pretty much everything on the property. We're talking ping pong to baseball size hail. You know, the scary stuff. The crazy thing here? We live barely five miles from them and thankfully didn't get any of the huge stuff. They are in the process of getting bids on a new roof, garage doors, windows, guttering.....everything. My dad had a few project vehicles outside that got damaged as well and offered Sean one of them. Of course he said he wanted it so now we have a 2000 Focus out in the shop. It wasn't running at the time so it was hauled over on the trailer and pushed into the shop. After a week of tinkering around on it Sean got it running and took Wesley for a test drive. Who knows, it might be Wesley's first car. Sean is looking forward to making it road worthy and eventually making it his daily driver to work. Thanks Dad for the fun new project!

You spin me right round

We found a Sit and Spin at a garage sale and my son has been spinning and singing this song all day. He won't spin unless he's singing the song. Turn your speakers up for this gem.

Conversations with a three year old.

So Alex and Abby were over for a play date yesterday and Alex was sitting on the couch talking to himself saying "A-L-E-X....Alex". Curiously I looked at Wesley and said "Wesley, do you know how to spell your name?"

He said nothing.

So I said "W....."

Wesley looked at me and said "E-S-L-E-Y, yeah Miss Cindy taught me".

Good to know I have no clue what my child is learning in preschool. :)

Diary of a retired goat milker.

My days as a goat milker are coming to an end. I will honestly say I won't miss it. I think it's an interesting task to complete in life but I have no desire to ever milk anything again. Dym has done wonderfully teaching me the ins and outs of milking. She's put up with my inexperience in the beginning. My total lack of knowledge that almost resulted in a bad case of mastitis, but luckily it didn't. We were in a nice routine there of milking twice a day. Her kids were growing like weeds, the milk was flowing. I got her down to once a day milking about a month and a half ago. My life got easier. Now we are nearing the four month mark and I'm ready to move on from this gig. The kids are now ginormous, she's done a wonderful job raising them. Dym is a very good mother and I'm thrilled I didn't have to bottle feed them....from what I hear that's a miserable job.

Two weeks ago I started the daunting job of drying up a dairy goat. I went from milking her once every evening, to milking her once every other evening. It was like I was alive again! For one solid day I didn't have to haul the milking machine out to the shop, lead her in, make her jump up on the milking stand, hook her up and hold the machine under her teats for 10 minutes while my knees screamed out in agony. I didn't have to bring in the equipment and sanitize it. I was free! That first time I milked her after skipping a day I got two gallons of milk out of her. Two gallons. Can you imagine carrying two gallons of milk between your legs? She's a 150 pound goat, so that would be like me with two gallon jugs of milk hanging there. To say she's a good milk goat would be an understatement.

So I did the every other day milking for two weeks. Today I'm changing it to taking two days off between milkings. We'll do this for a week or two. I thought everything was going to go smoothly and she'd be dried up by the end of May. That is until I looked out the window this weekend and saw that sneaky little baby boy goat nursing away. He's got to be nearing the 90 pound mark and there he was crouched under her nursing. Guess I'm going to have to separate the kids from Dym. I hope the neighbors like a whole lot of screaming goat babies. Lord help me.

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter to everyone! It has been an enjoyable, relaxing weekend of fun, friends and family. Friday we were thrilled to have some dear friends over for a visit. Dru and Charity were in town and came to see us with their two little girls. Wesley had a ball with them and I was amazed at how well they all played together. It was so nice to see Serenity and Isa, as I haven't seen them in a year and a half. It's amazing how fast little ones grow! We've decided we are going to make a trip out to visit them this summer, can't wait!

Wesley started off the Easter weekend on Thursday with his preschool class having it's Easter party. It was the first of three Easter egg hunts. Yikes, three! He was supposed to gather only the eggs with his name on them but we didn't know this so he just grabbed all he could see (like most egg hunts). I finally figured this out after looking around seeing each Mom bent over going "No Seth this isn't your egg, put it down." Oops. So we quietly dumped out the massive amount of eggs from his basket and quickly made a get away. It was fun and Wesley enjoyed seeing the Easter Bunny.....even though they whole time he was saying "I'm pretty sure the Easter bunny is Miss Cindy (his teacher)."

Then yesterday we went to our local city's Easter egg hunt. They had advertised it as having 5000 eggs with $400 dollars hidden inside the eggs. Sounded like fun to me. Apparently it sounded like fun to every parent in the city because it was a mad house. At least they divided up the eggs into different categories according to age, otherwise poor Greta would have been trampled by the bigger kids. Both kids were in the three and under category so Wesley was able to make out like a bandit.

Greta is going through her "stranger danger" phase and is stuck to me like glue most of the time when we are in public.

Alex and Abby were there with us, they were mad collecting fools. 

Then today we had another egg hunt at our house. Kids love hunting for eggs, so we might as well live it up while we can! Wesley colored the eggs all by himself this year. I was impressed at how careful he was with them, not making much of a mess at all. We colored two dozen although we could have easily done four dozen since the chickens are laying like crazy. I have eight hens, I get eight eggs a day. Anyone want any eggs??

My favorite picture of the weekend. All kids together this afternoon.....Greta in one of her moods, not loving all the new people around the house today. Poor little doll, I'll be happy once the "stranger danger" phase is over.

 I wish you all a happy Easter....I hope better than Greta's.

Off to see the wee one.

I got back this afternoon from my whirlwind trip to see my newest nephew. With Greta in tow, I left Saturday morning for a two day trip. Greta did awesome on the car ride, enjoying Elmo's Word most the way. Little Bennett is one super cute newborn! He's so quiet and mellow, I don't think I heard him cry once all weekend. It might be due to the fact that he was, literally, never put down. How does my sister luck out with all the mellow babies? I hope she knows how lucky she is!

Greta is in her "stranger danger" phase and tears up if anyone even so much as looks at her. Needless to say she was stuck to me like a baby monkey. It took several hours for her to warm up to everyone and start playing with her cousin Emery. Those two played pretty well together, looking like two little twins side by side. After all they are only 7 weeks apart.

Greta's baby doll stroller was a huge hit with Emery. He took his sippy cup for several long walks.

I had a great time seeing everyone including Blake sister, Stephanie. Thanks Sis for letting me come up and see that adorable little one, congratulations!

It was always either Stephanie holding Bennett....

.....or me.

The Wednesday Write Up

-As the kids grow so does their ability to push each others buttons. I swear all I do all day is break up their screaming matches. It's utterly exhausting. All Wesley has to do to make Greta cry is growl at her. Literally he walks up to her, bends near her and growls like a dog. She then melts into hysterical screaming and runs to hide between my legs. He sits in time out a lot these days. *sigh*

-I'm going to see my new nephew this weekend and am very excited! Can't wait to hold that tiny little man. I'm thinking about bringing Greta with me just to split the two kids up for a couple of days. It should be fun!

-I can't believe Easter is coming up so fast! It should be enjoyable this year with two walking little ones. We'll be going to the city Easter egg hunt and I can't wait.

-I forgot to blog about Abby's birthday. Jessica's little one turned three years old this past Monday and we celebrated it on Sunday with a small party. She's a doll and we were all happy to be there for her. Happy belated birthday Abby!

The birthday girl and her horse cake, which Wesley can't take his eyes off of.

More horsey stuff.....me thinks she likes horses.

Greta was there but clung to me like super glue.....stranger danger is strong in this one.

Released!

We finished up the new goat pasture and let the three out yesterday to graze. They were so excited. It took four weekends, some rainy, but it turned out awesome and I have to thank my hubby for all of his hard work. He's not really an animal guy so this means a lot that he'd do all of this for me.

I think he's more excited that it's done than even I am because now he gets his weekends back! Poor guy. Now on to the next project!

Fridays at the Park

The park was calling to me on Friday so I packed up the kids and off we went. I brought bread to feed the geese and ducks, hats and lots of sunscreen. Can you believe we're already hitting the 90's on a regular basis. Geez, it's the beginning of April! Oh well, the sun was out and the kids had a ball. I discovered Welsey is quite the ladies man. If there was a girl on the playground he was next to her talking to her. When it was lunch time he didn't want to go because he would miss his "girl". The whole way to Wendy's he told me to hurry up so he could get back to his girl. Oh boy, I'm not ready for the infatuations. We got back to the park just in time to see his girl drive away. He was so sad until a new girl appeared. He immediately took his kids meal toy over to her to show her, and poof! A new friendship was created. Off he went to build tee pee's under trees and dig for buried treasure.

My little boy is sure growing up and I credit preschool for him coming out of his shell. I'm thrilled with our choice to send him to 3 year old preschool. Best $65 a month we could spend. Greta thought she liked the ducks and geese until she fed one and 47 showed up immediately. It was a bit overwhelming for a 18 month old.

It was a great time and we now have a standing date with the park every Friday. Wesley is hoping his "girl" will be back.

Spring Happenings

Busy busy busy! That's spring in our household. The garden is being planned out since I have a ton of new plants to squeeze in. I got my seeds from Burpee and have started several indoors. I've got trays of bell peppers, hot peppers, chives, cilantro, lettuce and lavender. Every day Wesley goes over there with his spray bottle and thoroughly drenches everything in sight. We're having fun with it.

Hubby was out again this weekend working on the new goat pasture. He made some good progress but without both of us working it's slow going. I'm the babysitter. Greta is not at the age where she can wander around unsupervised. She's still into placing everything in her mouth. Hubby did get 40 something T-posts put in and all the 4X4 corner posts set in concrete. Everything is ready for the field fencing to be put up this coming weekend.

The future inhabitants of the pasture are more than ready to trade in their current pen for the new one. They have been forced to stay in their pen instead of the backyard ever since they discovered the tasty deliciousness that is baby cherry trees. Oh boy do they make their displeasure heard. I never had any idea that baby goats could be THAT loud. We're talking brain numbing screams. I imagine it would be the same noise if they were being eaten alive. I hope, for our neighbors sake, that their voices change soon. Our two full grown goats aren't loud at all, maybe around dinner time they'll call out but it's a low octave, not this high pitched cry. This new pen will all be worth it if they will just be quiet and eat grass.

I'm still milking Dym every morning and I just want to quit. But I can't. I have no idea how to dry her up and I've been trying different things to no avail. I believe she's weaned the kids as I haven't seen her nurse them in about a week. I've got to try harder to dry her up....so tired of milking.

The other set of kids (my children) are enjoying the spring warm weather. We spend hours outside discovering new and exciting things. Greta discovered walnuts this weekend and proceeded to go into the walnut grove and fill her little plastic golf club container with the nuts. She's just like her brother, always collecting stuff. Hope you are out enjoying this weather as much as we are!