Birthday Girl

 Our sweet girl turned eleven years old the other day. She's growing into a very caring and responsible young lady and we are very proud of her. I feel like she's growing faster than usual and seems to be changing by the day. Every time she stands next to the wall with little marks for her height, there is more height to mark. She's taller than her brother now (by a few inches) and likes to point it out at every available moment. I figure at this point she'll be taller than me when she's grown (and I'm 5'9"). She really likes being the tallest person in her grade.

She's very much into art (painting is her thing). She paints on pretty much anything she can find. For her birthday she wanted fabric paints and a jean jacket so she could paint on it. She loves collecting Hydroflasks and will spend an hour putting just the right stickers on them. 

 She's very much into her hair right now. It's a recent thing actually. During the state lock down she started watching YouTube videos on curly hair and learned how to brush it and put product in it. Then she wanted to cut it and shave the side of her head so when everything opened back up we went and had her hair cut/shaved. The cut allowed her curls to bounce up and created volume. Then came the requests for dying her hair. I said maybe temporary dyes. So she bought some vegan temporary dye that was highly rated on Amazon and dyed a chunk of her hair (that's all I will allow while school is in session). It's been pretty much all hair non stop for the past several months. 

Happy Birthday Greta! 

 

She has wanted a weighted blanket for about a year now, she finally got one.

She loves String Worms and wanted them on her cupcakes.

She loves lights so she got quite a few to decorate her room.

 

 

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Her room looks like a theater now.

A Vet Visit for Cooper

Remember back in February before all this coronavirus stuff happened we got a cute little puppy named Cooper? Well he's now a full on shaggy teenager who's full of energy and still wakes me up at 6:20 each morning. We weren't sure what a shih tzu/border collie mix would look like as an adult but he got his short little dad's legs and long hair and his mom's deep bark and size. He's 100% cute and has fit into our household quite well. He and Winston are pals and play all day long. 

 

Getting a puppy right before a pandemic has been quite the experience. Our vet clinic has grown to the point that it was time consuming to get in there....pre pandemic. we're talking at least a 45 minute wait in a stuffed waiting room. Now it's just plain crazy since everyone and their mother got a puppy during lockdown. Nobody is allowed to sit in the waiting room so we check in and then sit in our cars for an hour or more. When it's your time you hand off your animal to a vet tech and they take them to an exam room behind a big sheet of plastic. You get to watch from the hallway. I'm just glad he's done with his puppy shots now. 

Cooper went in two weeks ago to get neutered and all went well. My folks gave us a cone that they had from their miniature schnauzer so that Cooper wouldn't lick his incision area. This worked for a couple of days before he figured out it was too small and he could still lick. I took it off and put the cone of shame on the counter and it seemed to disappear. I later found it in Greta's room on one of the Build-A-Bears. 

 

Summer Odds and Ends

With the kids back at school I'm able to get back to sculpting full time.....something I haven't done since March. A quiet house is magical and I feel so ready to get back to it. Sean is still working from home and will be until next summer. He's got a work place in the basement which we need to actually turn into an office one of these days. Once a week we go out for a lunch date and I sure look forward to that each week. We tend to pick up food that we ordered online and either eat on the patio of the restaurant or go to the park to eat. It's been a fun tradition. 

 

 

We officially put the chicken brooder back in the garage. It's been in my living room since April. I put three rounds of baby birds through it this year, the most I've ever done. Usually I have one batch of chicks every other year to replenish the flock but this year I got bit by the hatching bug. That was sure a fun experience. Tuna and his gang needed a bigger place to hang out so I built a chicken tractor. It's really just a movable pen that goes on the lawn and allows the chickens to eat grass and flap around. It's called a chicken tractor because it's like a tractor in the sense that if you leave chickens in it long enough they will eat all the grass and till up the ground like a tractor. I was able to make the whole thing out of scrap lumber, the only thing purchased was the wire mesh and hinges. We still have a small pile of lumber left over from the massive deck that used to be around the inground pool.....that was taken out 12 years ago. It's the gift that keeps on giving.

 

 

We were able to get our yearly load of hay bales recently. We've used the same farmer for three years now and it's working out nicely. This was the first year with the new (to us) truck. We sold the old Ford F250 and replaced it with the Toyota Tundra and the difference is night and day. Let's just say the Ford had a lot of problems. I am very thankful we had that truck but sometimes it just nice to get something without issues that just works like it's supposed to. We got our normal 12 round bales and that seems to last exactly a year for us.The skid steer makes short work of lining them up end to end (I remember we did this by hand one year!). 

 

Back to School

 Ready or not here we go! The kids returned to school this week. We had the option of remote learning or in school learning. Remote was basically a video camera set up in the back of the classroom and kids can watch the feed from home on their laptops. I felt this option was not a good long term option so we decided to send them to in school learning. I'm just hoping for the best and that everyone stays healthy and the school remains open. 

If enough cases of COVID appear I assume they will close the school down and all students will remote learn at that point. The teachers will remain teaching in their (empty) classrooms in from of a camera. 

So far so good. They are on day 4 of school and wear their masks for the majority of the day. If they don't leave their socially distanced desks they can take off their mask while doing school work. There is lots of outside time without their masks and they don't seem to be having any problems wearing them. 

The middle and high school had decided to not issue lockers to the students and instead have them carry their belongings around all day from class to class. I assume this was to keep socializing at lockers to a minimum which I understand. What I think they failed to realize was that some of the smaller students were trying to carry around bags, laptops, lunches and instruments which weighted nearly half of their body weight. Wesley looked like a pack mule each morning. The strap on this bag was digging into his neck. Several parents must have written in because they decided to issue lockers by Friday. They will only be able to visit the locker three times a day but this should help with their load. 

We will see how long this lasts but for now I'm wishing them a healthy school year.

 

Wesley is going into 8th grade. 

Greta is going into 5th grade.

Tuna

So in previous posts I had mentioned that I tried my luck at incubating and hatching guinea fowl eggs back in May. I put in 5 eggs and 2.5 hatched. You're asking yourself how half an egg hatches? Well let me tell you. Two of the eggs hatched normally on the day they were supposed to hatch (day 26). I was hopeful for the other three and waited rather impatiently for them to hatch. The days went by and my hope faded. Then on day 30 one of the remaining eggs started to hatch. It sat like this for a day and a half.

My research told me not to intervene unless you really know what you are doing, which I didn't. So I kept the humidity up to help keep the membranes moist and watched it struggle. I finally couldn't take it anymore and opened up the incubator and helped him out of the shell. There are many sites online that tell you to dump the eggs that don't hatch after day 28. They will be stunted or have leg issues. Also many that need help getting out of their shells don't make it because they are so weak. So here we have this little guinea that is weak with curled toes and mis shaped legs. I didn't hold out much hope for him. He was noticeably smaller than his hatch-mates and about half the size of the chicks that hatched just a week before him.

He's the little guy at the top on the white towel.

 I told the kids not to get too attached as I wasn't sure he'd make it but he did. Wesley was watching The Office reruns at the time and we decided to name him "Big Tuna". Ironic since he was indeed not big or a fish. But the name stuck. He walked around on his elbows instead of his feet and didn't let the bigger chicks pick on him.

While the older chicks and guineas got bigger he grew slowly and struggled to get around. I knew he wouldn't be making the transition to the outdoor nursery coop with the others which led to the question of "What to do with Big Tuna?".

Well get more chicks of course! I decided to pick up 5 bantam chicks so Tuna could have his own little flock of similar sized birds. Bantam chickens are miniature chickens and since I'm fairly certain he will be a miniature guinea I thought it would suit him well.

He took to his new (much smaller than him) friends and now acts as a mother to them, letting them snuggle up under his feathers.

Here are two of the newest additions, silkie chicks.

Summer 2020

So what can I say about summer 2020? It's been a pretty typical summer. Lots of swimming, trips to the snow cone place, bike rides, trips in the convertible to get ice cream cones. We've tried to make it fun for the kids but for the most part we are still socially distancing ourselves from people. This is the first year we haven't taken a summer vacation. Why? The coronavirus is still wrecking havoc on our country and I have no desire to expose myself or my family to it while driving or flying around the country. So we stay home and wear masks in public and try to make it as normal of a summer as possible.

Part of making it feel normal is having my pal Jessica and her kids over to swim each week. The local public pool has been packed full because it is one of the few pools in the area that decided to open this year. People from all over have made the trip out to swim in our little town and at one point it had a 100+ kids a day in it. It made me very thankful that we purchased our above ground pool last year (we bought it for $300 used off of craigslist). Jessica didn't want her kids exposed to that many kids at the public pool so we invited them over to swim every week. It's been fun sitting in the shade on the deck while the kids have fun together.

We will continue to have fun and stay home as long as possible.....or until school starts. That's a whole different post for another day.

Summer Garden

There was something about this spring that made me plant a big garden. Was it the pandemic with limited food supply? Probably. I wasn't alone, many people have decided to grow gardens this year. Seeds were in limited supply, I was happy to have found some early on at our local feed store.

I couldn't plant in my normal plot as it had been taken over by Johnson grass and I decided I wasn't going to battle that horrible weed another year. I moved it across the yard near the tortoise pen. The ground was hard and not that great quality. Since there was no planning involved I didn't cover it last fall with mulch, which is a great way to turn crappy soil into nice soil. We do have a small electric tiller and I was able to scrape up the top few inches and get some seeds planted.

It's growing well now. We had a large round hay bale that got too wet when our tarp failed this spring so Sean used the skid steer to take it over to the garden for me to mulch it with. It was probably 700 pounds of hay I put down around the plants and walkways. Hay does a wonderful job of mulching the plants and keeping the moisture in the ground and keeping the roots cool and happy. I've had great luck with the deep mulching method of gardening. No weeds, very little watering and happy productive plants. It's a win win.

I'm not real great about remembering where I planted everything. I tend to draw up a garden plan and then make changes on the fly and not write them down. So this giant mass of vines came up and I assumed they were one of the three varieties of melon I planted (we LOVE melon). The vine kept growing and producing about 20 of these "melons". Finally I had to get on YouTube to figure out they are spaghetti squash and not melons. That was kind of a let down. I like spaghetti squash just not 20 of them. I've read that they store well, so maybe I can eat them all winter.

The vine in this picture is one of the other melon varieties: Early Silver Line Melon

No garden is complete, in my mind, without at least a small plot of zinnias. They are so beautiful and bring in so many good pollinators.

We've had a great haul so far with zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes, blackberries and spaghetti squash. The early melons are almost there and there are no less than 20 little watermelons growing, the kids are particularly excited about those (which makes me happy). Happy gardening y'all!

We have a teenager!

It's crazy to think my first born is now a teenager! Happy 13th birthday to Wesley! Since these times are a bit strange and gatherings are frowned upon we decided to rent out the local swimming pool for two hours in the evening and invite just a few people to swim and celebrate his birthday. It was sure fun!

Ditch Deer

Back in March the kids and I were doing some pretty long bike rides trying to get out of the house during state wide lock downs. It kept us busy and away from people since we are out in the country. On one of the rides we were out on a country road near a large drainage ditch for a field and took a break in the shade. The ditch had large chunks of concrete and among the concrete were these sad little concrete deer someone had tossed. They were missing ears and tails and parts of their legs but the rebar was still there.

Greta insisted we save them so once we got home the truck was taken back and the deer picked up. One was a buck and the other a doe and it turns out their fawn was in the ditch as well but it's head had broken off and was beyond repair.

The poor things sat under a large tree for nearly two months before I got around to figuring out a plan for their repairs. My dad mentioned Bondo might work so I ordered a tub of that off of Amazon. It was considered "non-essential" so it took a couple of weeks to get here.

I went out on a 95 degree day and sat under the tree in full vapor mask and mixed up the Bondo into a gooey paste and attempted to "sculpt" ears and a tail and fix the cracks. I didn't really know anything about Bondo but it set up within a minute or two so I had to work fast.

The definitely aren't perfect but it will work. I used a hand sander and sanded down the Bondo and went out and spray painted them last week. While painting them I saw 1961 stamped on their sides. The little antique ditch deer have a new lease on life.

Random This and That

The pool made it through the winter. We weren't sure how an inexpensive above ground pool would fair through our midwest winters but it did alright. We lowered the water below the filter lines, put winterizer in it and covered it with a pool tarp and then coated it with this blue shrink wrap to keep the cover on. It worked for a few months before our crazy wind got it off. So we re-shrink wrapped it and it made it into February before once again blowing the cover off. This time we just left it off since it was so close to spring. The down side to not recovering it was the water started growing stuff so we had to pump it out (fried our pond pump doing this) and scrub it down. I hope this fall we are able to come up with a better solution to keep the cover on. The kids are sure enjoying the pool again this season.

I had blogged about our progress on the walnut grove fence project. Sean welded the fence along the front of the property and we were able to get cattle panels attached so no goats make a run for it through the large areas in the fence. We are pretty happy with how it turned out. Now we just have the other three sides of this never ending project to finish.

Things are still weird in our world regarding coronavirus. Most restaurants have reopened, some with their lobby open some still with only curbside pickup. We've started a fun tradition of picking up food and going to a nearby church lawn and having a picnic dinner. We were finding our food was soggy by the time we made the 30 minuted drive home so this way we enjoy these beautiful evenings and have fresh food. It's a win win!

A couple of years ago we stumbled upon a local bike trail that connects several small towns around us. Wesley and I have ridden it before and had a great time so we invited my folks who were still in town for a ride. Greta also joined us as she's become a pretty confident bike rider. It was sure fun! We will have to go again soon.

The Bird House

Do you know how I can tell it's Spring? I fall into bed at night totally exhausted. I don't think I could cram one more thing into these days. I do love Spring and Summer. Well my chicks hatched. The ones is the incubator and the ones under the broody hen. I bought 11 hatching eggs from a gal I found online (5 guinea eggs and 6 chicken eggs). I put the majority of the chicken eggs under the broody hen and the guinea eggs in the incubator. The hen hatched out the chicken eggs no problem. I checked her for several days collecting the little balls of fluff and put them in the brooder. I felt awful taking them but our barn cats would not have allowed them to survive. I got 3 of the 5 guinea eggs to hatch in the incubator, I was hoping for all of them but oh well. I think incubators might be a little more tricky than I first thought.

Seven chicks and seven keets.

The first batch of guinea keets I bought at the feed store are now teenagers and outside doing well in their "nursery coop". I built a transitional coop in the back of the goat house so that they have a safe place to roost at night. Often times guineas roost in trees and are slowly picked off each night by owls. To prevent this it's good to train them to roost in a coop that can be shut each night. I moved out 10X10 foot dog kennel next to the new coop so they have an outdoor run while they are growing up.

It's bird central around here! It's been fun seeing what hatches and having little chicks and keets in the house. The kids are always over at the brooder feeding them dried meal worms through the little front window.