Grandpa's Homegoing

My grandpa went home to be with the Lord this past Thurs.  Although we lived a distance away and couldn't visit as often as I would like to, we enjoyed our chats on the phone and through email.  For a 92 year old, he was pretty good with technology!!  Although grandpa's health was failing, it was still a shock to hear he had passed away suddenly.  I'm so thankful he professed Christ as Savior, and I have the hope of seeing him again one day in glory.  How different it is to lose someone when you know you will see them again in eternity!  We will still miss his presence here, but how thankful we are that he is now in the presence of the Lord!  No more suffering, no more sin, no more pain.  We love you Grandpa and will miss you.

Fun week

We had such a great week last week with our visitors.  We had hubby's uncle and family visiting with us and the kids had such a wonderful time together.  We enjoyed their fellowship so much and always look forward to their visit!  Next time....2 weeks, right!!!
We also celebrated hubby's 40th!  So thankful for him :)
And our girl lost another tooth.  It was wiggly and not quite ready to come out, but when you're playing around with your younger sister and she bops you in the mouth....it popped right out!!  She was so excited to get some new cowgirl boots for her present.

Me and my love

Thought we would update our pic together!

Tooth

Look who lost her 'first' tooth (the right way!)  The one beside it is loose as well....won't be long :)

Kids photos

Birthday boy

Here is his birthday pic!  Such a handsome fella.....

Happy Birthday

Our boy turned 8 today!  We say it every time, but it sure feels like time is just flying by with each birthday.  His theme this year was dinosaurs.  He enjoyed his day very much and appreciated all the cards, gifts and calls.
We love you so much!!!  You are such a blessing to our family!

Updates

Haven't posted for a while so I'm trying to think if there is anything new around here.
   We took the month of August off for school, so we are back into the swing of things starting our new year.  So far the kids are enjoying their subjects.  Our oldest LOVES her history program this year.  She kept talking about it so much that our oldest boy now sits in during her audio portion (on CD) and he loves it too.  Still trying to work out a good system of adding the 4th full time child into the mix.  Hoping things will smooth out quickly and we will get into a good routine.
   All the animals are doing well.  Our batch of black maran chickens are starting to mature and we think we have 3 roosters so far (out of 9 chickens).  Rabbit cages have all been set up and the 7 of them are in seperate cages now.  We have one female ready for breeding but still need to wait on the male to mature.  I am anxious to start getting little bunnies!!!  Hopefully by Christmas we will be able to enjoy some rabbit meat.
   The ducks and guineas are laying eggs but since there is no nesting area, we find them broken in the yard every once in awhile.  Today we found an intact duck egg, so hubby is looking forward to trying it out :)  Puppy is growing!  He has done really well around all the animals so far.  We will take him into the chicken pens with us, and he is more interested in eating chicken poop than anything else.  How gross!  He also has a habit of eating any dead mice our barn cat leaves laying around.  Double gross!!
   I think that is about it.  We are enjoying the cooler weather!  Walking is so much more enjoyable with a nip in the air than humidity.  I love autumn!!  Our boy is also going to have a birthday this week.  Eight years old....how time flies.

Pigtails

Oh what a cutie!  And getting sooooo big......

Puppy

Last week we got our puppy!  He is a Great Pyrenees male, almost 6 weeks old.   We called him Duke.

Baby boy

On Thursday, I got to hold my baby boy in my hands....way too early.  At 14 weeks pregnant, our baby unfortunately miscarried and we met our precious son.  I did have to go to the hospital for an overnight stay due to much blood loss but I'm back home recovering.  We have a tree in by our front porch that droops over much like a weeping willow tree does.  We thought this would be the perfect place to put our little boy and I thank God for the short time I was able to carry him!
God has been so very good to us!

Good morning on the farm

"Good morning" from all of us!
The last pic is not one of ours.  He ate our last 2 adult Tophats that made it through the first massacre (by our dog).  We trapped him!!

Pics

   Getting around to posting a few pics.  Here are our new 'babies'.  I think we are already going to lose one, probably tomorrow.  It was weak from the time it arrived so I don't think that one will make it.  We have 15 Tophats in total.

    I baked up 2 more pumpkin today and got 4.5 cups of puree.  I guess I'll be making several loaves of pumpkin bread tomorrow!  We tried pumpkin pancakes and they were o.k.  Nothing spectacular.  I have cucumber coming out my ears!!!  I think next year we will only plant half a row!!  

   Here is a pic of our boys' cake.  Nothing spectacular again.....I was quite tired that day :)  Funny thing about it was I had it all done and was making room in the fridge for it.  As soon as I got it in there, a container of hummus fell right onto the cake landing on the '10' so I had some fixing up to do.
    I forgot to get a pic of all the rabbits we are watching.  We have one of the pens completely full of rabbit cages.  Quite the sight!  

   Our ducks are starting to mate.  I'm wondering if we are getting close to having them lay eggs.  We still haven't created any permanent nesting area for them so we need to get onto that soon!   

Updates

   We had some baby chicks arrived today!  Yep.....we missed our little Tophats so much we ordered some more.  The kids were surprised because we didn't tell them they were coming :)
   Hubby is going to watch a rabbit slaughter tonight.  It sounds gross, but these are meat rabbits like the ones we have and he is going to learn the whole process tonight from start to finish.  Hopefully he won't be too grossed out!  He's not really looking forward to it, but we have to learn how to do it.  Our rabbits will be ready for breeding the end of next month.  We are also rabbit-sitting for the next 2 weeks for friends.  They have lots of bunnies and juniors and we will be getting one of their bucks!
   The garden is continuing to produce daily.  Every other day I'm processing something, whether it is pickles, pumpkin or green beans.  We are waiting on our tomatoes and ocra,  and only one cantaloupe is growing (out of a whole row!!!)  Lettuce still is forming but nothing yet.  We went and plowed all the rows that didn't produce anything.  I lost all my onions, peppers, garlic, chives and strawberries. Such a disappointment.  We are certainly learning the things that work well and what doesn't and how much to plant next year.  It's been a great learning process and I'm already excited about next years' garden.
  Other than that, nothing else new I guess.....just staying busy!

Garden-fresh homemade pumpkin bread

How exciting!  My first 2 loaves of homemade pumpkin bread with our very own garden grown pumpkin!!  Tastes good too :)  We roasted the seeds as well, but the pumpkins were just a tad under-ripe so the seeds weren't the best.  I'm waiting to process the rest of the pumpkins to make sure they are fully ripened.  It was really easy though!  I'm going to have lots of pumpkin stored away for future goodies!  I also put in a picture of my pressure canner.  I've canned several jars of green beans so far, and the second batch of green beans I blanched and froze.  Our cucumbers are growing like crazy and some are just huge!!!  Tonight I will be doing my 5th batch of pickles.

Birthday pic and pickings

Here is our boys' 10th birthday pic.  (Well, one of the many!)  And another pic of today's harvest.  I've done 3 batches now of pickles but today we got out there and picked the green beans for the first time, more cucumber and our first pumpkin!  My pressure canner arrived in the mail today so tomorrow will be another first for me as I attempt to learn how to can!

Sad day and celebrations

This morning was a sad day on the farm.  We woke up to a sea of dead chickens across our yard.  All our top hats and Maran chickens are dead.  It was really quite sickening to see.  From the looks of the fur we see caught on the fence, it was our dog that did it through the night.
There is so much to be thankful for though.  We recently moved our Guinea and Easter Egg chickens out of that pen into a different area, so the devastation could have been much, much worse.  We also, thankfully, were hatching some of the Maran eggs in our garage and currently have 9 chicks that have hatched.  What a blessing that we will be able to replace our Maran population!
Needless to say, we don't have our dog anymore.
I guess it's part of life on a farm.  An unfortunately part....

In other news, we have a potty trained girl!!  She has gone (I guess a week now) with no accidents or even having to be told to go potty.  She always goes on her own!!  She hasn't been able to get through the night dry yet, but we will be working on that.  She loves her new underwear from Nana.  Thank  you Nana!

We also celebrated our boys' 10th birthday.  WOW!  Double digits!!  He's our farmer-in-the-making and loves the outdoors.  He does such a great job taking care of the animals.  He's also such a good big brother.  Happy birthday to our boy!  We love you!

My first canning experience

Here is our first pick of the harvest!  We have quite a few pickling cucumbers ready so I tried my hand at the hot water bath method and made some dill pickles today.  It was quite exciting!!

Chick hatching

This happened yesterday.  So cool to watch it from start to finish.  (I could only post a small portion of the video)  We now have 4 chicks in the house.  Hoping for a few more this week.

Here's the ending....

Survival

   Trying to survive infancy as a chick is tough!  The odds are not in your favor.  We have now lost 6 chicks with only 3 surviving so far.  Last night, one of the 4 babies died (I'm assuming it was merely squished through the night under her mama).  One of the chicks that was hatching died as well.  So we have had 3 newborns die, and 3 die while hatching.  Mama hen is still sitting on a good 10-15 eggs or so, but we may have to move those indoors soon.  Those eggs are a week behind the already-hatched chicks, so Mama hen may stop setting soon to nurture her 3 babies that are already starting to get curious about their surroundings.  

   Hubby is working on the new chicken coop for all our egg laying chickens (as opposed to our fertilized mixed group of hens/rooster)   Hubby is currently working on the nesting boxes right now. We need to get the chicken run all fenced in.  Our Top Hats/Guinea/Easter Egg chickens are now moved into a bigger area.  They are enjoying that much better!!  Yesterday, we saw that one of the comets was running around with a baby snake in its mouth!!  Yikes.  Ohhhh how I hate snakes!  But I am glad they like to eat them :)

  All the other animals are doing well.  The ducks, geese and goats coming running up to the fence whenever anyone is outside.  They love interaction with people (especially if you bring food).  

   We've had a lot of rain lately, so our garden is really growing!  Our pumpkins are starting to form and we see some tomatoes.  The green beans are cucumbers are coming along well.  

  That's it for now.....

Sad chicken lesson

We learned the hard way NOT to let the comet chickens hatch eggs!!  We had 2 suddenly want to start setting several weeks ago which we thought was odd.  They are a hybrid chicken for fast egg production and we didn't think they had that 'nesting' instinct in them.  They are not around a rooster so none of their eggs are fertilized.  Well, 2 of them decided to start setting, so we took some of our fertilized eggs from the Maran group of chickens and put them under our expectant mothers.  Yesterday we discovered that one of the hens had a baby but it was dead in the yard.  We figured all the other comets got jealous or something and trampled it.  So later yesterday evening, another egg hatched but oddly the mother pecked at it when it would peek out from under her.  I thought that was rather odd for a mother to do that so we kept an eye on her.  The kids came in before bed from their finally round of checking on the animals, and one of them said "That mom is mean.  I saw her peck at her baby".  So today I decided to go out and get some food and water ready for the baby and see how it was doing.  I took her out from under the mama hen and what an awful site.  She had pecked at the head and the eyes were bulging out and I think part of the brain.....it was so gross but the poor thing was still alive.  We immediately removed all the eggs from under both comets (7 of which are in the process of hatching) and put them all under our Maran chicken that is setting.  Hopefully she will take to them without any issues (or else I'm bringing them all in the house to hatch myself!!!)

Farm update

I can't get out to take pictures as there is a monsoon outside right now!!!  But I sure do love the rain we are getting, especially for our garden!  Our pumpkins and cucumbers are starting to flower now.....yay!!!  We have weeded several more rows.  The rows always look so nice after all the grass and vines have been picked out.  There are quite a few rows that we really can't weed because we can't find any produce growing....ugh.  We don't see any peppers or strawberries, can't find any garlic or carrots (bummer!!!)  and our cantaloup look pitiful.  Still need to weed the corn and green beans.  Next year we will definitely need to take a different route to help with the weeding issue.  Sitting in 90 degree heat picking weeds has not been fun.  It will be worth it and I think we will definitely appreciate the food a whole lot more as we eat it, knowing the work that went into growing and maintaining it!  I have found the canner/pressure cooker I want.  It  has excellent reviews so I'm excited about getting it.  Now to find some good recipes.

We have 3 hens that are setting right now.  I think we should be getting close to hatching pretty soon.  Our baby comets are getting within several weeks of starting to lay eggs.  We are going to have an explosion of eggs pretty soon.  Hubby has been starting to build the new chicken coop/area for all our eggs layers.  The guinea are getting close to being let loose (they are caged right now).  I have a feeling we are going to lose quite a few once this happens.  They do fly and wander far away so we will see how many stick close by.  The ducks, geese and goats and so much fun to play with.  They love attention!  We did notice a big problem with our pond the other day.  We found about 50 dead fish floating all around the perimeter of the pond.  We did some reading and found that during a heat way the balance of the oxygen in the water changes and then when a thunderstorm comes along and mixes up the water it can cause oxygen depletion.  That is exactly what happened last week.  Right after a big thunderstorm is when we found all the dead fish.  I didn't realize how many bass we had in the pond!!!  Sad to see, but hopefully there are some left in there to replenish the stock.  So many new things you learn living on a farm!!!

The kids are still doing their end-of-year testing trying to finish up their grades.  It will be such a great feeling to be done and ready to start the new year!  We are heading into grades 7, 5 and 3 with a kindergarten/grade 1 ready to start full time.  I'll have to do a post about our curriculum for the new year.  Always exciting starting new books!

That's about it.

A Biblical Alternative To The Sinner's Prayer by Paul Washer

We need to hear this over and over!!!  Such truth!

Garden pics

Here are some pics of the garden.  You can see that some of the rows still need weeding!!!  We've done several already, but there are more that need to be done.  Vines and grass are really growing around the plants.

first row pumpkin, second row green beans

3 rows of green beans

corn, potatoes and tomatoes

cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, and hopefully peppers

our rows that need weeding!!!!