The other day we had our first birth at the cabin!

(This is an iPhone snapshot. Seriously! And in case you were wondering that big pink spot on the chick is the thigh, nothing is wrong with it. Seconds later a big clawed foot popped on out, connected to that plump pink thigh.)

In my garage at the old house there was a hen sitting on eight eggs in a box in the back of the garage.  I waited until the eggs started hatching to move her to the cabin because I didn’t want her to get panicked and abandoned half incubated eggs.  That would be sad.

I’d lost track of how long she’d been sitting on her nest.  (It normally takes 21 days for them to hatch.)  The girls and I had been candling them every few days. Luckily the hen sitting on the eggs was one of our favorites Silver.  She is very tame and didn’t mind me touching her nest as long as I came with treats (kitchen scraps) in hand.  We could hear the eggs peeping and tapping one day.

Finally we showed up the following afternoon and they were beginning to pip!  (Pip is when the chick uses its tiny tooth on the tip of the beak to pip through the air cell at the end of the egg and poke a tiny hole in the shell.  If the chick doesn’t get through the air cell it will drown inside the egg in its own fluids. After the chicks are a few weeks old the egg tooth on the tip of the beak falls off or disappears somehow.)

Since the eggs were hatching Silver the hen was not about to leave her nest, so I was able to carry her entire box out and stick it in a huge dog crate.  She’s now residing on the front porch of the cabin.

When we got here all the eggs had hatched except for two.  One hatched out shortly after arrival!  The second one never hatched even though it was fully developed and we’d heard it peeping earlier in the day.  Not sure what happened there.  I didn’t open the egg to find out. That’s why you never count your chicks before they hatch. Ever heard that saying?

A third chick hatched halfway then died.  It had some kind of disturbing defect–a clear bubble over the heart that popped and left an open cavity. We could see its heart stop beating.

Never seen anything like that on a chick before.  It was a mixture of amazement and horror.  I didn’t even take a picture of it.

This is Silver, the mama hen.

(See the pale blue ear lobes she has?  There are tan flecks on them..those are chicken lice.  They catch them from wild birds.  SO NASTY!  But not contagious to mammals, thankfully. I found an all natural spray at Tractor Supply that actually kills lice and mites, but you have to repeatedly soak the chickens and clean out the bedding over and over to stop hatching eggs. Kind of a nightmare. Too many lice can make them anemic.)

The black rooster in the middle of this picture is the daddy of the chicks.  His name is Mr. Big, or Big Foot as the kids prefer to call him.

Mr. Big takes his rooster job very seriously.  He settles fights between the few other roosters we have and protects his hens with gusto.

Unfortunately that also includes attacking the kids if he sees them too close to his hens…he thinks the girls are predators or other roosters trying to mate with his ladies!

I usually get around this issue by luring him into the coop with scraps and shutting the door so that the kids can safely play with the hens inside the electric fencing.

The black speckled hen in the picture behind Mr. Big is the sister of the mama to the chicks.  Her name is Trixie.

Trixie and Silver are Appenzeller Spitzhaubens.  (I love that breed, super recommend them! They came from McMurray hatchery, I think.)

Another couple from the iPhone–

All of the chicks look similar to their daddy as a baby, except I think they don’t have as much white on their chests as he did.

 (Yep, her nails are dirty from hours of digging in the dirt prior to the chicks hatching. Believe it or not I cut those suckers short once a week!)

Below is a picture of Mr. Big as a tiny chick!

Silver is on the right as a chick, but a few weeks old not newly hatched.  Her sister Trixie is on the left.

It will be interesting to see what their offspring feather out to look like.  So far based on the wing feathers that are sprouting the chicks all look to be growing solid black feathers.

Genetics are fascinating!  I can’t believe  a) All the chicks are identical and b) None have top hat crests, not even partially.

The last mix I hatched of Silver’s babies and a Cuckoo Marans rooster looked like this…weird poofs on the backs of their heads:

They feathered out to have the black and white cuckoo barring of their father with something akin to a rat tail hairdo. Isn’t it weird how the crests were on the backs of their heads?  The Spitzhauben mother has a crest neatly on the top of her head.

So the chick in the picture above would be the half sibling to the chicks that hatched the other day.

I don’t have any of the half siblings left though.  We killed and ate two of them (roosters, at the end of my pregnancy with Ada) and the others were oddly stupid and all died of random freak accidents!

Wasn’t a good genetic mix at all for some reason.  Hopefully Mr. Big and Silver have made chicks that are more intelligent than Silver made with Lunch the Cuckoo Marans a couple years ago.

In case anyone is curious, the above chick turned into a rooster and this is one of his testicles from when we butchered him.  My friend’s son is holding it. Chicken genitalia are all inside their bodies, they don’t even have penises.  Weird, right?

And did you know the egg and the poop all come out of the same hole? It’s called an oviduct, but I prefer to call it the multipurpose shoot.

I don’t plan on butchering any of the current chickens we have since they are all pets with names, but it was an interesting learning experience to incubate, hatch, raise, and butcher your own.  Full circle!  (I’m hardcore, I even built the incubator we used for the eggs complete with wiring it myself.  Bahahaha.)

I’m glad I know how to slaughter, pluck, and cut up a chicken now in case the need should arise for whatever reason.  Honestly the worst parts were the plucking (it smelled awful when we dipped it in scalding water to loosen the feathers) and the unfamiliarity of touching warm raw meat since we’re so used to cold dead meat from the grocery.

And all of this while living in a suburb. Urban homesteading for the win, right? If I can do that in town IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES NOW AT THE CABIN!

I’m trying to pace myself over here.

Ok now that I’ve scarred you for life with chicken information, here are some cute pictures of the girls playing with the new chicks.

(Pretend my porch wasn’t having the weirdest lighting ever…)

She was looking at this:

Now it would be cute to say this chick is getting ready to take a flying leap back up the little ledge to get to its mama.

However, this is actually the position the chicks assume right before they squirt out a tiny poo…

No worries. They are still incredibly cute.

After five (yes, count them FIVE) long calls to Windstream and two tech visits to my house the internet is working again.  Who knows how long it will last.  It’s slow, but I don’t care as long as it comes on.

The issue seems to be that the firmware in my modem–the new modem they gave us–needed to be updated, but no one told me until call number five.

Why would it take five different people and two different techs to tell me this information?  Those idiots on the phone kept going through the whole, “unplug your router for a minute, then plug it back in and restart your computer…”  Gee, I hadn’t tired that 209832432 times already!  Clearly something else is wrong.

Why would they not let you know the firmware needs to be updated as soon as the tech unpacked the thing from the box and set it up?  You need their password and username info to update it too, so it’s not like I could just know and do it myself.

Anyway, now it’s updated and we’ll see how long the internet stays on before no longer working. Hopefully longer than an hour this time?

This mycoplasma bacteria crap we are sick with sucks.  It’s just like a bad cold/sinus infection/respiratory infection depending on how it decides to attack each person’s body.  Mine is of course in my sinuses and ears.  I just want to take handfuls of ibuprofen, but that isn’t safe during pregnancy.  Tylenol does absolutely NOTHING.

Ada is probably the worst sick kid ever.  The whining!  The not sleeping!  It goes on for days and days and days.  OMG.  Every time she gets the tiniest germ it’s impossible to just continue daily life.  I have to put up with her misery for about two weeks straight.  This is so fun while moving.  So fun.  Of course Tyler gets up at 1:30 and leaves for work at 2, then gets home at 6 in the morning six days a week, which means it’s only me with no break at all.  What I wouldn’t give for someone else to be responsible for just a few hours, or for one meal, anything.  Even just for five minutes while I brush my teeth and stare at myself in the mirror would be nice.  Never going to happen though.  I hate this aspect of my life.

The baby definitely had a growth spurt. My uterus feels HUGE now.  I don’t know where else it could possible go.  His toes are up at the point where my ribs come together, in my lungs.  The maternity clothes I wore up until the end of my previous pregnancies are laughably too small.  I’m a little scared!  I don’t know if it’s because he’s a huge baby boy or because my uterus is just stretching out easier after multiple pregnancies.  Time shall tell!

I’m not afraid he won’t fit out or anything, I had no issues giving birth to Rosie and Ada.  I’m not a large person, but I have a roomy pelvis and expandable hips according to my midwife.  Rosie and Ada both had perfectly round heads and everything! I am very curious what size Baby H will be, and how he will look, and what his personality will be like. He seems so unreal to me.  Who is this little person filling every inch of my belly?

I can’t imagine having a newborn.  We haven’t bought anything at all.  If he’s born at 39 weeks like Rosie and Ada then I only have about 10 weeks to go.  I have a feeling it will fly by.  Next thing I know I’ll be having those all night pre-labor misery things going on, then one day it will be the real thing and there he’ll be…seems like a dream.

This is belly for week 29.  (The mirror above the tub isn’t actually crooked, it’s just distortion.)  My belly is huge for my super slim body, considering my stomach is normally totally flat. Everyone is always like, “Oh your belly is so tiny!”  Yeah, actually not if you’ve regularly seen me naked!.  The girls are enjoying watching it grow and rubbing it daily! It feels like I’m wearing a 300 ton elephant suit.  If you look closely you can see how it’s not perfectly round. I think there’s a baby knee just on the far side of my belly button there.

(That’s a cat scratch on my back…don’t ask. And my ass is not actually totally flat, it’s just annoying ill fitting maternity pants! Driving me crazy!)

Living out here is still epically awesome. I’ve been taking lots of pictures with my iPhone due to lack of other technology.

I’m overwhelmed with moving disorganization, illness, pregnancy exhaustion, and setting up my farming things.  I’m determined to get it all done though.  Determined.

I charmed my neighbor (the goat owner Dale) into plowing up my garden space earlier this past week.  He made it a bit…huge.  What will I do with all this space!  (Exciting and overwhelming!)

I still have to get out my rototiller to chop through the clods of grass and dirt, then rake out the debris.  It’s very rocky soil.  I’m not sure how well things will grow in it, but it’s too late to till in compost mixture right now.  I can’t afford to buy compost for that large of a space, and I don’t have any of my own made.  I’ll have to start composting in anticipation of next year’s garden.  Then I have to buy and put up the t-post fencing, which isn’t hard to do…though I’m not sure how well it will go at 29 weeks pregnant. I’ll let you know in a few days, probably when I’m laid up with horrible pulled muscles…

Did I mention I’m determined?

Rosie is having the time of her life playing excavation in the garden space.  The original farmhouse used to be back there, so she’s finding all kinds of bits and pieces of old pottery and broken glass jars in various sizes.  She’s having fun trying to match up all the pieces, then imagining what they used to be and who used them for what.

I have a bunch of seedlings for the garden already started.  About 25 tomato plants of various kinds, about 8 bell pepper plants, a couple Zucchini plants, and a few green bean starts, plus my big strawberry patch I need to move from my old house. If I can hurry up and get the garden all set up this week I can plant a bunch of green beans, corn, maybe some summer peas if I can find heat tolerant ones, more squashes, and I don’t know what else.

I also have chicken eggs coming out of my ears.  I get more than a dozen a day, even with the stupid Lucy Andalusian chicken eating some eggs before we can gather them.  (Maddening!!)

Their pen is working out really well, but it’s a bit crowded.  I need to order a couple more rolls of electric netting (200 more feet) to expand their space to 300 feet total.  Tyler also needs to build a second hoop coop, but he won’t have time for awhile.  Not until we get everything moved in and unpacked.  I plan on moving the hoop coop(s) and fencing every two weeks so that they are always on fresh grass and never on mud.

I’m loving this electric netting so far.  I read it takes 3,000 volts to zap a coyote through its fur.  Even with weeds on the fence (which causes the fence to not be as powerful) my voltage meter is reading at 7,000 volts. Take that murderous predators!  I’ve also promised the girls bunnies, but not until our house sells.  Billy Who Wants to Buy Our House hasn’t called back.  Too bad, maybe that was too good to be true.

This is their hoop coop.  It’s not fully finished–the tarp is supposed to be nailed on tightly, and it needs nest boxes.  But it works fine for now.  I’ll get it finished nicely before the baby comes, at least.

The electric netting needs to be tighter, but I haven’t had internet to watch the troubleshooting videos yet.  It’s sagging because the land is uneven. I know there’s some solution, I just don’t know what yet.  It still works fine for now despite hitting the grass and popping a bit.

Over the winter I’m going to use bales of straw to keep the hoop coop warm.  I saw on a blog where someone made an entire floor out of straw bales and set the coop on top of it, then let the chickens scratch it down over the winter.  After that they composted it all.  Glorious idea!

Rosie is feeding them scraps.  Both girls already know how to unhook the electric fence at the battery, and then hook it back up, so they can go in and out without getting zapped.

I also need to build permanent housing for the battery energizer that hooks to the fence…so much to do!  Right now it’s just in a bucket with plastic.  More temporary short cuts.

The thing about living way out here is that everyone has random stuff going on. No one has picture perfect homes, lawns, or magazine worthy farm set-ups. Just not the way it works, so no worries.  Goodbye suburb perfection, hello reality!

I wish these two were focus properly! This is Jenny, their favorite little banty hen.

Rosie is simply glowing.  She is incredibly happy to be living here.  (Also, why/how is she so old now! What the heck happened!)

The scenery out here is just mind blowing.  I LOVE waking up and going to sleep surrounded by this place.

(I’m also loving the panorama ability with the iPhone 5.  Wow!)

This is the cabin at night, as viewed from the chicken pen.

Rintoo enjoying a breeze through the front door.

Yes, that’s my giant screen front door and my wide plank willow wood flooring.  Bliss!

The moths out here are very large, and there is such an interesting variety in color and size!

(Ignore all the disorganized moving mess on my porch…it will be straightened up one day. Eventually.)

I really like this spot.  The graveyard is just through those trees.  This is behind the chicken pen.

This is one of my favorite spots just around the corner. It’s a cattle farm.

After all that garden bed digging…

The graveyard path through the woods…this is where our property line ends.  I love visiting here.

These people lived on this gorgeous property a hundred years before I did. It seems fitting that they are still here, in some form.

I don’t know why they don’t mow around these.  There are snakes in there, but I’m dying to see what those gravestones say.

Rosie is in her pajamas because we walked out there this morning before breakfast.  We wanted to run through the fog, just because it’s fun.

See? I can’t believe this is where I live.

Morning time. I’m more than happy to roll out of bed.

The kids love it here so much.  Every time we go back to our house in town to finished packing stuff all they do is cry and whine to come back to the cabin as soon as possible.

I feel an extreme sense of peace about living here.

I’m typically a fairly anxious person–and don’t get me wrong, I am still anxious about being alone all night with the kids because it seems like things always go wrong at night and I just need another set of hands or another adult for reassurance.  I hate being in charge of everything all by myself in the dark when the world is asleep!

However, this house and this land just feel like HOME.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way about a place before.  I didn’t expect to feel that way about here.

I mean sure, it’s a fun place to rent for a few years.  Something new and different, and beautiful surroundings.  But it’s way out in the boonies.  It takes me at least 20 minutes just to get to Walmart, if not longer.  I don’t even like shopping at Walmart.  It takes me more than an hour to get to some place like Whole Foods.  That would be like a half day marathon dragging the kids up to the bigger town to shop.  If I want to order health food on Amazon instead I have to wait for the internet to decide to work because it doesn’t work at all for hours at a time.  4g doesn’t work here either, not reliably.  We’re in a dead spot on the coverage map.  Then once the internet does work it’s super slow, and so I have to hope what I’m ordering goes through.  Then even with two day shipping the mail man and UPS man don’t come to my door.  The mailbox is half a mile away and the UPS man or FedEx guy leave packages with the old pink farm house at the top of the street over the hill.

It’s so different from living in a suburb.

I thought these things might make it kind of frustrating.  They don’t so far though.  Just new and different things to get used to as part of regular life.

I don’t know why I feel so happy here.  It just feels good.  It feels right, like this is exactly where we are meant to be at this moment in time, and not even wiggling anxieties can question that feeling because it’s so strong.

 

My parents brought me one of our TV’s this evening along with the PS3 and Xbox to watch DVD’s with.  It somehow feels wrong to fill this place with big TV’s and technology.  I’m glad we don’t have cable and Netflix doesn’t stream well.

This afternoon the internet was out again, and so the girls watched a caterpillar they’d collected in a jar a few days ago eat an entire leaf.  It took us hours to figure out which kind of leaves this caterpillar wanted to eat because we couldn’t google search to figure out what kind of caterpillar it was, then google search what the trees it ate looked like. Hysterical how much we’ve come to rely on Google just to function.  We knew it was hungry because it was frantically crawling all over the jar and ignoring the sticks and leaves we’d given it.

I thought maybe I’d read before that these types of caterpillars like cherry trees and similar varieties, and I knew that sort of tree had a long pointy leaf.  Then we thought to look for a tree with leaves that had caterpillar nibbles off of them.  Believe me, there are A LOT of trees to choose from out here.

We tested out a billion different leaves and finally Mr. Caterpillar started happily munching on one specific kind.  I actually think it may have been from an ash tree, but I’m not for sure.

I feel like in town we could just look these things up or rely on an app, but here we need to memorize knowledge to have it in our heads.

I like that.

 

After we watched the caterpillar eat a leaf Ada fell asleep in the breeze from the screen door.

She’s so sick.  I’m sick also.  We went to the doctor today and he said there’s been an outbreak of mycoplasma bacteria, which is not uncommon, and that’s probably what we have since we have no signs of a virus.  (No bumpy throats, etc.)  Mycoplasma causes walking pneumonia and other upper respiratory illnesses that are worse than just a common cold.  That must have been what made Rosie’s lungs so sick last week.

Ada has major congestion and high fever because she’s not prone to lung infections.  Mine is festering in my throat and nose just waiting to explode into something horrible. More antibiotics, yuck.  You can’t get over it on your own though, which is why after four days Ada still had a high fever off and on, and why Rosie (who is never sick for more than 12 hours) was knocked flat on her back a few days ago then got better rapidly with antibiotics.

My neighbor out here is a school bus driver for the county schools and he told me yesterday that all the kids on his bus route have been sick with the same thing, then he caught it and couldn’t believe how sick he was.  Fun stuff.  Rosie probably caught it from that stupid candy jar at speech therapy.  (At public school…)  We haven’t been many other places recently.  I guess it could have come from anywhere though, considering the incubation period is 1-4 weeks!

I think I got antibiotics in the knick of time, before it really set in and caused the high fever.  I hope.  So far I’ve just had the chills on and off for a few days and felt really weird and tired along with a mild stuffy nose and sore throat.  I’ve probably had this bacteria before from going to school and working in a daycare for several years. I read that your body does retain limited immunity to it for a period of time.  (Watch, I’ll be down with a high fever next and eat my words.  Hope not.)

 

Anyway, while Ada was napping Rosie read a book on the front porch swing instead of playing games online, watching Netflix, or any of that stuff.

Bliss.

 

 

I can’t wait to have a tiny squishy newborn out here, rocking on the porch and wearing him outside in the warm summer sun.

He still doesn’t seem like he will be real, like maybe this whole pregnancy is only a figment of my imagination.

Time will tell.  I’ll be 29 weeks in a couple of days.

 

It’s 5:20 in the morning.  I hope this entry saves.  The internet seems to be cooperative in the wee hours.  Probably because nobody else in our area is on it.

I woke up when Tyler came home from work and couldn’t go back to sleep because I was starving and had to pee. Story of a pregnant woman’s life, right?  Now the roosters are crowing at everyone’s houses all around the hills and guess what?  I don’t have to freak out that my neighbors are hating me because THEY ALL OWN ROOSTERS TOO.

Perfect.

I can also hear the big herd of cattle up on the neighboring ridge across the road getting excited and bawling because they are ready to have breakfast.  I super heart the cow moos. Reminds me of being a kid on my grandparents’ dairy farm.  These neighbors feed their cows at about 5:45 in the morning and then again at 5:45-6:30 at night.  You can hear cows screaming MURRRRRR! Feeeed meeeee!

There’s also the occasional crunch on of tires on gravel and the rumble of diesel engines as neighbors all around slowly start their days either leaving for work or doing morning chores.  The area is remote, but you can hear sounds like that echoing over the open land in the background.  It’s so quiet out here. Nothing like our house in town where we hear trains, sirens, and traffic on on the state highway all night long.  There aren’t even cars going up and down our gravel road at night unless the neighbors are out late for some reason.  Instead in the dark you hear rain on the tin roof, the wind in the pine trees out front, and animal sounds.

Maybe I can go back to sleep for a few hours, if I can breathe.  One of my ears is totally clogged up too.  Hate that feeling!  Tomorrow if we’re well enough I have to get the rest of the chickens out here, along with the kitties and ducks.  (Our self scooping litter box is amazing.  I can fill the cat food dishes and then leaving knowing that their litter box will be clean and odor free for a week, until we need to replace the trash bag in the drawer under it.)

I’m trying to set a goal for each day.  It takes forever to drive into town to our old house, round up stuff and get it into the van by myself along with the kids, then drive back out here and get it inside the cabin.  My growing baby belly gets in the way, and I can’t lift heavy things, and the kids are all needy.  So frustrating!

I have photography work to do this weekend and I don’t even know where my cameras and lenses are.  Crisis!

Ah, Ada is waking up again…my cue to stop writing down trains of thought, cross my fingers, and hit save.

 

We spent our first night at the cabin last night.

Ada coughed all night long, so there wasn’t much sleep involved.

Sick, crazy bunny!

This weekend we moved some of our furniture–the dressers, beds, and a love seat.  We still have to move the big Expedit shelves, which have to be taken apart and put back together, and the washer and dryer.

The house has tons of stuff all over it, half packed boxes.  Everything is still in the scary over stuffed coat closet, the bathroom closet, the laundry closet, the attic, garage, and the kitchen cabinets.

Unfortunately packing any of it up with the girls is nearly impossible and Tyler has mandatory overtime this weekend.  Frustrating.

The anxiety of having all of my things completely disorganized is not fun.  I don’t like it when everything is out of place.

We don’t have a TV at the cabin because we didn’t move them.  Netflix is spotty–works sometimes, when the internet is cooperating.  We don’t have cable anymore.

It’s weird not having TV and streaming internet.  It reminds me of my childhood.  We have to do stuff like play and read books.  Haha.

If the girls could ever get over this bronchitis virus it would be a lot more fun out here.

My neighbor, who is a bus driver, said all the kids have had the same virus and it’s a long lasting one with a bad cough.  Fun stuff.

He said he caught it and coughed his head off for a full two weeks before he felt even semi-normal again.

Ah well.  At least the view is pretty!

The cabin is in the middle.  That white thing to the right of it is the first chicken hoop coop.  (Second one has yet to be constructed…first one isn’t even totally finished because the tarp isn’t nailed on.)

Here’s a view from up on the hill.

This is behind me to the right.  Belongs to a neighbor, the older lady named Ms. Ellen who lives in the cabin way back behind us over this ridge.  We are free to run and play up there, she doesn’t mind.

These neighbor horses are killing me.  Never close enough to touch!  Please, let me nuzzle your soft horsey nose…

Not approved.

Is it just me or does this horse have humongous nostrils?  I mean more so than regular horse nostrils…or maybe she’s just flaring them at me all the time in indignation.

Doesn’t help that Hank barks at them whenever he’s outside.  I don’t know what his hound brain thinks!

We brought Abby (the black lab mix) out here today.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that she had nice manners with all the other neighbor dogs!

Typically in our suburb she will try to attack other dogs in the yard or walking past.  I have to muzzle her at the vet too.  But here?

She came up on Brenda’s three big dogs (the horse owner) and they barked viciously at her.  She barked back then ran off to play.

I’m still unsure about fencing.  People here just let their dogs out to run where ever. Seeing my dogs running happily through the field is great.

Hank and Manuel tend to stick close to home and come back when called.  Abby though…she just took off running. I followed her for about half a mile before she stopped.

She doesn’t listen when I call her.

She’s fast too!

Hopefully she can learn that this is home and she doesn’t need to take off running at 240 mph.

Since we live on a dead end gravel road it’s pretty isolated for quite some way, so there aren’t that many dangers, but it causes me some anxiety to think that they aren’t safely locked in a fenced in space.

I really just…don’t know.

I will say they are definitely happy and exhausted dogs at night!  I can see that this is how Hank is meant to live, not in town where he is so bad.

We made the best purchase ever yesterday.

Long range walkie talkies!

They’re the Motorola brand kind that can go for an insane amount of distance. Something like 65 miles! They also act as a flash light and weather radio.  They recharge with a dock or via USB cord.

Since cell phone reception here is spotty, and sometimes I need to walk a fair distance from the house to lock up the chickens or chase down the dogs I can just take one walkie talkie with me and leave the other inside with the girls.

Rosie is responsible enough to not burn down the house or anything crazy when left inside with Ada, but she gets worried if she can’t see me out the window and can’t immediately speak to me.  She loves the walkie talkies!

Abby ran up to the neighbor’s house this evening and while I was corralling her Rosie was informing over the walkie talkies that she hurt Ada’s ear but it was an accident, and how many seconds until I walked back into sight of the house, and can she please eat some chips from the green bag?  Haha!

Before the walkie talkies when Abby would get out and run off (in our suburb) I would have to leave the girls at home to run and get her and they would sit there and sob.  (I can’t catch the dog while dragging two slow kids along!)

The walkie talkies have totally solved this problem.

Rosie is also sleeping upstairs in the loft bedrooms with a walkie talkie and I have one down here.  Perfect.

I can hear Ada coughing and choking again, so I’d better try to save this while the internet is working…

 Had an awkward moment this afternoon.

We were petting the goats when one of them managed to shove her head through a square in the fence!  It was kind of funny at first, until we realized it was actually completely stuck.  When she tried to pull her head back through the fence her horns would catch and prevent her from getting out of the headlock position.

This was when only one horn was through the fence square.  Soon both horns were stuck through it.

Then it got extremely awkward when all of the male goats decided to take this prime opportunity to gang rape her.  One of the long bearded pregnant female goats ran up and started repeatedly head butting all of the goats involved in the…orgy.  I’m not sure if she was annoyed at the chaos or trying to rescue her female friend from repeated rape.

My girls have seen the ducks do this, but somehow it was more horrifying to them with the goats. Probably because the poor goat with her head stuck was bleating in terror!

Finally Tyler was able to hold the goat’s head tightly in the right position to shove it back through the fence.

Shew!

Goats…

I am very surprised at how much Tyler likes the goats.  He was actually asking me questions about goat breeds and goat care.  (Because obviously I’ve already over researched owning goats over the past three years, just in case…)

They are hysterically funny creatures.  And friendly too!  Kind of dog-like, actually.  Except with “rectangly rectangle eyes that are not right” as Ada would say.

This is my favorite goat.  It’s a she goat.

She *loves* to be scratched behind her horns.

This is the sassy pregnant mama goat with the beard who was doing the head butting.

The little goat just underneath the one eating the apple is named Baby Frank.  He’s recently weaned.

These horses are so shy.  We have yet to actually touch them, even when offering treats.

Ada didn’t want to leave the goats.

I had to tie Hank to the porch so that we could pet the goats.  He barks and scares them if he follows us up there.

Luckily he doesn’t mind napping right there…for hours.  When I unclipped his collar to let him free he thumped his tail and resumed snoring.

We’re building hoop coops out of cattle panels for the chickens.

This is how it looks half done, in its current state.

It still needs chicken wire on the front and back, and the super strong tarp over it.  The tarps were in the mail at our house in town when I got home tonight.

Side view.

I can’t wait to get it finished!  Then we have to build the second one…

They are 8×8 feet, and a little over six feet tall inside.  They’re so strong you can hang the feeder and waterers from the top.

I’m going to put Premier electric poultry netting around them, but I haven’t ordered it yet.  I hate how expensive that stuff is!

Everyone I’ve talked to and everything I’ve read says it’s totally worth it though.

Both the electric poultry netting and the hoop coops can be moved around so that the chickens have plenty of fresh grass and bugs!  Basically they’re free range chickens without the neighbor’s dogs eating them.  (Hopefully.)

We sat out on the porch and watched a big thunderstorm come up over the hills.

After the storm!

This picture above was taken while standing right here, in my kitchen:

The cabin is really rustic.  But in a fun, quirky way.

I can’t wait until we get our beds moved in.  It already feels weird to come back to the suburb and our other house.  It’s so vastly different.

I’ll choose the cabin and that view any day!

The only major, major downside is the internet.  The speed is 1.5 compared to the 10 or 11 we have here in town.

1.5 is so slow that it barely functions.  I’m not sure how I will upload pictures or anything.  Netflix works, but it’s blurry.  Even Facebook is slow to use.

That’s the best option.  We explored every possibility.  Maybe they’ll upgrade the service out there soon?  Just a few miles away they don’t even have the ability to use wifi, so we’re lucky in that regard.

With no cable, poor internet, and living way out in the boonies we are definitely going to be in an isolated bubble.  Good thing there’s lots to do outside.

By the way, because several people always ask:  All the photos in this entry are iPhone pictures.  I took them using the VSCO CAM app, and used the filters from PicTapGo app to adjust the contrast and everything.  Those are my two all time favorite photo apps!

I am completely overwhelmed by moving and keeping up with daily chores.

Moving is going ever so slowly.  It pours rain all day for the one day off Tyler has each week.  Every single week since we’ve had the lease!

We can’t seem to get the fencing set up, which means we can’t move out there for good because we can’t leave the animals here alone.  I’m so frustrated!

I wish Tyler could just take a week off, but he doesn’t have any vacation time so that won’t happen.  They have so much mandatory overtime that he doesn’t get to leave work until after five every morning, which means he gets home around six, and then he has to sleep later.  Shift is supposed to end at 2:15 when there is no overtime.

On top of that they have been having mandatory Saturday overtime, which means Saturday is like a regular work day complete with not getting off until 5 in the morning.

He also has duties to do before shift starts, so he has to go in an hour early every day.  The money is great, but not the lack of time to get stuff done.

Plus, I suck at single parenting.  Really suck.  Especially during this pregnancy when I feel terrible a lot.  (Yes, still!  It’s not going to go away until birth, is it?)

Lots of people are buying Toyota cars I guess.  So much that they are opening a whole new section at the plant where he works. I think they’re going to start making the Lexus or something.  I can’t remember.  It’s due to increased demand.

Oh wait, here’s an article explaining all of it.  It’s a New York Times article about the plant where Tyler works.

 

Even though moving is incredibly stressful and horrible, our cabin is still awesome.

We finally met our closest neighbors.  They live in a tiny silver trailer just over the hill.  They’re extremely nice.

Sherri, the woman, is probably somewhere between 45 and 55.  It’s so hard to tell!  Her hair is all gray, but her face doesn’t look that old.

She has horses and she does dog rescue.  Her five year old granddaughter comes over to visit a lot.  I bet she will be friends with Rosie!

Sherri told me that her granddaughter knows how to ride well by herself and they would be happy to teach Rosie and Ada to ride.

Rosie is THRILLED.  I had promised her she could go to horse camp this summer, until I realized it cost about $300 for a week…not including the gas it takes to drive there and back to drop off and pick up.  Living next door to horses and getting to ride them all the time is only about thirty thousand times better!

One day, if we ever get moved and settled in with the new baby, and once Tyler gets a promotion at work, I would love to own a horse or two.

 

My dreams of having my kids grow up outside in the fresh air, enjoying nature and animals are totally coming true.

Can’t believe it.  So blessed to have found this place.

I’m 100% certain it’s an answer to my prayers. I could have never in my wildest dreams imagined this would really happen.

And so suddenly too!

Here are a few pictures from the past couple of days.

I want to learn the name of every wildflower around the cabin.  There are so many I don’t know!

See that?  Those are my kids in the creek, which is low right now.  Rosie begs to go get in the creek and play.

The day before yesterday she took off her shoes and squished her toes in the mud.

ROSIE!  Careful, clean, overly cautious Rosie!  This move is going to be so good for her.

Remember a few years ago when we went on a hike up a creek and Rosie screamed and sobbed the entire time?

I won’t ever get tired of staring at my yard.  (Both sides of the road are ours!)

There’s a county owned graveyard just over our property line through the trees on the very far left.

You can see where there are Christmas trees on the far left, and there’s a big gap between them.  The graveyard is about half a football field through the woods past those Christmas trees.

Here are a few iPhone photos from in the graveyard area.

The graveyard is hauntingly beautiful.

I think this grave says 1790.

(The county has an easement to go through our field to get to the graveyard for mowing.  They mow at Labor Day and at Memorial Day.)

A newer part of the cemetery is fenced off for a family area.

This made me pause for quite awhile in sadness.

I desperately want to know the story behind this family.  Did they live in the original farm house on our property?  The house that my cabin is made of?

(The cabin is made of reclaimed wood from the farm house, and the original farm house front door is the side door to the cabin that leads into the kitchen!)

Did the unnamed twin girls and the two year old die at the same time?  Or were they buried here at separate times and and a marker placed later?

Why did the toddler die?  Did the twins die from being born too small or too early?

Worst of all, how did that poor mama cope?  My heart, it breaks for her!  The mother and father and another adult with the same last name are buried right next to this grave.

The mother was also named Eunice.

I may never know the answers to these questions.  I want to ask the elderly lady who lives in the cabin on the ridge behind mine.  Her property backs up to the graveyard from the opposite direction.  She’s the mother of my neighbor Sherri with the horse riding granddaughter.

These May Apples grow all around the entrance of the graveyard.  Apparently they were a very useful herb to the Indians.

Which leads me to wonder if Native Americans used to live on this land too.  Too bad I can’t ask that person in the 1790 grave…

 

View from the Christmas tree line graveyard entrance:

Poor Hank almost died yesterday at 4 in the morning.  Apparently he ate a spider in his crate and then had a major allergic reaction.

He vomited a lot, collapsed, and couldn’t breathe.  I thought he was having heart failure or something, he’s pretty old.  Then once I realized he was swelling up (insanely, like a Shar Pei!) I shoved Benadryl down his throat and within 20 minutes he was able to take semi-normal breaths again.

As soon as the vet opened at 8 we rushed him in.  The vet swore that allergic reactions in dogs were actually somewhat common.

How terrifying!

If your dog ever has this happen give Benadryl immediately! I just guessed, as a last ditch effort, but it saved his life and was actually the correct thing to do.

His lips were so swollen they started to crack and bleed.  I’ve never seen anything like it before.  His eyes were even swelling shut.

His skin was burning hot and he had huge hives on his belly.

He’s fine now!  He has to take a strong dose of Prednisone for a few days.

I’m so glad he’s ok.  He belongs at this cabin on the front porch.

And goats.  Because they are awesome.

Today–

We seem to be stuck in a pattern of one nice day, followed by a week of rain and cool weather.

Yesterday at the cabin, it was actually this color outside.  Gray.  Blue.  Rain.

See that white gate?  That’s the last neighbor on the “street”.  Everything beyond the fence line there is her land.  Everything in front of it is…MINE.

One of my future lawn mowing crew, out of three.

Rosie standing in the road.

We were going to a princess birthday party after the cabin.

Ada was walking from the neighbor’s white gate and the horses back to our cabin.

Not wet grass on the princess dress! Noooo!

We took Hank out there to run around.

He’s totally fine loose with our chickens and ducks, so I was surprised that he barked and growled at the horses and goats.

Not sure what I’m going to do about that!  I’m not sure if he was actually barking at the animals or if he got them confused with the guard dogs in the fields.

Hank inside watching the goats through the living room window…hopefully he’ll get used to them?

Moving is going as slow as I thought it would.

As in we haven’t moved anything yet…

See this cabin?

THAT IS MY NEW HOUSE!

(That little person in the grass is Ada.)

At the driveway there’s a neighbor’s field.  The field is full of goats–maybe 15 of them.  They came running, bleating hello.

Pregnant goats, nurslings, and man goats with long beards.  Pure awesome.

Ada said, “That goat isn’t right Mama.  He’s got rectangle eyes!”

All goats have eyes like that kiddo.

Almost every house around has chickens and roosters.  The neighbors over one more field, also bordering our land, have horses and the neighbors behind them have a herd of cattle.

It’s completely and totally perfect.

 The view of my yard on a cloudy day:

There’s more land across the road and behind the house, plus a bit through the woods down to a creek.  It’s 4.33 acres in total.

I love that there is no road.  It’s all gravel, just a gravel road with gravel driveways off of it.  I don’t have to worry about kids and pets running into the street.

My Little House on the Prairie dream house is on a gravel road out in the sticks.

The inside of the cabin is a little rustic, but in a fun way.

WiFi reaches out here!  The cabin is a mile from the river, down winding roads out in the country.

This is the view on the drive out:

(It’s been so cloudy and cool out lately, yuck.)

We’re renting this place from another homeschooling family and selling our home in town as quickly as we can.

Moving is proving to be very stressful.  We have to put up fencing, build chicken pens, and pack/move all of our household things.

This isn’t exactly easy while pregnant. I get tired out so easily!

 I’m completely overwhelmed by predator proofing.  The neighbor with the horses warned us that her dogs eat chickens and chase cats.  The dogs roam all over.

We also have coyotes, on top of all the regular predators like raccoons, foxes, owls, and hawks.

Here’s a picture the owners posted of the inside:

The floors are made of willow wood.

I can’t wait to get moved out there!

Baby H will be born in this cabin out in the woods.  (Hopefully!)

Here’s to being 26 weeks pregnant, in my new bathroom!

Ada’s birthday weekend started with going to see Disney on Ice.  My parents went with us and bought everyone the tickets.

(They don’t allow professional cameras there, sad!  I utilized my trusty iPhone.)

My sister got cotton candy and it randomly came with stick on earrings.

The girls got $12 snow cones.  At least the cup and spoon straw are pretty cool.  (And dishwasher safe!)

The next day, Sunday the 21st, was Ada’s third birthday.  She was super excited.

We opened a few presents in the morning after everyone woke up.

(It was Princess Cadence, from My Little Pony. From Rosie!)

Tyler got her super heroes.  She loves Batman and Spider-Man.  A lot.

At first she said, “Hey I didn’t want these!”

So Tyler told her he could just return them and she was like, “Noooo!”

I guess she meant she didn’t specifically ask for these, not that she didn’t want them at all.

Rosie has Princess Celestia.

I got Ada sand for the turtle sandbox and a subscription to Starfall, neither of which have any pictures involved.

After brunch we told the girls we needed to run an errand, a really boring one.

No worries, we let them bring their ponies.

But alas, it was a trick!  Since we never go to the mall the girls had no idea where we were going.

When we walked up to Build-a-Bear Rosie was almost ready to cry–she’s been begging to make a

My Little Pony ever since she found out they have them there from one of her friends.

She thought only Ada was going to get to make one for her birthday.

What fun would that be?  Nothing is very fun when you don’t have someone else to play with you!

Ada insisted on carrying her box even though it was almost as big as she was.

And THEN, we met up with family at the park for some cake and a few last presents.

Except Ada only wanted to swing.

Until I swung her too high…

Ada wanted a bunny cake. She picked the pan from the clearance section at Kroger after Easter when we were grocery shopping one day.

She specifically requested it have blue ears.

(My sister made it.)

Ada also requested Batman cups and plates.

Cake!

Trying to get the candles to stay lit in the wind…

Then more swinging, before heading home!

We were all exhausted!

I can’t believe Ada is three.  Wow.