Hunting for Coyotes

"Mommy, will you go to the woods with me?" asked Emmett.
"Sure, baby, why do you want to go to the woods?"
"'Cause we're going hunting for coyotes!" he replied.
"Well lets go then!"

I helped him find his hat and his boots (he had already put on his sister's sweater before he came to ask me to go outside...) and out we went. He grabbed a basket on the way out, and when I asked him what he was going to use the basket for, he told me "stuff".

We wandered through the trees, talking about things like birds and squirrels. He noticed how loud our walking was as we crunched through the dry leaves. "Walk like this Mommy" he ordered, marching with his feet raised high to maximize the sound. So we marched for a while.

He found nuts, chewed by squirrels and mice, and put them in his basket. He discovered a hole dug underneath the roots of a cut tree stump.

He rolled all of his collected nuts down into the hole and when I asked him why he did that he replied "just 'cause." Well that sounded like a good reason to me.

Then we wandered past a patch of moss, he collected a tiny bit and examined it closely then tucked it into his basket.

Eventually we found our way to the trampoline. He climbed onto it and began doing somersaults. Between the dry winter air, the wool sweater and the nylon trampoline mat he developed quite a charge of static electricity. His fine curly hair was standing on end. Claire saw us playing there and ran over to join us. After a few minutes of playing together Emmett noticed her hair...

"Sissy" he proclaimed "You look like a happy octopus!"

We never found those coyotes he was looking for, but I'd say it was a great trip outside after all!

Meanwhile in the house:

Pickles the pig

**Don't forget to enter the giveaway I'm having right now! You could win one of my handmade Waldorf Dolls! You can enter by leaving a comment HERE!**

Rodrigo (my husband) calls me every day on his way home from work to chat about our days during his drive home. This afternoon he mentioned that he had picked up a little surprise for me on the way home. He often stops somewhere on his way home to buy me flowers, or a little treat to eat or something of that sort, so I said "Oh good! Now I really can't wait until you get here to see what your bringing me!" I mean, who doesn't love surprise gifts from their husband?? He laughed and assured me that it wasn't very big and said that he'd be home in about 15 minutes.

I was outside  petting the emus when he arrived. He got out of his truck and kissed me hello. All of the kids where in the house so it was just the two of us out there for a few minutes. We talked some more, and then I noticed an animal carrier in the back of his truck. I asked if he had brought my parents dog home, since we often doggy-sit for them when they go out of town. No, it wasn't their dog, when I got closer to his truck I realized he had a tiny piglet in the crate! I was shocked!

Let me explain, I've wanted to have a pig (or pigs) for years. And it's always been Rodrigo who said how we either didn't have a good place for them to live, or that they stink, or they break out of fences, etc. So I accepted that and let it go, I mean it's not like we lack either livestock or pets around here! But every once in a while we'd see pigs for sale somewhere and I'd mention again how much I'd like to have pigs one day.

After I petted her and oooo'd and aaaaah'd for a few minutes I ran (well, as much as a woman who is 7 months pregnant can run!) into the house to call the kids to come see what their Daddy had brought home. They were all thrilled! Especially Claire, she has been saying for months that this can't be a real farm unless we have a pig. Apparently in her estimation "real" farms must have a pig or a cow. She promptly declared that it would be her pig, and it should be named "Pickles". So that is the story of how Pickles the pig came to join our farm.

Now we can rest easy knowing that our little farm is indeed a bonafide farm! And I have a really awesome husband who instead of flowers or sweets brings me a piglet and totally makes my day!

The Emu Invasion

We have a pair of Emu chicks.  Actually, Logan has a pair of emu chicks in the house. Well, after that sentence I'm not really sure what else I should write about them.

I guess a bit of an explanation might be in order. The year after we moved here from Guatemala, in September of 2004 we took the boys to the Tennessee Valley Fair for the first time. Logan was seven years old. Of all of the animal exhibits there his very favorite thing was the petting zoo. They had a tame emu. Logan had never seen anything like it before, it was a giant 5 foot tall bird that looked like a dinosaur. He was smitten! All he talked about after that trip to the fair was that someday he wanted an emu. Every year we would go back to the fair and Logan would head straight for the petting zoo, and the emu.

 Any time we talked about getting a farm, or a pet or animals in general over the next 9 years Logan was sure to bring up emus. He wanted one, and he wasn't going to let us forget it! When we sold our house last summer and started looking for a small farm, Logan mentioned that he hoped it would have room for an emu. Rodrigo and I hadn't seen any emu chicks for sale in years so we nodded our heads and said, "Sure son." Haha, little did I know...

On Sunday afternoon Rodrigo and Logan were looking at the farm and garden section of Craigslist trying to find me a livestock guardian dog to take care of my goats and chickens. We've spotted coyotes in the fields across the road (in broad daylight ) and hawks are constantly flying over head scoping out the rabbit arks in the yard, hoping for an escapee. So I really need a good dog to help out around here! Well, they didn't find me a dog, instead they spotted an ad for emu chicks. And that, as they say, was that. The phone number was called and the directions given, and within a couple of hours Logan became the very happy almost 16 year old owner/ caregiver to a pair of adorable emu chicks.

For the moment they are living in a old baby play-yard converted to emu brooder in our dining room. The lady we got them from says that within two weeks they should be over two feet tall, so other arrangements will have to be made as soon as possible.

Honestly, this is just exactly the kind of thing that I would have begged my parents to let me do when I was a kid. They probably wouldn't have let me, they were pretty strict about the no weird livestock or pets. In retrospect they did let me have a pretty wide range of "normal" pets when I was a kid, but you know, I always had aspirations of starting my own zoo. Gerald Durrell was my hero, he traveled the world collecting animals and started a zoo! I read all of his books cover to cover so many times they became quite ragged and tattered after years of being carted around the globe with me. I always thought that when I grew up and had kids of my own and they wanted something that really and truly interested them, and we were in a place where we would be able to provide it with the type of home it needed, and it wasn't going to pose a threat to any little ones, or require a fortune to buy or for it's upkeep that we would let them have it. So here we are now with Logan's emu chicks in the house...

Bunnies

Rodrigo and the boys built another Rabbit Ark for our pasture raised bunnies. The littles where very excited to go out for a visit. I was so glad to see this litter of bunnies go outside! Their mama was killed tragically when they were just 4 days old. So I brought them into the house and had to bottle feed them for the next 5 weeks. That was a lot of work! And bunnies are very cute, but 8 of them in my sewing room was a bit much.

Single white females in search of a friend

Late last spring before we sold our house we got a pair of dairy goats that were both already milking. I had milked them successfully all through the many showings of our home , the eventual sale of our home, moving to my parents house, and finally moving into our own new home.

At first I was worried about having the responsibility of having to milk the goats twice a day every day through all of the craziness that was our lives last year. I thought it might be too much for me to handle on top of everything else. But turns out that for the most part my fears were unfounded.  On the day we were actually moving from our old house and putting all of our belongings into storage I asked a good friend of mine to goat sit until we could get our selves and our stuff out of one place and into any other. As soon as we were installed in my parent's house, I ran to get my "girls" as fast as I could. 

Turns out I loved having them with me. No matter what was happening, the milking and goat chores got me out of the house for a minimum of 20 minutes twice each day. It was always so peaceful, the goats had adjusted completely and were quite happy to jump up onto the milk stand and be milked, without making a fuss. They were always affectionate and so happy to see me. I told Rodrigo several times during those tumultuous months that if possible I never wanted to be without goats on our homestead.  Emmett and Claire often joined me playing in the yard and toddling around under the giant old shade trees playing or standing close to me petting the goats and "helping" me milk them. 

October came and we moved into our own home and relocated the goats to a lovely large pasture here on our new land. As cooler weather arrived the goats came into heat for the first time. My goats, like most dairy goats, are seasonal breeders. That means they only come into heat for a few days each month for a few months each year and if they aren't bred then, we will have to wait an entire year for them to get pregnant and freshen again. (Give birth and come into milk again!) Without baby goats there is no milk...so we need baby goats! 

In order to get baby goats we needed one thing... a buck! We do not have a buck (male goat) and I did not want to own a buck! They are rumored to be bad tempered, stinky escape artists with precisely one thing on their minds! But without a buck, the plain fact is there will be no baby goats! I asked around and scouted every farm I passed in hopes of finding a good looking guy to visit my girls but a couple of months passed and I had no leads. So I did what any respectable newbie homesteader would do... I posted a personal ad on Craigslist! 

In my ad I described my goats (Nubian-Saanen crosses) and explained that I was searching for a healthy goat of an appropriate breed to do us a favor. ;-) Within a couple of hours a gentleman with a herd of full blooded Saanen goats contacted me via email and said he might be able to help. After a nice long informative phone call he gave me his address (turns out he lives just across the mountain in the same tiny town we had moved to) and I drove over to borrow Cooper.

Cooper was quite large and really, really stinky! He was not exactly bad tempered and while he never attempted to butt us, he did repeated ram the fence and break out/jump over while he was here. Mostly the escapes where to get out to eat the pretty bushes just on the other side of the fence, and thankfully he never wandered off of our land. He was also very easy to catch, we just called and shook a bit of grain so he could hear it rattling in the bottom of the bucket and he would come running. But I did find his enthusiasm a bit disconcerting. A very large goat, with very large pointy horns running full speed towards me made me slightly nervous. He honestly never tried anything rough towards me, and the children were all warned to stay away from him, just in case! Because of his escapes we invested in a strand of electric wire to circle the top of the fence around the goats' entire pasture area. After that he never tried to escape again. He stayed here rooming with my goats for a total of 5 weeks. We wanted to be sure that both of my goats did get a chance to get bred before we returned him home. 

And now we wait. If I managed to guess correctly when my goats were in heat then I think the first birth should be sometime in the very first week of April! It is very exciting! Both Daisy and Larkspur had one baby each last time, and it was the first birth for each of them. According to most other goat people I've spoken with, goats often have one baby their first time around and the second time they will often have twins or even triplets!!! I think both girls are already looking plumper, but it might just be their thick winter fur... after all they are only about a month or a month and a half pregnant right now. I'm not sure how soon goats start showing. I've got lots to read up on over the next couple months so I am ready when the time comes for them to give birth. I can't wait, I just hope they both are pregnant! We are undecided about what we are going to do with the babies right now. One of the doelings (assuming we have a doeling!) will be going to the man who lent us Copper, and for the others, we will just have to wait and see. If we have little bucks we will probably raise at least one for meat. The boys are talking about keeping a buckling to train as a cart goat. :-) 

Goat Cart image found here.

A bit of catching up...

Oh, Hello there! It's been such a long time since I've written in this space. My inbox has been filled with sweet emails from people checking in on us wanting to make sure everything was OK over the past couple of months. Thank you. We are OK, better than OK in fact.

 I've come here dozens of times to start this post and I always leave with the page as blank as when I arrived. I lay in bed at night thinking of all the things I want to write down here, funny things, sad things, accomplishments, utter failures, conversations overheard, things I want to remember and I want my kids to see sometime down the road. Somehow I never managed to come up with the perfect beginning, or the perfect pictures so I never put anything down. Well, I'm over that now! Here I am back, after nearly half a year, without perfect pictures or a perfect title or perfect beginning. But here, just the same.

I suppose I'll try to catch up on the happenings around these parts, since in my last couple of posts I told you all that we had finally sold our house on less than one acre, and were in the process of buying a new one on 4 acres. Specifically,  a gorgeous Victorian farmhouse with a turret!! It was exactly like the house I've always dreamed of living in. I was never one of those little girls who dreamed of what her wedding was going to be like, what kind of dress I'd wear, what my cake and flowers or even the groom might be like. No, none of those things ever occurred to me to dream about, but I have always wanted to live in a pretty old rambling farmhouse! I dreamed about high ceilings and glass door knobs, window pane glass wavy with age. Wood floors, and pretty wood trim everywhere. A wide front porch to hang a swing on so I could spend hours out there curled up with a good book.

The plan was, we were going to close on the house we were selling on August 16 and then on August 17 we were going to close on the farm house and start fixing it up and moving in that afternoon, even if it meant camping out on the property for a while! The second appraisal that was required before we could buy the house was delayed almost 2 weeks. And four (very!) short days before we had to be out of our old house the appraisal finally came back saying that the house while beautiful from the outside was nearly irreparable structurally. There where so many termites that you could push through the floors into the root cellar in many spots, (apparently all carefully concealed under furniture and rugs! The foundation was cracked and the house had shifted, and the well was contaminated and we would have to pay for a new municipal water line to be run... plus a myriad of other costly problems that have slipped from my mind right now. Many, many more problems than what we ourselves noticed originally. But the point was, there was no way we could buy that house. And we had to get out of the house we were selling in 4 days! So I was about to find out just how much "fun" being homeless, with 5 kids, 2 milk goats, 15+ rabbits, 2 dogs, frogs, geckos, a saltwater aquarium and a house full of stuff and no-where to put any of it, really was.

I packed up three changes of clothes for each of us and everything else but our mattress was put into a giant storage building, until we could find a new house and start the purchasing process over. We moved all of our animals and ourselves into my parents house. The first night there the 7 of us slept in their living room. My mom was sick upstairs and never even came out of her room to say hello. Rodrigo got up and went to work the next morning and left me with instructions to "find us a place to live!" We moved our mattress out of her living room floor and into her storage room floor. By piling boxes to the ceiling all around we had barely enough room to fit the mattress, and nothing else. We couldn't even walk on either side of the bed, we had to climb into it from the end. Claire's toddler bed was wedged in at the foot of our bed, and Emmett slept in our bed. The big boys slept in the living room on the floor and sofa.

After not having seen my mom one single time since we became "roomies", on the second day I finally went up to her bedroom to find out what in the world was going on! My dad had told me she was sick, but sheesh couldn't she at least say hello?! I mean, really!  Well, turns out she couldn't even get out of bed, I had never seen her that sick. I took her to the doctor and he said "urinary tract infection" gave her some antibiotics told her to drink cranberry juice and she would be fine. Only she didn't get better. Finally after days of this I took her to the emergency room and they figured out that her appendix had ruptured 13 days before and she was nearly dead! She ended up having emergency surgery and had to remain in the hospital for almost 2 weeks. After she came home it was a long road to recovery, but thankfully she is fully recovered now!

During this time we tired our poor realtor out, looking for a place to live. Finally we found something that was not my dream home, but it would work for us. Honestly, I really didn't like this house initially. Rodrigo and the big boys loved it, they kept talking about how roomy it was, how much potential the land had, and I only noticed it didn't have a turret. And there wasn't one single romantic, or lovely detail about it. It was just a house, a sturdy, well built, fine house, but just a house. But it did have good land and lovely woods out back, that would be our own woods and enough space for a big goat pasture, to have chickens, to have a huge garden and orchards and berry patches, and everything we really wanted, so I said yes. Plus the 2+ months of sleeping in the storage room floor with boxes lining both sides of our bed from floor to ceiling was a great motivator in buying another house...any house! For a while though I really did feel like I was mourning the loss of something I never had.

We spent a very long 9.7 weeks (68 days if you're counting, not that I was counting or anything) in that storage room in my mom's house, before we finally were able to close on this house and move in. However as difficult as it was not to have our own place, we were all very thankful to have a place to live during the transition time.

 We moved in this house in the end of October, the woods were just starting to turn and there were beautiful acorns dropping all over the place. There were busy little squirrels and toadstools everywhere. It was lovely.

I prayed a lot about my crummy attitude towards this house while we where in the process of buying it. It was not love at first sight, me and this house. We came out often and walked around the land and through the house while we were waiting for realtors and loan people to get all of their ducks in a row so we could finally move in. I asked God to help me see the good and the lovely, because this really seemed to be the house that He was pointing us towards. There were struggles along the way, but things kept working out and eventually in the end of October we were able to sign on this house and move in. 

By the time we had been here a week I was so happy that we had bought this house and not the other. It is a GOOD house for our family. We have been busy painting, fixing, re-wiring, fencing since we've moved in. We have made so many plans for our little "homestead" .

During the time in my parent's house I didn't do much at all in the way of creative crafty stuff. However since coming here I have been sewing, painting and making all sorts of lovely new things that I can't wait to share with you. 

P.S. The pictures in this post are mostly unrelated to the posting... but I simply could not have a post sans pictures now could I?

P.P.S. The pictures of the houses are related to this post! 

P.P.P.S If anyone has trouble seeing my blog at this new width would you mind letting me know either in the comments or via email? I am hoping it will make my pictures bigger and everything easier to see. I think I'm going to have to fiddle with it a bit more. My email is up there on the right. Thanks!