Life Outside of the Kitchen

Even though it feels like we are spending all of our time indoors fixing the kitchen, we do still get to other areas of life.  Here are some snapshots from the last month that have taken place outside of the kitchen! :)

 Buttercup decided to lie down to chew her cud right in the middle of the children's play area.  It looked as if she was playing when we weren't looking and wore herself out.  Silly girl!

The kids worked to get our fence fixed up.  Ethan repaired places that needed work and then he sanded it some and then Molly, Miriam, Noah and Naomi gave it a fresh coat of paint and now it looks so nice and new!

I've been growing some Japanese Morning Glories for Baker Creek Seeds.  They are so very lovely.  They made gorgeous, brilliant blooms and had largish beautifully variegated leaves.

Steve bought this trellis for me to let them trail upwards and they were doing very well until Dolly decided they were oh, so tasty and she munched them all down to the ground level.  

Kezzy is hand-feeding one of her favorite young chickens.  This is a rooster named Velma.  We raised about 60 chicks this summer, most of them ended up being roosters.  After the weather cools we will butcher them and tuck them away in the freezer.

Several of my children are crazy chicken lovers.  They have chickens as pets and dote on them and the chickens seem to tolerate it if not enjoy it.

This was an odd sight one day.

 Kelwynne and Kezzy were crawling around in circles of the back deck, each with a chicken resting contentedly on their backs.  They were panting because the day was sunny and quite warm and it just added that extra touch to make it all look very odd.

  The roosters seemed to enjoy traveling in this manner and I don't know which I find more strange...that the chickens enjoyed it or that my daughters thought to try it!

 This year I've got 8 children that I'm home schooling.  It sure keeps me busy!  Kelwynne is very proud to be in Kindergarten and is thriving on "doing school" for real.  She loves it all!

My sweet, beautiful Keziah, enjoying the lovely summer day.  You are growing up all too quickly!

Samuel and I were giving Dolly some affection one day and Steve got the camera.  I'm usually the one behind the camera.  Dolly is getting so big!  She is half Angus and half Jersey and she has such a beefy look.  She is much larger than a Jersey calf.  She's about 500 lb. now at 6 months old.

Oh, Samuel, my boy, you are such a fun little man!  You steal my heart with your adorable dimply grins.

Kelwynne is absolutely taken by all of the chickens.  She is usually holding a chicken.  This one is  Mrs. Peabody.  I let everyone get dressed up, if they wanted to, for portraits on the first day of school.  Kelwynne, Kezzy and Naomi insisted on holding a chicken for their portraits.

 I find Naomi's to be the oddest.

Here are the official portraits.  Steve is going to make me photo ID cards for each of the children.
However, I was in a bit of a rush to get our first day off to a good start and so I didn't do such a good job really capturing their personalities.

 Emily, 11th grade

Ethan, 9th grade

Molly, 8th grade

 Miriam, 6th grade

Noah, 5th grade

Naomi, 3rd grade

Keziah, 2nd grade

Kelwynne, Kindergarten

Sweet little Fanny loves all the animals.  We have strange cats.  They all seem to enjoy being picked up and toted about in ways that I would think painful to them.  But when set down, they just rub on her and wait to be picked up again.  I think they view it as a massage.

There we go, Fanny, Dear.  That's a good way to hold a kitty.  And off she toddles, happy as a lark.

  However, her favorite animal in all the world is Dolly.

Dolly is 6 months old now and we had to wean her because Buttercup was holding up her cream for her baby.  We finally got tired of skim milk and had to separate them.  We have been keeping Dolly in the yard so that we can keep her use to people and help her to not be so skittish.  We keep a bucket of cattle cubes in the screened-in porch and she has learned quickly to come when called.  Stephanie could spend all day feeding snacks to Dolly!

Naomi and a chicken enjoying the shade.  I wonder if all chickens are so docile or if it is because ours are handled all the time?

While we've been too busy to keep up with things properly around the farm a possum took up residence in our barn and a raccoon also decided our chicken flock was rather tasty.   We lost over 50 of our chickens before we caught the possum and killed him and we haven't seen the raccoon again.  Since then we haven't lost a chicken but we are hoping to get our coop more predator tight after we get the kitchen taken care of.  Our smaller coop was too small to house all of our pullets so many of them roosted outside at night and were easy prey.

It is sad after having eggs a plenty for ourselves and for sharing to have to buy them from the store again.  But in a couple of months our new pullets will be laying and we have quite a few roosters to butcher for the freezer.  We are planning on getting some more hen chicks the end of October so that we can have eggs enough again.

Sammy and Daddy snuggling.  I especially like this picture.  Samuel gives such good hugs and kisses!

Steve gives pretty good kisses, too! ;)

I found some little paste bottles online and made the younger ones some homemade paste and they each have their own bottle.  My children all love to do cutting and pasting!

Kelwynne is making an alphabet book for her Kindergarten year and because it is such fun to do, Kezzy and Naomi decided to make one themselves along with her.

One of our favorite school subjects is Nature Study.  Ethan found this on a walk and we enjoyed sketching it and identifying it.  

One of my experiments this past year was to grow a rare, heirloom corn called Floriani Red Flint.  We turned and tilled a part of our hay field and planted the corn and watched it grow.  I've never grown corn before.  It is suppose to have a much higher nutritional profile than cornmeal from the store.  We tried some and it was so flavorful and delicious!

Fanny enjoying a ride in the wheelbarrow one evening.

Fanny is such a little doll!  She is just so cute, and such a happy little girl.

We spread sheets down in the living room and shucked the corn and popped the kernels off the cobs by hand.

(Pardon the untidy living room.  All the birthday decorations in the background are for the 5 birthdays we've celebrated since we began working on the kitchen.  Our kitchen cabinets and drawers are still all unloaded into boxes that are in our living room underneath a couple of camping tables that are functioning as my "counter tops" for now and all the furniture is pushed closer together due to all of Steve's tools left just outside the kitchen so he can pick up where he left off when he gets home from work.  We are still in "camping mode".)

Everyone helped shuck and pick off the corn.  I read aloud to them during much of the process.  We made a lot of headway in our literature reading since we had so much corn to work up.  We had a good yield and will enjoy freshly ground cornmeal throughout the winter.

This little guy was dubbed "Super Corny".   (I think everyone picked kernels for so long they were getting punchy!)

Fanny loves to hold Georgia.  She is a super gentle pullet that will just fall asleep in anyone's arms and they tote her about like a baby-doll.

Naomi is convinced this chicken loves to perch on her head while she walks around.  I'm always amazed that they don't get chicken poop on themselves!

My sweet little farm boy!  He loves nothing better than to put on his boots and go outside.  He has started to choose his own clothes and he'll tell me that he's putting on his chore clothes. Chores are a privilege around here and something to enjoy and he is more than ready to help with the barn chores.  Everyone loves going to the barn in the evenings and caring for the animals.

My, that fence looks nice! :)

For "recess" we've been picking up walnuts.  The children have all been such good workers.  Even Fanny has picked up buckets and buckets of walnuts on her own.  She has a diligent streak!  Mostly the younger ones pick up the walnuts while the older ones are busy working on the kitchen or during breaks in school for some fresh air and exercise.

Kezzy showing Mommy her walnut carrying abilities.  She's such a sweetheart!  She's proud to be one of the helpers and has picked up quite a few of the walnuts herself.  We keep our empty feedsacks and as they kids fill them up Steve loads up the van and takes them to Hammons Factory and the kids get paid .14 per pound for the hulled walnuts.

Dolly enjoying some scratchins from Kelwynne.  Dolly comes to the screened-in porch that has windows that look into our living room and moos to us to tell us she's lonely for attention.

The weather has turned and we are busy with getting things ready for winter.

This is our beef steer, T-Bone.  He's getting nice and big and delicious looking.  He has a pet chicken, too.  :)  Jenny, the hen, follows him all around his pasture.

Emily giving T-Bone a snack.  

This is one of the bottle bucklings we bought and raised this past spring.  They have been such sweet and gentle goats, very different from the does we got that had not been socialized with humans.  This little guy's name is Alonzo and he belongs to Naomi.

We de-worm our goats by giving them a daily "goat cracker".  We had the vet run a fecal on the goats and after giving me a lecture about "natural remedies" he then told me it must be working and to keep on giving our crackers to them.  I find it much more preferable to using the chemicals.  The goats go crazy for them!

Emily snuggling with Ping-Pong, one of the 25 cats we have.  We have yet to figure out the best way to control our cat population.  Every one of them has a name and they are all very tame and gentle.  One a few of them are true barn cats and live at the barn.  The rest are spoiled rotten and live on the back patio outside the kitchen door lounging around waiting for scraps.

Emily is a crazy cow lady.  She and Buttercup are developing a close relationship.  You can see how much Buttercup is enjoying her scratchings.

These are our 2 hogs we've been raising this summer.  They are not very friendly, nice animals this time around and therefore we never scratch their backs and tenderize the bacon.  Our other pigs were so tame and gentle and like pets.  These pigs just want food and will scream like orklings.  Their names are Piggy-Wiggy and Pinky-Winky and Noah takes care of them.  As soon as the weather turns cold enough we will butcher them on our own this time.  If we get to it, Ethan and Steve are planning on building a smokebox of sorts that will attach to his smoker grill and we can try smoking some bacon and hams.

Happy goats!  We were hoping the two bucks would breed our does and we would have kids in the spring with goat milk to drink, but we haven't noticed any mating behavior.

Emily playing with Buttercup.

Buttercup has been the perfect cow for us.

She is very gentle and patient even though she is a first time heifer and she has just enough smarts and mischievousness to her to make her a spunky challenge for Emily.  We had her AI'd in June but we haven't confirmed a pregnancy yet.  We had been dragging our feet on the thought of drawing blood from the underside of her tail.  We just found out we can send in a vial of her milk and have that tested so we hope to find out some good news soon.

We have not gotten around to integrating the first batch of chickens we raised this summer.  We will need to shut them all up in the coop for several days and hate to do that when the weather has been so warm and beautiful.  They still live in the love nest even though it won't hold them all.  Some of them roost on top...

...and some roost in the rose bush.

After the second batch gets a little older and are large enough to integrate and the weather turns colder we will shut all 3 flocks up in the big coop together and let them all get acquainted for a few days.

A lovely autumn sunset.

I know this was such a long post with so many pics.  I always get so long-winded.  It seems there is so much life happening so quickly and every day is so full.  It's hard to stop talking once I get going. :)