Playing Catch Up

Oh Mylanta. Is it summertime yet???  I seem to have so much to write about, but its random stuff, so I thought I'd just add pictures with little tid-bits of our happenings.

We HAVE been super busy, and Friday found me on the verge of tears all day. My feelings were very close to the surface. Anyway, Saturday morning I slept until 9, and this morning I slept until 9:30. I think I was just really tired and my fuel tank was on empty.

Tristen is officially done with his track season and Jacob will be after Thursday. Jacob seems a bit sad its almost over. He really has enjoyed his season and his coaches.   I, however, won't miss packing lunches. After a couple of weeks you just seem to run out of lunch box creativity.

We officially have survived another April of birthdays!! This above was Tristen's cake. Didn't our cute little cake maker do a fantastic job??? I told her that he was 12 and loved Monster Energy, and this was the result. She even made the frosting Monster flavored. It was a huge hit!!

And THIS girl is officially ready for college. And she will be playing basketball.  The very handsome guy behind her is my dad. ;)  I am so very proud of her and will be needing some new team t-shirts and probably new tires of my car, so I can go cheer her on.

My dwarf Hotot doe had a cute little singleton.  And I do mean CA-UTE!! He's spoiled rotten, and the bigger he got, the more excited  I got about showing him..until one day I noticed a spot behind one of his ears..a DQ. =( And it IS a little buck, which I don't need. So my heart is a little torn.  If he turns out to be nicer than his dad, I might keep him. I just don't know. Or I may just keep him anyway.  I DO know, that I am really enjoying him and this is the sweetest bunny we have ever had. Jacob has named him Buster. At any given time any one of us will be out in the barn snuggling with him. He's 2 weeks old and weighs a whopping 3oz. Aren't those little ears the cutest thing you've ever seen??

And we've really been enjoying the blooms in our yard the past few weeks. My friend Melanie told me she'd had a hummingbird at her house, so I put my feeder out a few days later. Was a good thing, because I had one the next day! =D AND..my Honeysuckle bush I planted year before last FINALLY bloomed. We had one if our yard when I was growing up, and I remember sleeping with the windows open and the smell blowing in. Delicious!!

We've gotten our garden MOSTLY planted. Still needing to get the Okra planted. I planted beets a few weeks ago and they either never..NONE OF THEM..came up, were washed away with the rain, or some animal REALLY loves young beets. They are ALL gone.  Good thing I didn't plant all seeds. I'll have to try again!

And I'll spare you the picture of this one. Tristen is really bummed-- his heifer, Black Out, has developed several patches of Ring Worm.  She looks pretty rough, and resembles something that came out of the ghetto.  We've been treating her like crazy, but it really stinks it had to pop up now, just in time for our county spring show.  *itch itch itch*  These things never happen it seems in the dead of winter when nothing is going on!  So he won't be participating at the show, but he sure wants to be there to watch it! =)

Hope everyone has a fantastic week!!!

Nanny's Roses

11 years ago, we were cleaning out my Grandmothers little apartment  right after she had passed away.  Her death had been long and sad and heartbreaking.

While packing boxes I heard  someone made a comment about hoping the new tenant enjoyed her rose bush and I immediately felt sadness.  It felt like I was leaving a piece of her behind.  She loved that rose bush and in the last few years of her life,  she couldn't get out much, but she'd always ask me if it was blooming when I came to visit.  Other times if I saw that it was, I'd pick one for her and she'd smile and bury her nose in it.

I couldn't just LEAVE it there. What if the new tenants didn't like roses? What if they let it die? What if they ripped it out and threw it away??? 

So, my auntie, my husband and I, armed with shovels and an axe,  took on the monster rose bush.  She cut it back, Danny dug and dug and dug  it out, cutting it loose from its carrot and garden hose thick roots.  We plopped it in a hole in our yard, covered it up and then went our separate ways to go clean up our scratches caused by mutated thorns.

"I'm not sure if it will live or not. We weren't very nice to it!" said my auntie. "But  with some TLC, it just might."

It did.

I watched that bush go through shock, until I was certain I was looking at dead sticks in the ground. Until the teeniest tiniest of leaves poked out.   Today, its a monster again.  And it makes me smile.

The first time I saw it bloom I was shocked. And thrilled. And sad. and excited.

Every spring since then, I watch for the first blooms, and a little tiny lady comes into my mind. A lady who cussed like a sailor, called me Princess, who could name and recite any verse in the bible at any given time,  who wouldn't DREAM of having Christmas eve dinner without Peanut Butter fudge, who sang Happy Birthday to me over the phone EVER year, and a lady who could never EVER get my children's name correct, (Jacob was called Joseph and Baby Tristen was little Christan.) but I never ever doubted her love for them. It was HIGHLY irritating as a new mom, but its one of my favorite memories of her now, and it always makes me smile.

I bet the roses are beautiful in Heaven!

Hello, BABIES

I just realized I never updated about our last round of babies.  Tristen is FINALLY a Dutch breeder!!

His Tort, Snickers, had 5 little fat babies.  She's been a wonderful momma, and they are plump and happy.

Any day now their eyes will open up! Its so funny to watch them when they start seeing the world.

His blue, Storm, also had 5 little blue babies.  They are beautiful.  She's been a good mom too, but is more protective than the other does.  If there are any hands in the box and she's immediately over, paws up on the lip, seeing what you are doing.   I waited to see just what she would do if I "over stayed" my welcome in the box yesterday, and she boxed my arm. ;)

 Twilight, a black, had 2 black babies, who are pretty fat and sassy too. Isn't her baby pictured above just adorable?

And this isn't a Dutch, but here's one of the four first Jagger babies. SO far, Jacob's been THRILLED with the color these guys have!!  Like bittersweet chocolate!!

So be watching for these little cuties on a show table near you..just as soon as they make weight! ;)

Yeowch!

Jacob's heifer, Charlie, tagged me this weekend.  She was eating, I was scratching her back, she kicked forward to scatter the flies and caught the side of my  knee.

Its a running joke in our house about mom and her bruising, but I was even a little shocked at the results a "thunk" in the knee did. 

I feel tough.

I HEART ROSES

The roses have just loved the rain we've had this year. And I've loved watching them bloom!! This bush has just exploded.

I have another bush that I transplanted from my grandmothers apartment when she passed away 11 years ago. Its LOADED with blooms and I'm patiently waiting for its show to start. 

I think I mentioned before that I  transplanted 3 bushes this year from the farm.  2 look about normal. All the leaves have died, but its staying green, so I'm hoping with TLC this year, next year they will take off. The other bush I planted never did wilt or die off  and it already has TONS of new growth on it.

I also had my first Poppies bloom this morning.  Have I mentioned I love spring??

Crazy Like A FOX

I've always loved where we live. We are in town, but yet on the edge of town, where we see lots of wildlife.

Last week around 4am, Danny and both shot up in bed. There was a weird noise outside. Its sounded like a chicken or large bird was being killed.  It kept squawking, and went up the road, fading out until we couldn't hear it anymore.
I had wanted to go out and see what it was, but Dan was warm and cozy in bed, and I sure as heck wasn't going to go out there alone.

The sound was a hot topic around here for the next couple of days, and Jacob made me promise if I heard it again, I'd wake him up.

Last night I was cozy in my bed, just starting to nod off, when I heard it again, and it sounded like it was right in the yard. I flew down the stairs, ran by the bathroom where Tristen was yelling: WHAT THE HECK IS THAT NOISE????

Ran to the living room where Jacob was coming out of his room, wide eyed and saying something like OhhhhhMyyyyyGosssshhhhhh...What ISSSSS that????

We sat quietly by the front door, not being able to located the sound that sounded SO close. Until...I saw a large yellow cat run across the road. With a big fat bushy tail.  Not a cat!! A FOX!!! We watched it run back across the road.

Apparently, denning season is from April to July.

These cat like canine will eat  insects, worms, crayfish and mollusks, small rodents like mice, wood rats, squirrels  as well as rabbits..oh great!!... fish, reptiles and birds. Now and then, vulnerable farm animals, such as chickens, ducks and lamb will be taken. While farmers used to routinely trap foxes, many now realize that the fox brings far more benefit in its constant predation on crop destroying rodents and insects, than the harm they cause in taking the occasional barnyard animal.

If you would like to hear what we've been hearing, here is a video. The Vixen Scream is what we've been listening to.

Twisted Weather

Saturday we spent the day at Hutchinson at the Salt City show.  We didn't end up winning anything big, but enjoyed seeing our friends.  The weather was a hot topic around the show.  We were expected to get some pretty wicked weather in our part of Kansas.  Our friend, Sandi, even had a little hand held weather radio, and had packed up everything and left as soon as they were done showing.

As we packed up, I wanted to go in and say good bye to everyone, but Dan insisted that we leave. My mom, who is a 911 dispatcher here at home, sent texts telling us to stay put, that weather was going to hit just as we were leaving town. Dan pulled the map up on his phone, determined he was pretty sure we would miss it and  stay  just ahead of it.

That is EXACTLY what we did. Literally staying just a minute ahead of a storm that caused some major damage.  Mom would send msgs like "golf ball sized hail in Arlington" as we could still see Arlington in our mirror. It was a massive dark wall that was chasing us, or so it felt like. I had had the boys gather up shirts and hoodies, just in case they needed to cover up their heads with something in if started hailing, but all we ran into was some rain.

Came home, unpacked.  Sandi texted me several times, making sure we had gotten home ok, and we chatted about the weather a bit. Went to bed, woke up, made coffee, turned on the news. Holy moly.  The town of Woodward, OK, an hour from us, had been hit. Death count this morning from there is 6 people, with 3 of those being children.  Wichita area had been hit too, and WHY OH WHY was the street they kept repeating on the news sounding so familiar to me?? Took me a little bit before I realized that was where Sandi and her family lived. Surely not, I kept thinking.

Turned on the computer, and tuned into the chatter on Facebook.  Sure enough. Its sad when you see damage from towns or places you know, but it is a whole new level of panic and sadness when its people you know and care about going through it.   They had gone to a shelter to ride out the storm, and had spent the night in a FEMA trailer.   Their house is a disaster, their rabbit barn was destroyed, but they are all ok, and Tyler only ended up only losing 3 bunnies.  The cages were all bent and smashed, and he found mommas with babies in the neighbors yard, so I am now pretty certain bunnies have guardian angels too!  If those bunnies could talk, I bet they would have some stories to tell.

Kansas weather isn't anything to mess around with.

Sometimes I forget that. =(