~Baby Food Days Are Here Again~

Carrots ready to freeze in ice cube trays. With little girls I use ice cube trays, with little boys I use yogurt containers :) My girls eat so much less then the boys. Baby G can eat two cubes if she's really hungry, J3 at this stage was eating 4!

I freeze them in the trays then pop them out and keep them in 1 gallon zip lock bags, refilling as needed. Soon I will only use these handy cubes for meals in a hurry or when we go out and about and I will use my baby food mill at the table at meal times for at home meals.

Food?? Really?? Baby G Takes a Taste :)

I'm a Happy Baby!! 

I'm a very happy baby!! 

First Bite.

Seriously?? THIS is what we were all excited about?

Are you sure Mom?? 

Hey MOM let go of my hands!! 

J can you believe she's not letting me grab the spoon??

THE GREEN LIGHT!!

Seriously! This stuff is NASTY!!

Well Mom seems to be encouraging me to eat it!! Maybe I'll have another bite.

Nope still nasty! MORE???

I AM SO DONE!!!

Just for the record it was well sweetened, nicely thinned, cream of wheat at the perfect temp!

J, R and E fought over who got to finish it off and they all assured me it was WONDERFUL!!

She's now had cream of wheat, carrots, oatmeal, watermelon and apple sauce. 

Thank You J for taking all the wonderful pictures :) 

The green light is the light on the front of the camera that comes on just before the picture is taken.

Baby G thinks the green light is evil. 

But she enjoys hamming up to the camera anyway. 

A Merry Night

The Food!!! 

Mr. B had been gone guiding and came home for a short few days to visit with his wife and he brought back a 15lbs salmon!!
The Friends
Mrs. B called us up and asked if Mr. B could make us supper.. 

OH YEAH!! 

Then she asked if they could bring Mr. B's younger brother Scott..
I had to think about that one :) . 

Scott's been off traveling the world for the last several months so we hadn't seen him for quite a while. 

He's my cousin you see.

The kids love him.

So I said yes :) 

No really Scott it was really nice to see you :) 

Finishing supper.. BBQ'd salmon, flayed by Scott, cooked by Papa and Mr. B, rice, corn on the cob, salad, with ice cream cake for dessert. YUM!!! A meal for a king!! 

J3 and his cheese ball grin :) 

What was left of the 15lbs salmon after roughly 30 minutes of feasting.. They sliced up lemons and onions and laid them on top of the fish. It was AMAZING!!!! Papa took this last piece to work and he said it was just as good the second day. Which is amazing for fish! 

The Fun!
After supper there was the usual sword fighting :) 

Apparently Scott and E were the two champs and here they are dueling it out.

E won!! Scott said she was amazing! 

This is not just mindless sword play.

 There are rules.

 If you are mortally wounded you die. (Often dramatically) 

When the last person is standing, you can come alive again and play again.

 Certain areas are off limits for attack. 

This picture pretty much sums up a night with Mr. B and Scott over.. or just Mr. and Mrs B. 

Fun Craziness

Baby G and Baby J :)

WOW there is a baby here!

And WHO is that over there??  :) 

They are 4 months apart :) 

Super Cute. 

E Reading :)

Bedtime stories :) 

L Reading :)

Something Is Wrong Here~ Meat Chickens~

Took this picture this morning.. these chicks are all the same age, on the same food, from the same place. 

Note the size difference? 

:$ 

We actually took the largest 50 out and have slowly caught 35 more of the bigger mediums and put them in with the large birds in a different pen on grass.. hoping that this will give the smaller birds a better chance. Which means we have 50 birds that are the size they should be.. out of 300. 

We took 35 of the mediums out which is roughly half of the mediums.. 

*Blasted hard to catch when you've been in there catching a few times*

So lets say mediums are roughly 80 birds? 

Which leaves us with 50+80=130. 

Which leaves us with  170 little birds... Little tiny birds that are weak and die easily. 

We are down to a total of 255.

We've never had birds like this before. EVER! 

The hatcheries email box is full,

 I wonder if they are getting a LOT of negative feedback this year?, 

so my message is not been able to go through..

But they will be hearing from us. SOON!! 

The Car.. Good bye Car~ Large Family Home School Thoughts.

A home schooled teenage boy who lives down the road came over last week and asked about our car out front. It's been there for several years and we were just going to get it taken away so we gave it to him. 

They had a bit of fun getting it going as one of the wheels had seized up. But they got it moving and the teenager drove it home. He said he wanted it for a project and we were quite glad to help him out! 

We knew there was a home schooled family down the road but we've not had any contact with them until that day. They also have 6 children, 3 natural and 3 adopted. I believe the boy who got the car is the oldest? or second oldest at 13. This brings the total of home schooled families, that we know, of with 6 kids up to 4 families, not including us, in our area. Though we are the only ones with six in such a short age gap. For instance one family's oldest is 16 and the youngest is 1. Where is our oldest is 8 and our youngest is 6 months. M's from church are the closest age gap as their oldest is 12 and their youngest is 3 months. :) 

Thinking of the age gap helps me understand how people with as many kids as we have still think 'wow that's a lot of kids' simply because we had ours so fast while their 6 kids are spaced out over more years.

A Fun Sunday! ~And A Picture of Me For Aunt Linda~

The wonderful Ladies we home church with :) Cindy, Me, Sarah, Christine, and Rachel.

Between these 5 ladies there are 19 children :) 

Three are missing.. Aubree and Deb and Colette. 

All the children in the church group number 23 and another on the way! 

We are standing on the trampoline! 

We all traveled out to Sarah and her family's new place in a nearby town to Church together 

and had a BLAST!! 

What a wonderful day.

I did not take my camera and I snagged this picture off FB for Aunt Linda. :) This was taken on the 10th Aunt Linda :) 

Wonderful friends, wonderful fellowship, wonderful food, wonderful games, wonderful time.

Some One Has Been Building...

With the toilet paper again :) 

I have a suspect :) 

This was actually there for several days.

Kinda neat hey?

Chicks Are Out And I Am NOT IMPRESSED!!!

All the kids gathered around to see the first meat chicks out of the barn!

Papa came home for lunch today to help me and the kids put the chicks out on grass.. the more I look at them the madder I am! ARG!! The last two years we've gone through a different hatchery because of the store hassle with our old hatchery and they kept sending us the wrong turkeys which we finally just stopped doing! I think we may just have to deal with the store next year! This year we ordered Cornish giant cockerels and got A LOT OF HENS!!! I mean come on people a few hens I can understand could slip by BUT OVER HALF OF OUR "COCKERELS" ARE HENS!!! And this momma is ticked right off!! 

It's not the feed.. it's the same feed we've been using for 6 of the last 7 years. It's not the temps as the weather was better then normal and they've been in a barn with a heat lamp since we got them.. until today at 6 weeks old when we put them outside. Normally we try and put them out at about 4 weeks but these chicks just would not have made it. They are healthy, we've only lost 10 of the 300 we ordered and one of them arrived dead! They are just small!! We've done everything, and more, then we normally do and these birds just don't seem to be growing. Some of them don't seem to be growing at all.. 

Baby G loves them! No matter what size they are! 

Two medium sized hens taking a look at the grass.. 

Group shot.. Some HUGE ones, right on track for their age, some TEENY TINY ones, and lots of medium sized birds. And LOTS AND LOTS OF HENS!!! 

They seem to be attached to the cardboard that was in the barn to keep them out of the corners so we left one in the pen for them. The white stuff in the dish is milk which we normally mix into the feed but now that they are outside they can start getting it in a dish. 

A close up for the hatchery.. Yes I've complained and emailed them.. I'm linking them to the blog in hopes that they'll do something about this..And to think we paid $20 extra for cockerels per 100 chicks..

and prices keep rising. I did mention this momma is MAD!!!

You want to hear the best part??

 Because of where we live we only have, that I know of, two hatcheries to choose from. 

At this rate we'll have 3lb birds and be happy they got that big 

by butchering time, at 12 weeks! and be out of chicken by January!! 

Time to spend some time on google I think.. and then on the phone.. 

Seriously hatcheries.. get it together!!! 

Look What I Can Do~ Baby G

6 1/2 months old and army crawling and now sitting alone!

Planting :)

The kids by our raised beds! We planted peas, carrots, strawberry starts, spinach, lettuce, potatoes and radishes. 

They were so excited to plant the potatoes all by themselves!! 

Great job!! 

Project 4x4!

Project 4X4 is pretty easy.. I actually did about half of it alone as Papa wasn't feeling too hot and he had a few other things that needed doing. So we did the outside ring of 4x4's together and then he set me up and I did the last inside row pretty much alone.. I guess now that I'm able to 'properly use a drill' I'm more helpful :) 

These 4x4 pieces of wood are 17 inches from outside edge to outside edge. The straw bales will sit on these 4x4's and become our outside and hallway walls. They are glued and screwed on and by the end of the day my back was informing me LOUDLY that the Tylenol bottle MUST BE OPENED!! 

We didn't get all the 4x4's done but before we can finish them we have to figure out where we want doors in the hallway. We did borrow Mr and Mrs. B's program to plan out the house and we now just have to figure out where the doors go! 

~The Chicken Leg~ Science

I found this cool experiment on Pintrest :) 

You take a chicken bone, soak it in vinegar for several days and see what happens..

It was VERY COOL!!!

The vinegar takes the calcium out of the bone and the results are cool and kinda fun to play with..

Try it.. it's easy!! 

I talked to the kids when we put the bone in the vinegar, told them what the vinegar should do to the bone and asked them what they thought would happen to the bone. We also had quite a nice chat on calcium and it's sources. 

J thought it would get softer.

L thought it would go skinnier.

E thought it would go fatter.

R thought it would get smaller.

Try it and see what did happen :) 

Great BIG FUN!!

This picture was taken May 17th 2012. Yes that is snow. 

This is our Before picture :) 

We started our GREAT BIG FUN project on 

 Saturday May 19th. 

A little mind boggling with all the pieces.. took us about 30 minutes working together to get it organized so we could find stuff! 

By the 21st we realized a tree or 4 would need to come out! 

Papa grabbed up his chain saw and started cutting.

Before too long the trees were down 

and a bunch of junk wood, trees down etc 

on the hill was all chopped up

 and the kids were piling it on the large burn pile on the other side of the driveway! 

On the 24th J got his knee stuck in between two of the boards and I had to rescue him with a power drill.

Of course I was a great mom and took a picture first. :) 

By the way I guess I'm getting better with a power drill... Papa complemented  me on it!!

And I used the same drill bits the whole project through! 

And the next day the swings were finished and in use.. 

They spent HOURS outside on the swings those first few days..

OH WAIT... they still do!! 

R fell out of the door way and cut a tiny cut right on her eyelid! It healed fast but sure looked terrible!

By the 29th it looked done!! But wasn't quite.. the slide was not tightened and the star bursts above the windows were not finished! I think it looks lonely in the picture, normally there are kids crawling all over it :) 

On the 30th Papa got all those pesty bolts tightened on the slide and found some wood to support the bottom and R was the very first one down the slide!! YAY!!! It's FINISHED!!! I'd put up the star bursts that afternoon :) 

Neat picture of E and R!! I love the fluid look of E and R's face!! 

Then it was a never ending flow of kids coming down the slide!

 They went so fast I almost got dizzy.

Macho Man here decided to put the 6x6's around the 'playground' while the kids went around and around and around enjoying their new slide! When the road bans are lifted we are getting a couple loads of sand to fill in the playground area and the 6x6's will hold it all together. 

Fun for the whole family!!