Rhubarb :)

A year ago today I posted this and today we made the same recipe for the first time this year. Though this time I doubled it and I remembered the sugar :) This time though J3, G and I had a nap while J, L, E and R harvested the rhubarb and washed it. When I got up from my nap I chopped it all up and we worked together to get the crisp all put together and in the oven :) I love having BIGGER kids :)

One of these gallon buckets made the bottom roaster full! 

The other two went into the fridge for more yummy crisp soon!! 

Hmm.. Now the big question is

Is this dessert tonight???

Or breakfast tomorrow???

Or BOTH :) 

Grandpa's Fish!

Ham and Bacon Update. A Piglet Story II

24 hours old.

Two weeks old.

Amazing what 2 weeks and all the milk they can drink can do!! 

And No they do not live in that tote :) They are living in the big tote in this post minus the heat lamp but added a 1 by 4 fence around the top :) as Bacon got out one day!! 

They just visit this tote when we clean out the big tote :) 

Peggy Sue

Is on the road once more :) 

Sows and Cubs

We went zipping by this sow bear and her 3 cubs the other day on the way home from the City. Papa swung around so we could get a better look. She had 2 black cubs and a brown cub. You can see the brown one in the middle of the picture. She is off to the right a bit. 

Here is a better picture of her but the cubs were all hiding in the top area there. 

Several weeks later I saw another black bear with 3 black cubs racing along a lake about 10 minutes drive from this area. Apparently some one else has seen a sow with 2 brown cubs and 1 black cub near this area too!! Must be a good year for black bears!! 

Ah... Hot Dog Roast :)

First some stick clean up. We had 8 six month old pigs in this pen for about a month and they did a fantastic job tilling in the leftover hay, flattening it out and pulling out sticks!! Papa spread some seed in there about a week before we moved them which is a super easy way to get some nice seeding done!! A little bit of raking around the edges and we have a nice flat seeded area! 

Tucker had a stick too.. but he really didn't think we should BURN it.. he'd rather chew on it :) 

Sitting back relaxing next to the house waiting for the fire to die down a bit so we could roast hotdogs. 

Ahh what a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon!! 

Grandpa And G

I took this quick picture the other day when Grandpa and Grandma stopped in for a quick visit. 

Proof.. G is making friends with Grandpa :) 

Funnily enough.. it was Grandpa who had enough of her... 

and I don't blame him one bit!! 

Turns out she had a skunk in her basement!! 

But the moment was had and swiftly enjoyed and now will be remembered :) 

Birthday Flowers

Yup I had another birthday :) 

I got spoiled too!!

Breakfast in bed, 

flowers,

cards from all the kids 

and Papa, 

ice cream cake with the house church,

and they sang Happy Birthday too!!

Peach and apple cake and timbits with my mom and sisters,

and their kids :) 

Amazingly enough the cup still looks almost like this on my counter right now, and it's been a while since my birthday :), Only the red flowers died so far so I'm really enjoying these flowers!!

Normally flowers see me and decided to die... just as easy as 1 2 3.. but these are still doing really well!! YAY!! When they do finally die I'll have a new cup to remember them by :) 

Surprises On The Front Porch :)

One day last week E came screaming into our room in a most excited manner and woke me up from my nap :) 

Daisy, our not so bright cat, had just lay down on the front porch and given birth to a kitten right before their very eyes. 

They had been on the porch setting up this surprise for me when it happened.

What great kids I have!! 

And Daisy?? Well she went on to have 3 more kittens in the old outdated carseat we kept on the dogs crate for the cats to sleep in. One was this little orange kitten who stole all our hearts. That night Papa moved the carseat, kittens and all, into the new house, we couldn't leave them where Tucker could get at them, and found out the next morning that Daisy had some sense after all and moved them out of harms way. Turns out Tuckers figured out how to get into the house. We were a bit worried as we couldn't find them and Daisy seemed to be around a bit too much to have just had kittens, but Saturday morning after chores Papa came bursting into the house to tell us that he saw Daisy go above the ceiling, on the insulation, of the house and he's pretty sure that's where she's hiding her kittens!! YAY!!! 

Some School Projects :)

L and E with their mosquito traps made from bottles, tape, yeast, sugar and water! 

(Thank you Pinterest! )

J's spaghetti bridge experiment .. 

J had to put pennies in the triangle paper piece and see how many pennies both spaghetti and fettuccine could hold without breaking and compare the two. Pretty neat!! He really enjoyed it! 

The bridge he designed himself! 

His birds nest out of newspapers, a pipe cleaner and toothpicks... It held an amazing 136 pennies!! 

Ham & Bacon & The 4 boys.

Home sweet home :)

The ladder holds up the heat lamp and makes a good place to store piggy bottles :)  

Getting bigger! They are both doing very well. Ham is still a lot bigger then Bacon but they are both growing. They love to dig around in the shavings and make nests to sleep in. I've mostly got them off the heat lamp for the daytime now. They will be a week old tonight. We are still bottle feeding them every hour or two during the day and they see us walk by and they get all excited :) Neither of them like to be held which is just fine with me. Papa and I want to put them in the chick barn when the chicks go out on grass and they'll be able to clean up the feed mess in there and stay warm and in one place :) Being so little without a mom to keep them in they could be a real problem to fence in so the barn is a good safe place for them until they get a bit bigger. But that's at least 2 weeks away and I have a feeling they will be in this tote until then! 

Our entrance is a busy place these days.. 

These 4 little male cats are Fluffs litter and will be 5 weeks old on Saturday! One fell off the wall where she had them Wednesday night and Papa got the rest off when he got home. They are very tame considering they've not really seen humans before and only hiss a little if you startle them. The kids pick them up and cuddle them and play with them and they are wonderful with them. Papa told me this morning he had at least one of them purring so that's a good start! 

The Pictures Really Say It All!!!

And just for the record I told J3 to get out of there. He HATES to be wet.. He wanted to be there... 

at first!! 

The rest of the kids had a BLAST!! 

Spring On The Farm!!

Laying hens got let loose, for the days, last week! They are doing their job of spring clean up and loving every minute of it!! 

G was having a blast playing with this toy. Big brother L was helping and hiding behind the stroller. 

The sandbox emptied itself this spring (water washed the sand out?? We think?) and the kids turn black if they play in the empty tire so they are playing beside it in some leftover sand. J3 loves the hat the girls got from our neighbor! 

Green leaves :) E wanted me to take a picture of 'all the pretty leaves!' 

So nice to see Green again after all that White!!

Nice to see you Spring :)

Or did we miss Spring and just hit summer?? With temps higher then we often see in July it felt a lot like August around here last week!! 

Ham and Bacon; A Piglet Story.

Saturday morning Papa and I were having a nice relaxing coffee in bed before a busy day and the phone rang. It was my uncle and he had a interesting quandary. Would we help him out?? I told him we'd talk about it and get back to him. Soon.. So we chatted about it for a minute and Papa gave me the go ahead.. I was a bit surprised I will tell you. I honestly didn't think he would say yes.

Turns out my uncles sow had a batch of piglets the night before and he was pretty sure she was not going to be able to keep up with them all. She had 15!! 14 lived and he wanted to give us the two runts to raise! I had a chiropractor appointment that morning so I got to go to town, have a wonderful lunch (you may have seen pictures on the fb page) all by myself and then visit with my folks a bit before heading out to pick them up. I had a great visit with my Aunt and Uncle and totally enjoyed seeing all their pigs before heading back to town with these two little piglets sleeping in a tote in the back of the car. They slept all the way to town and only woke up when I found the M family and dragged them, 2 parents/6 kids, to the car to see them :) Then I almost couldn't get out of the parking lot! People I haven't seen in years saw the piglet and I was swarmed :) The kids LOVED them!! Cousins K and RJ were out shopping with their grandma and got to see the piglet too!

It was a bit crazy in here when I brought them home later that day, but I did manage to get some pictures. L has Bacon and E has Ham. Bacon is quite small but makes up for it in attitude!! 

It's amazing how fast they grow! We got them on Saturday and they were less then 24 hours old. They slept most of Saturday, ate a LOT in the evening, slept all night, ate like crazy (4 times in about 3 hours!) on Sunday morning (we took them to church :) ), slept most of the afternoon, ate like crazy again Sunday night, slept all night and woke up starving this morning. All we really have to do to feed them is stick the bottle in the tote.. they fight over the bottles until they are both sucking and then they eat, switch, fight over the bottle again, and eat some more.. The whole feed takes less then 10 minutes and if you can keep them from fighting over the bottle too much or if they are really hungry you can feed them in about 5 minutes. 

The girls really love them and I often see E crooning over them. I named them Ham, the bigger one, and Bacon as a constant reminder that these pigs are just like our other pigs (except white) and will be food just like the others, no matter how much fun they are now! 

Today they will get a bigger tote and a bit of milk in a short container. Uncle Joe told me that, as early as next week, they could be eating out of a trough and not needing the bottle so much! That is fast!! I'll, hopefully :), keep you updated :) 

New Kid Pictures.

G at 18 months.

J3 at 2.5 years old.

R at 5 years old! 

E at 6.5 years old.

L at 8 years old.

J at 9 years old!!