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!! 

More Mystery Bird Pictures.

Patch Having Fun.

A Couple of G Pictures!

Reading books on my bed in the morning.

Playing outside before all the snow was gone.

Summer Has Arrived :) Sun Burn Anyone??

What a great day in the sunshine!!! 

Yup everyone of us had a 'bit of red' after our fun day in the sun on Saturday! 

I did oil them up with JenK's Burn and Rash Salve that night

 and the next morning we had 6 little brown faces :) 

I guess Spring decided to skip us this year and Summer moved right in :) 

We had great temps of 23 and 24C (mid 70'sF) for the last couple of days!! 

AND WE ARE LOVING IT!!!!