My Birthday

I had such a lovely day on my birthday. Since it was on the weekend hubby was home and that always makes the day extra special. My hubby and children treated me like a queen all day. Thank you to my family and friends for their gifts, phone calls and lovely emails :)

Hubby spoilt me.. he won a gift card to Best Buy from his work and he used it to buy me a new laptop. He also got me a laptop bag for my birthday, so now you know where I'm writing these posts from! LOL!

Our church had a function on Friday night and part of it was a Bake sale, and I bought my birthday cake there. It was made and decorated by our Pastor's wife. Talk about yummy!

All in all, a lovely day!

Soil... and lots of it!!!

On Friday we received our 15 ton delivery of topsoil. That is a LOT of topsoil.

We've added bunny poop to it and put it into our boxes. Whew, talk about a lot of work!

Over the last couple of days we've started planting out the boxes with out seedlings. Quite exciting to see everything going in :)

Mother's Day

I am fortunate enough to have not just one or even two wonderful women to say Happy Mother's Day to, but THREE of them.

My mama - my biological mother. A lovely lady who understands me like no other.

My mother-in-law - I am so fortunate to have such a wonderful MIL. She made me feel like part of her family from the very start and I love her and the rest of my DH's family as if they were my own blood relatives.

My USA mama - a precious lady who started out as a family friend of my DH's family. She quickly became just as dear to me as my other two mothers.

Each of these dear ladies holds a very special place in my heart and I am so blessed to have them as part of my life.

I was terribly spoiled by my family for Mother's Day. DH let me sleep late and woke me at 9 am with a cup of coffee. Once I was awake my children came in with hand made cards (my favorite kind!) and little gifts from each of them. My hubby gave me a new quilting rotary cutting mat that has all the quilt template shapes on it. It's a nice size for quilt cutting.

When I came downstairs the children had two lots of handpicked flowers waiting for me. Aren't they lovely? I especially like the simplicity of the first arrangement.

After a quick breakfast of fruit we left for the historic farm museum. I LOVE it there. There are two different homesteads there, the one is from the 1860's and the other from the 1890's. We usually start with the 1860's farm, but this time we decided to start with the 1890's farm. It has a fully functional Barn, Blacksmith Shop, Farm House, Coop, Garden and Fishing Dock.

After that we broke for lunch. We had a picnic in the park. Fishing sandwiches - yum!

After lunch we toured the 1860's farm, also fully functional. It consists of an Orchard with bee hives, Cow Paddock, Pig Pen, Cabin (tiny!), Barn, Root Cellar, Coop/Shed, Sheep Shed, four crop fields, School House and an Ice House.

It really is a wonderful place to spend a lovely day.

My DH always insists that I not do ANY work on Mother's Day, so I had the day off from everything. He and the children really treated me like a queen all day, it was wonderful and I feel truly blessed to have the family I have.

Chicken Coop

We spent the evenings of last week and this weekend building our new chicken coop. It's going to be quite a bit bigger than I first imagined!

We based it on some of the coops on http://www.backyardchickens.com/ using the 4 x 8 size to best utilize 4 x 8 plyboard pieces.


DH and DD13 hard at work.


View of the nest boxes.


My wonderful DH and beautiful DD13.


While we were outside I saw this bug carrying this huge worm. It appears to be some kind of flying ant, but much bigger than any ant I've ever seen, and it has huge pincers. It obviously had someplace very important to get this worm to, so I followed it.


And I was surprised to find that it was on its way to this hold in the ground. It pulled the worm in after it. If you know what this interesting bug is, please let me know!

Anyway! More about the coop.


Our little chicks are so big now! They spend days outside, either in their brooder or else in a little pen I have set up for them. We decided to see what two of them would think about their future living quarters.


Awwww... they're so cute.


LOL. DD13 peeking through the chicken entrance door.


And here is the back of it, as you can see we have it painted with the primer coat, and we have the roof on. The door on the back is for cleaning and "human" access to the coop.

It's not finished yet, this week we'll finish the painting (it will be green) and add the final touches. Once we have it moved to it's final home we'll add the outside pen.

Playing in the dirt :)

This is Colorado for you. This morning we woke up to sunny skies. By 12 pm it was snowing. By 1 pm the sun was out again and it was nice and warm. Today we planted out the cooler weather seedlings and also planted turnip, rutabaga and snap pea seeds. I LOVE the smell of that fresh, rich dirt, it's lovely. We also started more warmer weather seedlings. Mid May marks our approximate last freeze date.

We still have to clean out the rabbits and figure out a new chicken coop. Those chicks are HUGE now and not quite as cute as they were when we first got them, LOL. They'll need to go outside soon.

Speaking of dirt and chickens, while we were turning over the soil the kids were finding earthworms and feeding them to the chickens who thought they were in heaven! Funny biddies.

Where's my worm!?

On the moving to a homestead effort: We have saved up enough for a 20 to 30 % deposit on the property we're looking at in Missouri and have contacted a local bank to find out if we can qualify for a 2nd home loan so we can get started. We plan on buying the property and start paying it off while we're still here and DH has a great paying job. Exciting stuff!

Life is almost back to normal! :)

Well, our houseguests have left and our children really loved getting to know two of their cousins!

We were so lucky to have a really good snow the second day after they arrived, so the two boys could experience their first snowball fight, snowman, sledding, etc. Great fun!

Here is a group photo of the whole bunch of us. A lovely lady sent us money for a family outing so we all went to Amazing Jakes which was GREAT fun for everyone! The adults especially enjoyed the Go Karts, even "Ouma" rode once or twice :) Thank you my dear friend for treating our family, and being part of creating some very special memories!

Today was "Take Your Child To Work Day" so DD7 got to go this time much to her delight.

It was the first time she got to participate in this day, and she's still there with DH as I write this, and thoroughly enjoying herself!

At lunch time the rest of us drove out there and had lunch together at a buffet restaurant and then all the other children got to tour Daddy's work as well.

In taking the children to DH's work I again avoided any highways. I get ridiculously panicked when I have to drive on a highway/freeway. I don't know why, but I was glad to find out today that I'm not alone in this fear. Fear of road travel is called Hodophobia, but I'm more fearful of highways/freeways, especially either merging onto a highway or having other vehicles merge onto the highway in the lane I'm in... I can't even stand it when DH is driving and I have been known to close my eyes when there are lots of cars merging onto the highway (when DH is driving, not when I'm driving! LOL!) How to get over it? I don't know.

Anyway, enough of that. We had a lovely lunch and the children really enjoyed seeing where DH works, I think that's important for them to know and see.

Our garden is coming alive and all the bulbs that were here before we bought this house and coming up everywhere, it's so pretty! Here are a few photos from yesterday:

Well, that's all for now, I'm sure everyone is enjoying the return of Spring and getting those veggie gardens started!

We're having company for two weeks (arriving Tuesday!) so we've been super busy getting ready for them. I'm a little intimidated at the thought of having to cook for twelve people!

We've had a lot happening here too.... first off, nope that egg I posted about earlier was not a double yolk like we had hoped.. :(

However! Shimmer has been really amazing and laid us THREE double yolk eggs this past week! Here is a photo of one of them alongside a "regular" sized egg.

We were all very impressed with her, what a great hen!

These are all our eggs from last week. Our ladies have been laying beautifully, we're getting almost three eggs every day. You can see the three double yolk eggs on the left side of the box. It's quite interesting that each hen lays a distinctive color egg. Shimmer lays darker brown eggs than Henny Penny and Miss Pearl off course lays white eggs.

We saved all the eggs up and had "egg in a hole" for breakfast on Saturday morning. YUMMY!

Hmm... what do you suppose could be in this cute little box?

Awww!!!

We split an order with friends, and our part of the order was 13 RIR chicks. Somehow they snuck an extra chick in there, so we actually have 14 chicks! Aren't they cute?! They're currently in their little brooder cheeping happily. We'll only be keeping four of them as we only need 7 layers, the rest we'll sell when they're a little older.

That is all for now, I probably won't be posting much in the next two weeks.