Kids

I was determined to make it to church today. I heard Kleven get up at seven and a few minutes later, heard the tv downstairs turn on. I rolled out of bed about 20 minutes later.  I was going to shower and be dressed and ready for church before the other two boys got up. Instead of getting right intot he shower, I figured I might as well feed the animals first, so I didn't get my church clothes dirty. I headed out the back door and saw the goats come running from the far end of the pasture area. Even Eleanor was bookin it faster than I'd seen her run in weeks.  And then I saw it... the tell-tale bloody cord hanging out of her backside, swinging as she ran. "OH CRAP!" I immediately started screaming at her.  "OH ELEANOR!  NO! TELL ME YOU DIDN'T! NOT AGAIN!!!  WHERE IS IT?  WHERE DID YOU LEAVE IT!!!???"  I was in panic mode, since the last experience ended badly, I was fully prepared to find another dead baby goat in the pasture. I could see something about 50 yards away that looked like it could be, but was it? Right as I took my first running stride, I heard a noise from inside the shelter to my left...  "WHAT!?!?!" There in the corner, out of sight from almost anywhere, were two babies, and I could see both their faces. I ran over to them and one lifted its head.  I grabbed the other one hard around it's belly and gave it a shake.  It was clear they were both alive. I was instantly overcome with relief.  Then I apologized to Eleanor. 
I carried the new baby boy and his sister into the house.  They were crying pretty loud so I nuzzled my face deep into their necks and talked to them softly.  Baby goats smell SO fresh right after they're born. I recognized that familar smell from a couple weeks ago. Kleven heard us coming and his face lit up when he realized they weren't Princess' babies and he was kind of in shock, wondering where they'd come from.  It could have been a look of relief that I didn't make him watch the delivery this time around, since I'm pretty sure he's scarred from Princess' delivery. I plopped them down in his lap on the couch while I ran upstairs to get my phone. They look just like their mama! Creamy white with gorgeous, tan spots!  The little boy has an extra couple spots of a beautiful gray/brown.  They're already as big as their 2 1/2 week old friends.  So far, Eleanor has proven to be an excellent mama.  She'll even stop eating to let them nurse, instead of kicking them away.  If it weren't raining today, I'd be right out there with them.
We DID end up making it to church. After a meltdown on Kleven's part, and pulling in to the parking lot nearly an hour late, I realized Merrick's sippy cup was upside-down in his carseat, so I had to put everyone BACK in the car and drive home for some dry pants. We made it into the building right as our ward was exiting the chapel. I walked the two big boys to Primary and Merrick and I took out seat in the back of the Sunday School room.  He was being an ANGEL today.  Total fluke, I'm sure. Not more than 10 minutes into the lesson the door opened and I got pulled out to go help in a nursery class. I get asked to sub almost every week, but I'd never been in nursery before today, and I DON'T want to go back.  I feel bad for the teachers of that class.  They were there, but needed extra hands.  I soon found out why... There's a terror in there and I was scared of him after about five minutes. He only punched me in the face once, while holding a hard plastic troll doll, but he also pretended to be a shark and bite by shoulder and later, he smacked me with a toy stethoscope because I wouldn't let him listen to my heart. I wanted to lock him in the toy cabinet.  It was the only way to keep everyone safe.  If I were the nursery leader, he wouldn't be allowed in there without one of his parents. Or in a straight jacket.

One week down...

Four days til Chris is HOME! We get to have him for a couple days and then send him off again for a couple weeks.  It's crunch time! The Digital Signage Expo is this month, which means he's BUSY!
Being busy makes the days go by faster.  I learned this the past week, among other things.  I think I may have also found my personal limit. I realized "I cannot do it all."
I thought I was being so smart by taking on a few extra projects to keep me busy-you know, to make the days go by faster, and then quickly realized I was stupid for thinking I could do it all.
Sunday night I had a client deliver a dining room table and six chairs. They wanted them back in a week.
Monday was rainy and sunny in five minute increments and I couldn't strip the table down for fear it would swell or get wet. SO- I had a couple of my favorite people come over so we could work on a project for church. I was cutting the vinyl for a New Beginnings project. Easy enough. I made a trip to Home Depot for all the supplies I needed for the table and chairs.
Tuesday- I started stripping down the table- I used a belt sander and it was FUN! I also had my sis-in-law over to watch the boys and help around the house while I kept busy.  I spent a good part of the day working on the chairs and continuing to sand the table.
Wednesday- I was well on my way to getting all the chairs and table legs painted. Around 9:45, Ezra was bugging me for popcorn and because I was holding a wet paintbrush and anxious to finish the chairs, I let him have popcorn, which the microwave promptly burned and I ended up taking it out to the chickens. That's when I noticed our goat, Princess, was in the first stages of labor. I spent the rest of the afternoon being a goat midwife, delivering baby goats with one hand and holding my phone in the other so Chris could watch the action via video conference.  It was pretty amazing. I never did get back to the table and chairs, since I was up ALL night worried that the baby goats were freezing to death outside in the cold- and because I was sharing my bed with two snoring, teeth grinding, hacking-up-a-lung little boys. 
Thursday- Ezra stayed home from school with a fever. Kleven got a fever too.  I worked feverishly on the chairs. The antiquing process was taking longer than the paint job. Sis-in law saved me from insanity once again. We went to Olive Garden for Maylee and Skylar's b-day dinner, came home and I went right back to the garage to finish sanding the table.
Friday- Both boys home, both really sick.  I worked on the chairs between cutting Valentine vinyl and the lumber that went with it, and eventually got around to putting the first coat of stain on the table.  I was literally running up the stairs to the vinyl cutter and downto the table in the garage with a stain laden brush in my hand. The table looked awful. I used a pre-stain conditioner and it still wouldn't absorb evenly. It looked like tiger stripes.  I sent a panicked email to the owners and started praying HARD that I could get it to work and then cried.  That night, I loaded up the car and headed over to a Valentine craft party- the one I had cut all the wood and vinyl for. I went with wet hair and no makeup, after sending another email to the table owners that there was no chance I was letting them have their table the way it was.
Saturday- I was working on chairs as soon as the sun came up. Kleven asked me why I would choose to spend time on furniture and not with him.  I cried again. Then I told him that it was mom's work, and I was doing it to make money so we could do fun things. He asked if "fun things" involved the pet store, I assured him it did, and then he forgave me. I tried a second coat of stain. And then I went looking for matches, cuz I was gonna torch the whole dang table.
Sunday- Mom and Carson came and watched my sick boys so I could go to sacrament meeting at church. I needed that more than I thought I did. And when I got home, I worked on the chairs. Sunday night we went to my mom's for dinner and Maylee's b-day cake. I cried some more to my dad about the dang table.
Today's Monday.  After picking up kids from school, and running to a RS meeting, I'm continuing work on the table.  I need to go get more stain and we're running low on groceries. I'm sure it doesn't sound like it, but I'm grateful for the trials I've had this week.  I've learned that I really can't do it all, but that I CAN do a lot. I'm also grateful for a few fellow bloggers for getting me through this week.
If you're in need of some inspiration yourself, go read this:  www.jonesdesigncompany.com/feature/time/

We're Separating...

It's fun to see people's expressions when we use that phrase. :)  In about an hour from this very moment, we're walking out the door and dropping Chris off at the airport. We'll see him in a couple weeks, and then a couple times before JUNE.
He got a JOB! Which is GREAT!
But it's not here, so he has to go "There".
We're used to having him travel for work, but MOVING OUT is a whole different story.
I'm gearing up for a couple days of no change on the home front, and expecting some major meltdowns and tantrums to happen for a while after that.
It is what it is.
Kleven's excited to be the "Man of the House", but I'm sure he'll forget about that as soon as I tell him he can't have oreos for dinner or something else ridiculous.
Ezra's already been in a mood of sorts- I'm not looking forward to what he'll scheme up next.
Merrick is a handful. Anyone who attends church in our building on Sunday knows what I'm talking about. That's not going to change.
For some reason, Chris thinks I'm going to party it up when he leaves... I can't imagine why?
I'm going to have to start getting up before the SUN, to wake a sleeping monster, get him showered, dressed, fed and to school by 7:30... waking two more monsters nearly two hours earlier than what they're used to, just to throw them in the car for twenty minutes.
Once home, the remaining monsters will demand food and cartoons. And I'll give them food and cartoons in hopes that it keeps them occupied enough for me to sneak out the back door to feed and water the seven and a half goats and the 20+ chickens. I still don't have a game plan for the delivery of goat #8.. and maybe a #9.  I'm hoping and praying that she delivers without the need of my intervention. Or at least during nap time. :)
I was so spoiled.

Our Farm

During the summer of 2010, we decided, as a family, that some major changes needed to be made in our lives.  We had been "stuck" in an increasingly stressful {2+ year} loan modification process and things were NOT working out in our favor. It was time for us to get "back to basics".  We knew we wanted to become more self reliant.  We were willing to make whatever sacrifices we needed to make in order to spend less money, spend more quality time as a family, and make lasting memories for our children.
We called on every for rent/sale sign in our neighborhood hoping to stay in our same ward, but we never felt like any of the houses were "right".  It took a lot of patience and prayer, but we finally found a rental less than a mile down the street, and for some reason it didn't take much convincing on Chris' part to get me to go look at it. It was in a neighborhood we drove through on occasion, that made us both think that "one day" we would settle down in something similar- you know, the kind of place you live in for the rest of your life... where you grow old and your children grow up and out of...
On our first drive-by, I wasn't completely sold on the idea. It looked too big from the street, had an obnoxiously long driveway and after peeking through the fence, the yard was huge. Huge yard = LOTs of work. I took a picture of the house from the street and sent it to my mom with an "um...yeah, right" text. 
However, the rent was cheaper than our mortgage payment had been and the backyard was well equipped with a play set, horse fencing, a chicken coop, a built-in BBQ on a large patio, mature fruit trees, garden plots, and everything was on an auto-watering system.  The inside of the house was builder-basic, with blah tile floors, too-pink-of-a-beige paint job, toilets that are "testy", out-dated light fixtures, trim that needs re-caulking, a layout that makes furniture placement difficult, and overall felt like a home we could easily live in. :)
The owners had taken in an elderly parent or two and had to find a single level home that was more accessible and had tried to rent this one out for almost six months before we came along. They told us they had asked their friends and congregation at church to pray that they would find renters and that we had called the very next day.
Well, we moved in at the beginning of June and our first two goats, Snickers and Eleanor Rigby, both Nubian Boer crosses, were delivered that same weekend.  Eleanor came to us pregnant, but sadly, the baby didn't survive. It still makes me cry. Since then, we've added two Nigerian Dwarf wethers, Randy and Oreo, and three more girls- Princess, a female Nigerian Dwarf, Heaven- a purebred Nubian, and Kiwi- a Boer.
We made some improvements to the chicken coop and collected layers. Our five Rhode Island Reds came from craigslist, and the Three Stooges, aka, White Leghorns came from a family friend who rescued them from another family's Easter basket. Gertie, the yellow Bantam (Ezra's chicken) came over from Grandma's house where she was lonely.  The eight Amaracaunas came next. We have since added another 10 baby chicks from the feed store- four more White Leghorns, two rust colored Frizzles, a  Silver Wyandotte, two Barred Rocks and a Buff Orpington.  In addition to the chickens, we had three Guinea Hens. They were a little too noisy ( Chris hated them), so we just re-homed them, but they were so fun to watch and we would collect their polka-dotted feathers.
Three rabbits came home from the feed store early on. Fat Jack Ears, Francis, and Bean. Only Bean (Ezra's) survived the summer- yes, we let them burrow and supplied them with an endless amount of frozen water bottles, and warned the boys ahead of time that the heat might get to them. It was sad.
We've learned some valuable lessons on our "farm". Goats can get through chicken wire quite easily, they get nasty diarreah if they eat chicken feed, and they'll bite the buttons off your clothes-including the giant rhinestone buttons off your favorite jeans. Chickens will peck relentlessly at shiny toenail polish, lay their eggs wherever they darn well please, and every once in a while, find themselves in the car, on the way to school, because they hop over the fence using the garbage can near the back gate, and are wandering aimlessly around the driveway when mom is running late for carpool.
Our determination to plant a garden cost us the rental of a rototiller, and countless hours with the shovels and picks and even bare hands, scraping the sad excuse of a garden bed into furrows.... and nothing grew. So, add to the list of things we've learned: Replace your "dirt" with soil or use a raised bed instead.  We've been composting- with both a home-made system and my dad's "for real" set-up.  We keep a gallon-sized bag near the sink and toss all our egg shells and banana peels into it. Most everything green goes out the back door for the rabbit and when I clean out the fridge of unwanted leftovers, it all goes out to the chickens. I love that I don't feel like I'm throwing money away by throwing food away! We then clean out the animal cages and enclosures on a regular basis and throw the mounds of poop into the composters or into a pile in the garden that eventually gets worked into rotation. We are very much looking forward to planting again in February!
We also have pink grapefruit, lemon, peach, apricot and apple trees.  They aren't huge, but they certainly produce!  Things we learned here: Little boys think it's fun to have "wars" with anything easily launched- unripened fruit included. They also like to stab all the grapefruit with large bamboo sticks, and they think they're such good helpers by doing so! "Look! I can fit three on here!", and citrus trees have gnarly sharp thorns.
I'm pretty sure our boys are in Heaven here. They're learning to work and play hard, as are Chris and I, which is exactly what we were hoping for.

Did you miss me?

I'm hopping back on the blogging bandwagon and I'm hoping to achieve quite a few things on this ONE blog, so bear with me as I sort out the kinks.
It's been well over a year since I last posted and there is an ever-growing list of reasons for that, but I'm not ready to share them just yet and I'm afraid no one has the time to read about all of it anyway.
So, if you're reading this, thanks for not completely giving up on us. :)