Muddy times

Guest post by Alexandra…

Our part of the world has been pretty dry this winter. Not much rain and not much snow, until last week. It rained for a day and a half and then snowed for an entire night. For what is called the high desert, 1 1/2 inches of rain and another 2 inches of snow on top of the mud is a big deal. We are in the middle of a 2 year long drought right now and so the moisture is greatly appreciated, –except first thing in the morning when it is feeding time.

Feeding the cows has become more of a chore than normal, and what normally takes 2 hours to do now takes 5. It’s not freezing at night and so we can’t feed with the pickup right now because even with chains all the way around the pickup can’t pull the feed wagon through the mud. Every morning we start a tractor, load the trailer and then hook the trailer to the tractor and haul the hay to the cows that way to pitch it off the them.

Yesterday, we buried the trailer to the frame in the mud.

So we unhooked the trailer, unloaded the hay off the wagon with the tractor, hooked the trailer back up, pulled the now empty trailer out of the mud, unhooked the tractor, loaded the hay back onto the trailer, hooked the tractor back up to the wagon, and started feeding from there. Any questions?




The 2 older boys don’t drive the tractor when the ground is so soft and feeding is more challenging, so Gus helped pitch hay instead. Tell thought he should be allowed to help when we stopped moving.




In a little more light hearted news, Tell loves the dogs and feeds them from his high chair whenever they are available to be fed. Today he reached a new level when he climbed onto the table and got the french toast that was waiting for Matthew’s breakfast and went in search of a dog to feed it to.

Blurry lines…

Guest post by Alexandra…

I don’t allow the cats on the beds or the couch. They get put outside if I catch them on said furniture. With the weather turning so cold, they have decided that this lesson is worth learning. They curl up on the boys little chairs, any clothes or blankets that have fallen onto the floor, but rarely (anymore) do I catch them any place they are not allowed.



What category does an open dresser drawer fall in?

Routines on the ranch

Guest post by Alexandra...

Gus and Brent are learning the days of the week and the months of the year. December and January are the beginning and the end and they have several important birthdays. February and March is when the cows are calving. April cows are going out on the mountain. May is branding season. June, July, and August are fun times since the tractors are all rolling with the hay season in full swing and the horses are always in with riding and moving cows constantly. September is more riding and weaning calves. October is spent checking and doctoring on any sick calves and then in November the calves get on the trucks for a ride to their new home. Then it is (My favorite time of year!) 2 or 3 weeks of slower time before we bring all the cows home off the mountain and start feeding them hay everyday.


Obviously life on a cattle ranch has a certain rhythm. We are feeding cows everyday now. One of the 2 older boys is enlisted every morning to help feed. Matthew needs a driver so the pickup doesn’t run off into the creek or through a fence while he is on the back pitching hay off. Oh, the arguments that we have every morning…. The rules are that boys must be dressed and have made an effort at making their bed before leaving the house. And the latest rule? No one is allowed to get up before 5am! We seriously had boys showing up in the middle of the night fully dressed and with a made bed, expecting that they should be able to go start feeding. Ugh. Matthew prefers to feed in the daylight.




We have a new addition to our family! Hold your seats everyone, its NOT what your thinking.  His name is Zeb and he’s about 4 months old, since we apparently just really love dogs around here. (Adrienne's note... I thinks this makes five dogs for them. It makes my little zoo with the dog and the stray rooster sound lame.)



I guess for that matter we probably love chickens, horses, cats, and cows too, but dogs just have a special place in our hearts –and our couch- around here. I mean really, how can you not just fall in love with something that can so exuberantly love, lick and chew on you all in the same 30 seconds?! –And then turn around and leave his mess on the floor and think you should scratch his belly for it? The first morning after we got Zeb, I opened the door to let him into the house and watched him go bounding over to the couch, that was loaded with 3 out of the 4 boys, and land right smack in the middle of them. That was funny, to watch that heap try to untangle themselves!

Facts of Life (by Alexandra)

  

Gus helped his dad ride through the weaned calves checking for sick ones yesterday. The boys have a pretty impressive understanding of how life goes. They have watched calves being born when it is calving season. All mother’s make milk for their babies, but during the weaning process they know that the calves no longer get milk from their mom and sometimes they get sick without the good stuff in her milk. Sometimes they get so sick that they die.

One of my chickens sat on eggs and even managed to hatch one of them. They chick made it 2 days before one of the cats ate it.

Tough stuff for little boys to understand, but they do amazingly well with it. It’s hard to shield them from much when our life is so surrounded by animals and the life and death of them. I've come to conclude that, while it's sad, it's good for them to experience. The knowledge that life leads to death, that people die too, that Jesus died so that their death isn't permanent... it all becomes an integral part of who they are and learning what we believe. Hard lessons, but important ones too.

A friend gave us another kitten. He got named Spike the 2nd. (If you remember back, the owl got Spike #1) Gus was outside building him a house on Saturday when he came running into the house crying. Almost to the point of hysteria, I finally was able to decipher what he was saying enough to figure out that it was something about my dog eating Spike that had him upset. I look out onto the porch to see Spike calmly sunbathing on the pillow he had been instructed to stay on.

“Pretty sure the dog ain’t eating your cat, honey.”

“Well she is eating something! It was all wet and gross!”

“Hmmm, lets go see…  Do you think that it could be?…”




Mystery solved. The kids watched for a few minutes and then went back to their cat house building.  There was a comment made at dinner to the effect of her “milk” being a lot bigger but that was about the extent of it. “When can we PLAY with them? They just sleep all the time right now!”

Around and around we go. It's a pretty incredible life in which to raise these sons of mine. They get to experience so much, to learn from real life, and to see so much firsthand. What a joy life is!!

Mornin’!

Gus is not my early riser out the bunch, so when he was the 1st one up the other day and it happened to be the day I tried to sleep in, he wasn’t impressed. I drug myself to the coffee pot at 6am to see him dancing to the radio in the living room. He stops, looks at me, and asks me why on earth was I still sleeping? “Its light out mom, and I hit you, and you still didn’t get up!” I never even knew he tried to wake me. Apparently I needed the extra sleep that morning…

We went to town yesterday for the county fair. We were all pretty excited for the change in pace. Matthew even got the day off from work. We got to hang out with friends, watch the horse races, the team branding, and the ranch doctoring. The best part? Nobody remembered to put pants on the baby.

Doing some yard work last, CT stops and asks me what I am doing. I informed him I was pulling weeds so my chokecherry tree might grow a little more. I stopped pulling weeds to look up at him and find him completely naked in anticipation of his nightly shower. And then I watched him pee on the tree I was weeding around.

Gus went to work with Matthew the other day. I woke him up at 5:30 and informed him his brothers horse was being saddled for him and get some jeans on. I shoved him out the door with a breakfast burrito in one hand and another for his papa in the other hand. He was thrilled.




Getting to go to work with papa and all the day workers makes up for having to get up in the dark. I suppose I can understand why.

Cats

We have barn cats. Very wild barn cats. The boys weren’t even sure what a cat was because they had never really seen one. So we got a couple cats. One of them disappeared 3 days after we brought him home. We think the owl that has been lusting after my chickens got him. We currently have Cat and Bob. In hindsight I should have pressed for different names. These names create a bit of confusion for little boys at the museum when looking at a bobcat….

Cat somehow seems to escape the majority of ‘loving’.

Bob, however, does not.

We even had to test out his swimming abilities! Poor Bob.

He’s mild mannered enough that this same night, he got snuck into the bathtub. At least the water was warm the 2nd time, I guess. I finally had to get after the boys and tell them they absolutely could NOT make him go swimming anymore.

 

Still, I don’t think that they have life all that bad.

There's a reason why the rhyme goes that way...

I made a birthday cake for a friend. She loves chocolate and is not a baker so what could be better than a homemade chocolate cake with chocolate icing for a chocolate loving friend? (If you are unsure still, there is a lot of chocolate in this cake.)

It was not a success.

I have made this cake, and many others, many times. I forgot to level the cake batter in the pans before I baked them. They weren’t level. My cake kept sliding off itself.

CT got on the table and took a handful out of each of the three cakes while they were cooling.

This cake needs to be refrigerated. It was almost 100 degrees at the park where I met my friend.

The cake melted.

My chocolate loving friend didn’t like the cake. Too much chocolate!
She sent it home with me.

I put it back in the fridge when we got home and as it cooled went to trying to prop it back up on itself with the icing as it slowly stiffened.

Then Brent decided he wanted a piece of the cake. When a 4 year old takes a triple layer cake out of the fridge, he does not grab it by the bottom base. I grabs it by the top where it is easiest to hold.


When I suggested that we throw it out and call it quits on the STUPID cake, he started crying, so heartbroken that he would be the last straw on the yummy, ugly, ahem, cake. I decided that since I had mopped in the last 24 hours it probably wouldn’t kill us. I put it back together again.




Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

and when it was all said and done they gave up and didn’t put him back together again!!!!

Oh, for dreams

 Edited by Adrienne to add: If you look at the title of this post and the post I posted yesterday... I laughed. We are sisters, after all!

This is what I found yesterday when I looked out the window.



Dreaming about the day when they will be able to bale hay on their own, I guess. Either that or it was the best entertainment they had for the day!

Gus hauled his first load of hay. He and Matthew were at a set of hay meadows about 15 miles away with a loader tractor and the pickup and flatbed trailer. Matthew was picking up bales and loading them on the flatbed and Gus drove the pickup and trailer around the field. –It was in 4 low and 1st gear though. All he had to do was steer it around following the tractor, and not take out any fences with the trailer. I wish I had pictures of that!

Strides

In one week (not this week, I don’t keep up well enough), one little boy went for his first solo ride on a 4-wheeler.


He also starting crawling.

A couple other little boys enjoyed our version of a swimming pool, aka an old stock trough.



Another little boy wasn’t so much into the swimming, but he thought the outfit was alright!


We started haying. Here they are getting a tractor ready to hook up to the baler. *Note the darn sheep that followed everyone to the shop?

Going to cut hay.



It’s a very full swather when the whole crew is helping.

Sheep.–On a cattle ranch…

We have free ranging sheep. We also have free ranging chickens, but they are another story for another day…



Back to the sheep. They started out as these 2 cute little leppy lambs that my two dear oldest boys named “Mr. Black” (the female, of course) and the other, after “What is that noise that he makes called?" "Yeah, lets just call him that if you are absolutely sure that we can’t have 2 sheep with the same name.” Alrighty then, “Baa” it is.

Mr. Black and Baa are a pair. A pair of troublemakers! The 3 older boys spend more time chasing the sheep out of my flower beds and off the porch…(Do you know what kind of a mess a sheep leaves on the porch for a 1 year old to run into with bare feet? Now that you have a clear mental picture of what I am talking about... you're welcome.) We have chased them out the house, – and not just “get out of the mud room, Mr. Black. You don’t belong here!” But “ What the*#!! is ‘Baa’ doing in my bedroom and in my bathroom!!!!!” “I don’t appreciate cleaning up… “


Okay, you all get the picture plenty well enough. We are now in the process of finding a new home for Mr. Black and Baa – one where they will be slightly more loved and have slightly better fencing! In the meantime though, we are desperately trying to hang on to our last frayed string of sanity… (Turns out that fencing for cattle and fencing for sheep have entirely different definitions.)

Redo

Let’s try that again…

And maybe there is hope for the day after all.

Going for a ride…

Matthew had a bull get in with the wrong bunch of cows yesterday, and had to run the horses in off the hill to get the bull situation taken care of. Since we had the horses in the corral, the boys talked us into going for a ride.



CT leading his (my) horse to the barn.



Good old Baldy. Her little boy is Brent. I apparently didn’t get a good picture of them together.



CT and Danielle



Gus and Hoot



And they're off!    



What a trio…