Life With Full Hands: A little slice of life

My time is flying by! We have been busy with all sorts of things. Thankfully a lot of that is with *normal* everyday things. And, of course, some of it has not been...but I have been determined to live life as normally as possible. I still have a post planned on our newest bug situation, but for now I am waiting till we are in the clear. We are getting there! So that is the good news. The bad news is we are still not free and clear. One day, one day.

In the meantime I thought I would hop on here and share a bit that we've been up to. As we find ourselves a step closer to getting back to normal the girls and I have been having some discussion on the projects we would like to tackle around the house and outdoors. I find it very therapeutic to talk about such things! For example I am very excited to be getting new chickens. We got rid of our whole flock at the beginning of this bug situation. I found out that I really miss seeing those silly birds on a daily basis. They come running when you walk outside. They 'greet' us when we pull up form being out and about (really to see if we have any crumbs to throw to them). They just stroll around the property eating all sorts of bugs. Speaking of which, I realized that we may have a tick problem this year! Yikes. When we first moved to this house the kids would get ticks *daily*. I hated having to do tick check duty all day every day. Then we got chickens. Ahhhhh! No more tick problem. The ticks make their annual appearance around March 15, give or take 2 days (no, I'm very serious, it's always within a day or two of the 15th). It takes the chickens about two weeks until we don't see any ticks, but that is a whole lot better than doing tick checks for the WHOLE summer and fall! Needless to say our new chicks will not be big enough to get the ticks at the first sign of them. So we will be dealing with them for longer this year. Oh well.

On to the pictures:

The official One Year Old Birthday Cake! The girls made two cakes, this one and a round pink one.

Each of our children has taken part in the tradition of 'picking their fortune'. NO, we do not believe it to be true in any way shape or form, but it is fun to do, and make up stories about their future life. Merida chose the cross necklace...which means she is 'supposed' to end up as a nun, or in some ministry. Moira was our only child to pick up two of the objects at the same time! Ha, ha.

We let Merida feed herself her cake. Lets just say it was bath time after that!

Who needs a fork?

Some needed park time. I really try to make sure the kids get outside every day. This winter has been very wet, so we've had a few too many days inside. And let me tell you.....it shows!!! These little boys need to get OUT and RUN and JUMP and get rid of some of that energy that will inevitably be channeled in the wrong way if they stay inside :-)

Climbing up the spider web.

The girls spent half their outside park time playing with their Breyer horses.

At one point they snagged my camera to take pictures of their horses in the setting sun.

Feeding time. I take the evening feeding of the animals. Three of the girls do the morning feeding. They are responsible for their feed and water, that way, come evening all I have to do is drop their feed. After taking this picture I realized how much this animal feed is the equivalent to human boxed cereal. Sad, yes. How I wish money grew on trees!!

Merida LOVES the swing. She gets excited when she knows she is going outside.

Our dwindling hay stack. One of our big outside tasks coming up is to rake up all the spent hay to put in the compost pile. We have quite a big clean up day ahead of us. Lots of 'stuff' makes its way outside....never to make its way back in!

Aubrey asked me to take his picture.

This is part of a village that Flannery built. She had stables off to the other side, that didn't make it in the picture. It's amazing what they will do, or think of, when they get outside. One of their favorite things to do is play gypsies.