Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Have you ever felt this tired?

This past weekend was a busy one. It was so beautiful outside that we were able to get lots done.

Randen is a trooper. He takes any opportunity to take a nap when he is tired.



He fell asleep sitting straight up in the wagon while we walked to the corrals.

He slept in the wagon while we were at the corrals. He slept in the pickup while his mom and auntie got the pickup and panel trailer stuck.


He fell asleep while he was feeding with his dad. He slept in the tractor while everyone else worked on the house or dug waterline.


When he went to Grandma Linda's, he fell asleep while she and him were riding the 4-wheeler.

Does he like taking a nap in his comfy crib? Not really.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Thunder Chicken

This is the story of Thunder Chicken...

Zach was a 2nd grader at Johnstown Elementary. They were having a class project of incubating eggs. Each kid got to pick out an egg and write there name on it. If the egg hatched, they could take it home. Zach's ended up hatching (and living) so he took it home. His dad and he were brainstorming for a name and his dad suggested Thunder Chicken. Zach loved it and from then on she was known as Thunder Chicken Lanka.

At the time, they had no other chickens so TC was kept in a box until she got older. Zach was constantly playing with her and carrying her around. She became so tame that she started following them around just like a dog. One day Marla and Aaron went to town to do errands. They parked on Main Street and went into the Post Office. When they came out they saw a black hen pecking in the dirt underneath the pickup. It was Thunder Chicken!! She had rode all the way to town in the engine compartment. Not a feather was missing!

As soon as Thunder Chicken was grown up, Zach took her back to school for Show-and-Tell. (His was the only one that lived to be a pet). After showing her off to everyone, he put her back in the cardboard box. She clucked for the rest of the day and the other kids kept going over there to pet her. I'm sure his teacher was thrilled.

Zach and Aaron would take her fishing and she would try to eat a worm whole. She would cough and choke and fall over dramatically. Then eat another one and do the same thing. She would also eat any food scraps. One year she hatched five baby chicks and raised them.

There big debut came when Zach took Thunder Chicken to the County Fair. They enetered in the 4-H show competition at the fairgrounds. There was a big long table and everyone was supposed to put their chicken on it so the judge could start critiquing. Zach plopped TC down and she didn't move a muscle. She calmly sat there and clucked. The other chickens were trying to run away while there owners scambled to grab their feet and contain them. Zach and TC ended up winning the purple ribbon and a trophy (which is still at Zach's folk's house). The judge commented to Zach that he had been judging chickens for quite a few years and that TC was by far the nicest one he had encountered. Thunder Chicken's reward was a Snicker's bar that she had to share with Zach.

I wish I had the picture for you to see of Zach and Thunder Chicken. Imagine a freckle-faced little boy grinning from ear to ear with a big, fat, black chicken resting under his arm.


So I wasn't surprised when Zach brought home three baby chicks the other day and told me it was our new project.

I have to admit...they are pretty cute!



For now we are calling them Cluck, Chirp, and Cheep.

Their home is a box in our living room.

They do NOT quit chirping.

Could this be the next Thunder Chicken?

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Fun Mail

Day after day when I go to the mailbox I find bills and junk mail. Some days I don't even actually get my mail. Confession: Sometimes, I actually stop at the mailbox, look in, and if nothing looks interesting, I don't even make the effort to get the mail out! Pathetic huh?

However, there are those rare occassions in which something fun is in the mail. Like birthdays. Or just for no reason at all. I was recently the recipient of fun mail that wasn't for my birthday!
My sister-in-law is a paper-crafter extraordinaire. If you are into scrapbooking, stamping, or making cards, you HAVE to check out her site http://www.katieskiff.typepad.com/. She is pretty much an expert in this area. She sells product, creates kits, showcases stuff everyday on her blog, is on design teams, and also teaches classes. She recently sent me all the materials and instructions to create cards she did at her last class.
The contents of the package:
Some of my finished cards from her packet!
I also received a huge box of goodies from a friend in Missouri. Her name is Tracy, and I met her online over a year ago. She is such a great person and has been a very supportive friend. She is the mother of a sweet baby girl. When she heard I was expecting a girl, she sent us all of this:

Oodles of really cute baby clothes, a diaper bag, baby soap, sleepers, you name it!

I hope you get something fun in the mail this week!

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Snow and Mud

This past weekend, Matt and I went to Wishard's. We left home while it was warm, dry, and sunny. When we got to the north country, it was a different story. Chronic fog and more wet, melting snow made things quite interesting. I really don't know how many times Ris and Joe had been stuck the previous week. We continued to wrack up that count over the weekend.

This is what the front yard looks like.
One minute you could be stuck in the mud and then next minute you could be stuck in a drift.
Ris and I made plans to make it down to the cabin to get a bunch of work done. We got an early start. Joe decided to drive us down and leave us there as there was another pickup there for us to drive back. We should have seen the writing on the wall.
We slugged through the mud and turned to go East when we started hitting drifts. Joe had been over that road with the tractor the day before but it was drifted in again, despite the warm temps. He onioned through several drifts and we finally came to a standstill in a particularly heavy, wet drift.
It was too bad there was only one shovel in the pickup. He dug the whole thing out and chained up while Ris and I gossiped and drank 7-up in the pickup.
We got going again. Ris and I both agreed we would have turned around, but it had become a personal mission for Joe to get us down to the cabin. We hit increasingly bigger drifts before we finally became extremly high-centered on a huge drift. Luckily, Ris and I had predicted this and had called Matt 15 minutes before this to start heading down with the tractor. Matt made it down and cleared the rest of the road for us.
The road going south was muddy and snowy, but we made it to the cabin. Ris and I started priming and touching up on the mud for the next 5 hours while the guys headed back to the house to finish feeding.
When Ris and I left later in the day, the warmer temps had turned the muddy roads to a completely impassable obstacle course. But we gave it the old college try. Ris made several attempts to actually jump the pickup onto the road while I ran ahead on foot to open the gate so she wouldn't have to stop. Fast foward 5 minutes and the Dodge couldn't have been more stuck. We had packed food and water and cell phone chargers but no cell phones. So we took off walking as it was going to be hours before the guys came looking for us.
We took off for the main road. The mud on the road was deep so we jumped off the road. Ris became majorly stuck in the ditch. Snowy slush coming dangerously close to flowing over the tops of her mud knee-high mud boots. We got her out and trudged along. She practically had to carry this fat preggers half of the way. Our plan was to get to the main road and go to an empty house that is used in the summer by a neighbor. Our hopes were that A) the house was open and B) the phone was connected and C) we could actually get ahold of one of the guys. Lots of holes in that plan, but it was warm out and we were optimistic.
As we neared the main road (still another 8 miles from home) we saw a guy driving a Ranger with tracked out in the middle of nowhere. (An anomoly, as we would NEVER see anyone out there.) He seemed a little concerned why we were out there walking, but let us use his cell phone. Then he went on his merry way and we continued walking to the road. We finally stood by the road for about an hour until Joe showed up in the tractor. We were both getting cold by then and I wondered if I was having contractions, but Ris assured me that it was just because I was SERIOUSLY out of shape.
Joe had to pull the Dodge an entire mile with the tractor. When he got there, we all decided that was probably the last trip we were going to be making in the pickup on that road until the forth of July.
Ris and I were happy to get home and eat beer-butt chicken, watch Sex and the City and fantasize about living on a beach.




Sunday, March 14, 2010

Princess of the Single-Wide Trailer

Before Zach and I got married, I had a little house in town. It was decorated super cute and had a huge kitchen. It was girly and clean and I loved it! I had ALOT of stuff packed in there but it all had a place and fit perfectly.
Zach, on the other hand, lived in a 1980's single-wide trailer north of town. He and two other guys had been living there for the last four years so you can guess how clean and girly it was. It has about the same square footage as my house but less closet space and an extremely tiny kitchen.
When we got married, we thought we better move in together (as married couples do). Since we have horses it seemed practical to live at the trailer (the roommates have moved out) and keep my house as a rental.
The renter that I was hoping to get, told me on Tuesday that she wanted to move in on Saturday. Yay! But yikes as I had been putting off fully moving to the country until we actually had a renter. With the help of Matt and Lindsey, we did a whirlwind move job. Furniture and boxes got thrown haphazardously into the trailer...wherever it would fit.

Zach thinks we need to have a giant garage sale and maybe take a couple loads to the dump. I'm thinking we just need to get a really big house to fit it all!