the pooches

Since I've already introduced our old Vizsla, Devon, I figured I may as well introduce the rest of the canine crew, so I took a few quick pics while we were out playing with them this afternoon.

This first picture is of J playing with our three Smooth Collies. They're the same breed as the "Lassie" type Rough Collie, just a different coat type (Smooth= short-haired = a lot less grooming!). From left to right is our 4 month old sable and white male pup, our 5 year old tri-colored female (and J's best buddy), and our 18 month old blue merle female. All three of these dogs are very closely related, from a good line of working Collies. These are the dogs that I personally am most vested in, and most of my training efforts are focused on them. They are not dissappointing me!

Here is the Collie that started it all for me. He's 10 1/2 years old now, and getting a bit long-in-the-tooth, so to speak, but he's a grand old dog. It's no wonder I fell in love with the breed after working with him. He's been retired for a couple of years now, and is more than happy to let the youngsters do the farm work. He spends most of the day lying on "his rock", a good vantage point from which to keep a watchful eye over the entire farm.

Here's my small diversion. This cute little thing is our 3 year old Shetland Sheepdog (Sheltie) girl. She's a pretty good little sheepdog, too. I don't spend as much time working with her as I probably should, but she still gets enough work to earn her a spot in the "fab four", as I refer to the 4 dogs I am currently actively training.

And here's Teak. He's a 4 year old smooth-coated Border Collie, from a truly outstanding working lineage. I really should place this dog, as I've decided not to work him -- the amount of effort versus the quality of what I'm getting in return on investing time in him isn't worth it for me right now. Maybe if I had less "stuff" going on in my life. He COULD be a really great working dog. But I just don't have the time or energy for him. However, he's a wonderfully tolerant, mellow house dog, and just great with the kids and the other dogs, so I've found it hard to part with him. I placed him once, but he came back after experiencing problems in his new home. He's a complex dog, not for everyone -- he's very protective of his property and family, and that's what got him in trouble in his other home. But I have to believe there is the perfect home for him out there somewhere. I just have to get to the point where I can bring myself to look for it.

egg hunt(s)

The only really unusual things about having so many Easter pictures to share is that, well, we're not a Christian family, so we don't really celebrate Easter! But both The Map Man and I were raised Christians, and of both of our families are Christian (we're the only heathens in the lot....), so sometimes it's just easier to go with the flow. And heck, what's not to like about hunting for brightly colored eggs and eating a lot of chocolate!

So here's a photo series of our weekend activities. On Saturday we had an egg hunt at The Map Man's parents' house (first photo) and a big dinner, which was very yummy.

Then we had an egg hunt at our house on Sunday morning (because that's what the kids were apparently expecting -- fortunately, I was prepared just in case!).








Then the kids ate a lot of chocolate for breakfast. Fortunately, nobody had to be taken to the hospital in a diabetic coma. It's amazing the quantity of chocolate a child can consume and still live....






And then we went up to my parents' for dinner, which was also very yummy. Mom had baskets for the kids loaded with candy and toys and treats and insanity.






And then we had another egg hunt, because you just can't collect enough plastic eggs on a freezing cold weekend in April.

barefoot in the chicken coop

We were out doing barn chores the other day. The way it usually works is that the kids basically keep themselves entertained while I work my butt off cleaning stalls, scooping poop, feeding critters, etc. There's a couple things they help me out with, but pretty much I just let them enjoy themselves (things get done quicker that way anyway!). Besides, there'll be plenty of time as they grow up to work THEIR butts off.

Anyway, this particular day was no different, other than it being pretty cold considering the fact that it's supposed to be spring. The mud was as deep as usual for this time of year, so the kids were in boots. And as usual, the kids were having a pretty good time chasing the chickens.

About those chickens -- Zoo Boy has long called them "Ghana Chickens" (taking a stab in the dark at how "Ghana" might be spelled, incidentally). I asked him at some point last year what made a chicken a"Ghana Chicken", and he explained that it was a chicken that liked to be chased. I doubted sincerely at the time that our chickens actually ENJOYED being chased, but I've since changed my mind -- if the kids decide to go climb trees rather than chase chickens, the chickens actually seek them out and roost up in the trees with them. So I guess they really ARE Ghana Chickens.

In any case, on this day, the chickens had the kids' full attention, so I left them to their fun and tended to my scooping duties in the pony pasture. I could hear their laughing and bits of conversation, mostly revolving around some aspect of chicken life. At some point I tossed a glance in their direction. That's when I noticed their boots were off. And their socks.

I read somewhere once that kids who are exposed to lots of germs when they are little are healthier than kids that live in obsessively clean, sterile environments. I always figured, if that's true, my kids are probably the healthiest kids on earth. It's a thought I clung to while trying to dismiss the feeling of slight nausea at the site of them barefoot in about the dirtiest place on the entire farm.

I kept my cool (being the totally cool country mom I am), and asked what made them take their boots off. The reason had something to do with a piece of hay inside that was tickling them. Which made me ponder what was more uncomfortable, a piece of hay in your boots or chicken poop between your toes? On a freezing cold day, no less.

I had them sit on a tire in the barnyard and went back to the chicken coop to retreive the boots. It was easy to find them, they were on the floor in the middle of the coop. But I couldn't seem to locate the socks. I looked inside the coop, I looked outside the coop, I dug around a bit in the hay, I couldn't find the socks. Just as I was about to ask the kids where they left them, I noticed a glimmer of white coming from the nest boxes. There was a white sock in each nest box, like some sort of weird, deflated, fuzzy eggs.

I wonder what those Ghana Chickens were thinking....

why can't we all just get along?

She looks so cute and innocent, doesn't she?

That's our new pony. Er, um, WAS our new pony. She left our farm yesterday, headed towards another new home. She's a really wonderful little horse, who really adored me and the kids, and really HATED (with a burning passion) our little Shetland Pony. She wasn't too fond of my mare, either, but then again, the feeling was obviously quite mutual, and my mare chose to just stay away -- far, far away -- from her. But the little guy just wouldn't take no for an answer, and insisted on trying to approach her at every opportunity. So we kept them seperated for the past month, hoping they'd work it out eventually. And he did his darndest to -- he was as cute as he can be (which is pretty amazingly cute). Yet her response was increasing aggitation -- she kicked at him (via the fence) at every opportunity. The final straw came when she put a hole through the side of her temporary shelter in the wee hours of the morning this past week. For her own safety, and that of our other ponies, we had to find her a new place to live.

Fortunately, our farrier (a person who trims horse feet for a living) had another client whose older gelding was in mourning over the loss of their pony this past winter. She was anxious to give our pony a good home with plenty of love, attention, and less annoying companionship than a pint-sized naive pony boy drooling over the fence at her.

We are all pretty broken-hearted, she's such an easy horse to love, and we all shed some tears over her leaving. Well, all except for my mare, who was doing the happy dance of victory as the horse trailer pulled away. If a horse could smile, her grin would have been ear to ear. I told her to keep smiling -- this means that she's going to have to suck it up and let the kids ride her.

happy birthday, old girl

Yesterday was our Devon's 15th birthday. Devon is a Vizsla -- a medium-sized hunting dog, of which we've had several. Prior to moving to our farm 11 years ago, this was the breed of dog that suited us best -- two youngish married folks with no kids and lots of time for hiking and hunting and otherwise spending time in the outdoors. We didn't start getting Collies until we got sheep. And we didn't start having kids for several more years.


15 is a pretty momentous age to reach for a dog -- most don't. So of course we had a party! We went to Devon's breeders house and celebrated with her brother (on the left) and sister (in the middle). Her brother is from the same litter as Devon, her sister is actually older, from the previous litter. (Devon is on the right in this photo.) These are the last of the siblings, the others have all passed away, though most lived to ripe old ages themselves.


Here are the cakes! The one in the upper left corner is a special dog cake that Devon's breeder made for the birthday pups. The other two were for the humans at the party (which, with the young dogs out playing in the yard, were vastly outnumbered by Vizslas, or Vizslak which is the proper Hungarian plural for Vizsla).



Devon thought the dog cake was just delicious. It was a big hit with all the canine party-goers.







After all that partying, there's nothing left to do but take a nap! Here Devon (in the back) and her sister share a bed.

lambing season

Actually, this is a little late for us, we usually lamb mid-February thru mid-March, but it was a weird winter. Other sheep farmers I've spoken to have said the same, nobody's having a particulary great lambing year. I had hoped the ewes that are lambing now would have been bred by our good brown ram, Hershey, but I can tell by the lambing dates (and the colors of the lambs!) that they were bred by our black clean-up ram Eko. (It's hard to keep a mature ram safely on the premesis, so we remove him once we know the ewes have been bred, then keep a ram lamb or two in with the ewes in case their breedings to the ram don't work, so we still get lambs, even if they're not of the genetics we prefer.)

The first photo is our 3 year old ewe Nilla and her day-old twin ram lambs, Gaius and Helo. We use a theme for naming our sheep each year -- the year Nilla was born it was flavors (Nilla is short for Vanilla). This year we're using names from the cable TV series Battlestar Galactica, which The Map Man and I are a bit obsessed with watching on DVD at the moment.

Two more of this year's lambs, twins out of our best ewe, Freckles. On the left is a ewe lamb named Kara, on the right is a ram lamb (who will become our new flock ram) Apollo. These babies were sired by Hershey, you can see how different they look from Nilla's lambs. They were born mid-February, and are about 6 weeks old in this photo.

Here's a soon-to-lamb 5 year old ewe named Buttercup. These are Katahdin sheep, which are a "hair breed" of sheep -- that means that they don't grow wool, but rather have a coat of hair like a deer. The breed was developed in Maine on Mount Katahdin (hence the name). We can tell that Buttercup is getting close to lambing by her very swollen udder and the way her back has "hollowed out" as her big pregnant belly has dropped in preparation for giving birth.

And finally, here are some of our yearlings (last year's lambs). All were sired by Hershey, so they are 1/2 siblings of Kara and Apollo (you can see the resemblence). Last year's theme was the TV series LOST, so we have Kate, Claire, Jack, Charlie, Sawyer, Sun and Anna Lucia. The two ram lambs we kept for clean-up breeding from last year were Eko and Jin, but they have since left our farm.

adversity

I wasn't sure that was the word I was looking for. So I went to my handy-dandy Random House Dictionary to look it up, and their definition of adversity is "adverse fortune or fate; a condition marked by misfortune, calamity".

Yup, that's the word I want!

Our lives this week were defintely marked by calamity. And since I have neither the desire nor the energy to move from this seat any time soon, I will write about it in detail, so that you too can share in the calamity. With illustrations, because somehow that makes it feel like the content is more blog-worthy. Even though, let's face it, I'll be lucky if anyone is still reading by the end....

The first photo is just my kids playing. Cute, eh? They were the cute part of the week, pretty much the ONLY cute part of the week. The non-adversity. Or would it be unadversity? How about cuteversity?

But anyway, about that adversity:

First, The Map Man (shown here during less traumatic times) got sick. With Pneumonia, of course, because if it was just a cold or the flu, it would totally suck, but it wouldn't be adversity. The stressful thing about Pneumonia is that it can kill you. So even though The Map Man wasn't anywhere near the verge of death (tho he probably felt like he was for a couple days there...), the POSSIBILITY of it turning into something much, much more dire loomed constantly, and made me order him to his sick bed for the week while I took care of all of the animal feeding and poop scooping and water hauling and stall mucking and chicken-coop cleaning and other big-burly-man-type jobs. (Mind you, in general I handle at least half of that stuff anyway, despite not being a big burly man, or even a big burly woman....)

Which would have been just fine, except then:

I threw my back out. Oh, I've got a history of back trouble in my lower back. But this wasn't in my lower back, it was in my mid-back. You know, just the place that carrying a bucket full of water puts a strain on. A brand new area to experience the sort of pain that only comes with messing with the spinal column.

Of course, I did this on the FIRST DAY that The Map Man took to his sick bed. Because if I'd waited until he was better, that would have been far less inconvenient and adverse and, what was that word? Oh yes. That would have contributed far less to the CALAMITY of the situation.

Things like this bring you to a quick tally of your friends. And then the sad discovery that, while I have many good friends, the ones that are the sorts of friends that would come over and haul 18 buckets of water out to my barn all live over an hour away (many of them STATES away) or have equally bad backs.

The second sad discovery was that, although the last time I hurt my back we talked PASSIONATELY and FREQUENTLY about replacing our old, worn-out sliding glass door that leads to the dog yard with something that works with a nob and a fraction of the effort to open and close, we never actually DID replace it.

Needless to say, I'm not really in any better shape today than I was 6 days ago when I first hurt my back, because I've been opening and closing that door dozens of times and hauling 18 buckets of water out to the barn daily.

Meanwhile, I still had those two cute kids from the first photo to look after and keep out of their father's hair, plus all of the household crap that generally has to be dealt with on a weekly basis (and which I normally can count on The Map Man to carry his share of). Oh yeah, and that pesky job thing, you know, the one where I take time away from my family for meager wages. Though it was fortunately a "lite" week on the work front for me. It still sucked.

Plus, to add a cherry to the top of this sundae-of-misery, we got bloodwork results back on our little Shetland Pony, which confirmed that he's as sick as we think he is. Which meant more visits from vets and other associated equine professionals, more bills (ugh), and more stress.

Needless to say, those cute kids didn't get much in the way of organized homeschooling this week. We were purely on survival mode around here. I think I actually let them eat potato chips and pretzels for lunch one day....

So maybe adversity wasn't really the word I was looking for. Maybe it was great-big-whine-fest. Or Pity Party. Or oh-woe-is-me-has-there-ever-been-a-more-pitiful-family.

Good news, I suppose, is that this week is bound to be better. Right? Right? RIGHT??!! Hello, is this thing on???