Friday, June 25, 2010

The First Two Eggs!

Gracie was thrilled to find our first two eggs inside the mobile chicken coop today! After 5 long months of caring for the chickens and waiting for the coop to be built we will now begin to finally enjoy the fruits of our labor! They are tiny pullet eggs right now (about half the size of a normal egg) but within just a few weeks we'll have full size eggs to eat and sell!

This egg scale belonged to our kids' Great-grandmother, Frieda Beckmann. The tiny egg is not even registering yet. (shown with the bottle of beer for comparison)
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Thursday, June 24, 2010

Luke and "Butler"

Luke is shown here with one of our roosters, "Butler". Amazingly, he can still catch him and Butler shows no aggression. In fact, after putting him down, Butler continues to follow Luke around.
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Nyla Nicole 11 Weeks

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Sunday, June 20, 2010

A Bittersweet Father's Day

While I celebrate today to honor the amazing father of my five beautiful children, my heart aches for my own father. So I pray.......

Lord, Your ways are higher than mine. How do You see this person? Show me the good things You see that I'm not seeing right now. Help me keep sight of Your heavenly and eternal perspective instead of my own earthly, limited ones.

God, give me insight into Your purposes so I can better cooperate with You in what You're doing in this relationship. Give me Your Spirit of wisdom and revelation so I can know You better through this and can relate to the situation from Your perspective.

Give me the confidence, God, that You work all things together for good for those who love You.  Help me to trust that You will bring good things out of this situation and restoration to the relationship.

Search my heart, Holy Spirit, and expose my sinful reactions to this hurt.  I repent of damaging attitudes such as bitterness and anger.

Father, let Your life-giving Spirit flow through me and wash away my anger and pain, replacing them with Your selfless love.  I remember the richness of Your kindness to me, Lord, as I am still a sinner.  Now help me to extend that same quality of mercy and kindness to another.

Father, I trust you to deal with this broken relationship.  I resist the desire to control, manipulate, or fix this situation. Instead, I choose to entrust it to You.  With Your help, I won't allow anger to remain in my heart, God.  I resist all efforts of the enemy to gain a foothold in my life through it.  Fill me with the fruit of Your Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness. 

God, if it is Your Will, please break down these dividing walls and build bridges of reconciliation. In Your Son's precious name I pray. Amen.                                                    

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Gracie and "Bill"

Sadly, Gracie's horse Shadow is too lame to ride this spring so this is her new horse "Billy", or "William" or "Welhelm", depending on which discipline she's riding! Bill is a versatile Western or English horse. He's a 12 year-old Paint with two blue eyes. Gracie also came home with two ribbons from the Colby Creek Hunter/Jumper show, a pretty impressive feat considering the competition and the fact that she's only had him about two weeks! Bill is a big boy and Gracie had her first "ground test" on him (fell off) this weekend. She swears the big bruise on her butt doesn't hurt a bit! Yeah...right.

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Gemma's New Pony

Gemma and her new 10 year-old POA (Pony Of The Americas) Pony, "Happy"! I think he's so ugly he's cute....but he's just her size and full of "GO"...but also has a good "WHOA". Gemma came home with two ribbons from the Hunter/Jumper show last weekend after only two weeks on Happy! Looks like they're going to make a great team!




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Nyla at 8 Weeks

I could not get her big gummy smile for anything! Guess I need to have the camera ready when I'm changing her diaper!



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Chickens In The Yard!

The girls are rangin' all over the place!

Relaxing At The Farm

With summer here, we spend alot of the time at the farm riding horses, playing with chickens, swimming in the lake etc....Grandma's couch is a welcoming place to rest out of the heat!

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Marshall???

Marshall with Grandpa's mud boots, fishing hat and newspaper reader (magnifying glass). The boots are taller than his inseam!
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Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Chicken Update!

So whatever happened with those chickens you ask??  Yes, with the birth of Nyla the chickens took a bit of a back seat, so here we are now with the flock at almost 16 weeks old!  We ended up brooding them in our basement until they were about 8 weeks and then moved the entire operation to the garage (got too stinky for the basement!) Scott and the kids built  a pen with high, cardboard walls to contain them until their new home was ready.  The "egg mobile", built by our friend Stefan Penas, was delivered to us in early May and we moved the chickens out to the farm on May 13. The egg mobile has been moving around the farm every 5-7 days since then and the chickens are thrilled to be foraging on pastures with real, live bugs! We should have eggs by the end of July so stayed tuned for news on that!  Let's get caught up with some photos.....
Gracie with the chickens in our garage!

The coop arrives at our house.

Gracie is checking out the inside. There are 8 nesting boxes and 4 roosts.

Gracie is sanding the windows (they are from the old hog house at the farm)

Windows get a fresh coat of white paint.

Coop is complete and ready to move to the farm!

Chickens are loaded and ready to leave. Check out those nice windows!
Egg Mobile arrives at the farm!

Chickens aren't too sure yet.

Luke helps some find their way outside. The rest quickly follow.