Greetings! I am sure you are thinking to yourself, "you are horrible at this". Many true bloggers would be quick to tell me I'll never get a following if I don't get more consistent, and you'd all be right. But let me back up to 2018 when I decided to STOP writing on the blog. What I purposefully left out of the short bits I wrote about last time was that we are not only building a farm here but we built a house. We built that house for 2 years. WE built the house. Brent designed it and we did all the general contractor work on it, while both working full time and raising two kids and living with my in laws, then a 2 bedroom apartment then with my mom for about 5 months. Phew! All in all we owned the land and were building a total of 3 years before we moved into the house. It was a lot. So much that I was caving under the pressure of building. I didn't do a garden last year, we lost all of our chickens to a predator and so we now have none and I didn't even care. I was consumed by the entire building process. AND in typical fashion for our family our son had a week long hospital stay for Meningitis then later that year I had surgery and needed to be in the hospital for 4 days, didn't heal well and ended up with a drainage tube for 5 weeks and our daughter, well she just kinda always has something pop up every 6 months that needs addressing. So LIFE sometimes slowed our process down and then sometimes it was the weather and a lot of times it was money. Cash flowing a house build is not like cash flowing a bathroom remodel. SO I told you all of that to tell you this, the reason I stopped writing was because I had to dig so very deep to come up with anything positive or good to even think I couldn't bring myself to write. And lets face it, no one really wants to hear a middle age woman complain about how stressed she is about a house build. That's not a pretty color on ANYONE.
So, you are moderately caught up on house stuff. We live here, we will never be done with the house because that is just not how we roll. We still are running from one project to another because there is ALWAYS something to be done or could be done on the farm or the house.
2020 Our new farm has changed a lot! We are now the proud owners of a Great Pyrenees
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| The night we brought Kahlua home! |
She is the absolute sweetest! She is a momma's girl and is nearly 6 months old now. She is true to her breed with being stubborn and challenging to train but she is getting better each day (I think).
We are currently in the process of transitioning her to being outdoors all the time. When we first got her we did not have anything for her to guard and she has bonded to us fairly well. Since then we have added 4 KuneKune pigs to the farm. 2 males and 2 females. She was not real sure what to make of them the first time she met them but now that she is getting older and so are they its getting better. One of our females, Ms Piggie, will allow Kahlua to climb on her and basically just mess with her and the pig just doesn't care. The other pigs don't always react this way the rest of them get away from her or scare her off. Well, except for Chris P. He is the runt of his litter of pigs and she knows it. She will go after him and he is still pretty small so he can't fend her off. Because of this we have her set up in a yard next to the pasture the pigs are in. They share a fence line and all 4 pigs will come and give her nose kisses through the fence. The goal is to get her older and Chris P bigger that way they can all be around one another. We shall see!
KuneKune pigs were introduced to us very briefly by the woman we bought Kahlua from. These funny little pigs are not a typical, commercial pig. They are referred to as domestic pigs and they GRAZE grass. Crazy, right? No slop buckets or muck to deal with, they eat grass. While the fields are down due to winter we feed them a grass protein feed but now that Spring has hit we can back down their feed because they are on pasture. This breed is very friendly and the girls love a belly rub. Also, they don't get as large as a typical commercial hog and they take much longer to mature. Which is why a "hog farmer" wouldn't really mess with this breed. The time it takes to get them to full size cuts down on the profit margin. Which is why from everything I've read this breed is more popular with the homesteaders and small family farms. So, we thought we'd give them a try! |
| The boys are smaller than the two girls however they are younger |
COVID 19 is here too. We are quarantined and doing school and work from home just like the vast majority of the country. The biggest difference is we are social distant the majority of our lives when we aren't at school or work. If anything its made taking care of the animals easier. I get up, before the sun, take care of everything with 4 legs and then get to work at the kitchen table around 7AM most days. Which is fine with me. I know many people are struggling, and its not all rainbows and sunshine here either, but tonight as I look back at how far we've come I'm trying to focus on that. I'm trying not to focus on all the what ifs and fears of the unknown. I've lived in those days and places before, I know how bad it is for me and my family to have me in that head space. So tonight I'm catching up, smiling when I think about our goofy looking pigs. I'm choosing to not get upset that Kahlua got away from me tonight and ran because she got a deer bone from the woods, I really should clean that up since she keep going back to it, and then we had to convince her to drop it and come to one of us as she ran roughly 8 acres. Tonight and tomorrow I'm going to choose to be happy at home not merely healthy at home, because this home that we are building can be frustrating and hard but mostly it is beautiful and fun and we laugh at ourselves more than anything else.
Hope everyone is staying calm and healthy during these weird times of virus and money uncertainties. Prayers for us all.
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