Category Archives: The Homestead

There’s no contest. No cat I’ve ever had will sit where I want it to, stay as long as I want it to, and get all excited, wag it’s tail and give me kisses every time I step away for five minutes and come back again.

If I were to let my cat up while I type, forget about my lap, she’d want to sit right on the top of the entire keyboard. There’s no way she’d lay nicely on my lap while I work on the keyboard.

A quick browse for the name “Patches” (our house cat’s name) through my photo gallery on flickr reminds me of how true that really is!

My husband, he has more patience then I, apparently.

Of course, he doesn’t do a whole lot of typing either…

And who, tell me WHO, could resist these absolutely adoring puppy dog eyes and not feel their heart melt at least a little bit?

Tuesday we picked up our new puppy, Teagan. I shared some photos here on the blog real quick the other day. He’s super cute, just one pound and a fiesty little bundle. It’s like having a newborn again. Ha! Late nights, and early mornings, (4:30 am, 3 am?? I haven’t been up that early in a LONG time). Well worth it though. 🙂

He’s like a little wind up toy when he gets going.

It’s not without it’s worry though, having a teeny tiny little puppy! The other night I woke up at 3 am to find the puppy MISSING! Ack. Not much will get the heart racing the way a missing 1 pound puppy will in the middle of the night! Thankfully we found him, but between our footboard and mattress at the end of the bed. NOT good!

I do have a laundry basket set up for him which I put him into at bedtime, and he actually does sleep in it pretty well, but he wakes up crying periodically through the night and… well… we co-slept with our babies so… it just makes sense of course, to co-sleep with our puppies. lol

Yeah, I know, you can call me crazy. It’s ok, I really don’t mind. I already know that about myself and I’m ok with it.

And there’s so much to be thankful for!

This weekend is Thanksgiving here in Canada. I’m honestly trying to make myself believe it. As far as my mind and body are concerned, they are quite certain it’s still summer time and no where near time to be thinking of turkey dinners! Although today’s rain is reminding me that yes, winter is near, the season I call Rain. And, here it is, Thanksgiving weekend! Just the other week we were out enjoying ocean, today it’s cool and VERY wet! Living near the ocean is one thing I’m certainly VERY thankful for, even if it does bring with it some unpredictable weather!

It seems like only a few short months ago that we celebrated last year’s Thanksgiving, yet so much has happened since then. Our five children have all grown a year older and all five are now in double digits. Our eldest has ‘officially’ become an adult and has an out of the home job that is pretty much full time. Our son has his career path set out before him and is growing into such a fine young man. Our ‘younger’ three are not so young anymore. I can no longer call them my ‘babies’! Elsa will be 13 in January, the twins will be 11 in less then two months. That’s something I’m not so thankful for. Ha! They simply keep growing up much too fast. The twins are the only ones still shorter then I! It truly is a blessing though to watch them all growing up, no matter how quickly it seems to be happening!

I’m so thankful for their health, and for my husband’s and my own. Thankful for 20 years with my best friend and lover. Thankful that both our sets of parents, our children’s grandparents, are all still around to share in our children’s lives.  Thankful for good friends and family. We’re not the type of family who has the most active of social lives but our life is what we’ve made it and we enjoy it. For that I am thankful. We enjoy our little ‘homestead’.

I’m also very thankful for Homestead Emporium and each one of you. You make it special, not just for me, but for my family too.

For that, I am VERY thankful!

Seriously!

ONE pound of pure joy.

Found on soulemama.com

{this moment} – A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. If you’re inspired to do the same, leave a link to your ‘moment’ in the comments for all to find and see.

I loved this idea, so I’m going to do the same, however, my own way. I can not often keep quiet about things I love so I’m going to share about my photo. 🙂

Last week when we went on vacation, it was just my husband and I, to celebrate our 20th Wedding Anniversary. We never had a ‘real’ honeymoon and we don’t often get away alone together. Never for more then 1 or 2 nights since our first was born over 19 years ago actually! So we thought this would be a good time to get away. Things have been SO crazy busy around here and even though I really couldn’t “afford” the time off both financially, and simply time-wise, it had to be done. So away we went for 3 days and 3 nights, all the way to… the ocean resort 5 mins away. LOL

That’s how we do things around here when you have a homestead with animals, five kids, two of whom work jobs outside the home, and you want to keep the costs budget friendly so you can go away relatively guilt free. 😉

However, despite the lack of long travel time to get to our destination, it was beautiful, relaxing, and a very enjoyable trip and this photo, this was our view during our time away.

I loved it.

I still love it.

I want to go back and run away from the busyness my life has been since I got home. I feel like I still haven’t caught up, exactly one week after coming home I’m STILL behind. I only went away THREE days, how can this be?

But I look at this photo, and I feel a little more calm. A little. Until I look away at the chaos that is my house at this moment. lol

It was fun while it lasted. 🙂

It’s been a very very busy day around here.

First off, my very nice husband was kind enough to get up in time to have our eldest daughter to work for her 7:30am shift. Phew. I may have been sleep driving if I had done it after the late nights I’ve been having. lol

I still managed to get up on time though, as a friend was going to be here by 8am with his excavator and bobcat to get some work done on our property. Now that we know we’re staying here there are SO many things we’ve put off and put off over the past five years because we always had to get things done that would look good for resale. Now it’s time to truly make this place ‘ours’.

First, he moved our manure/compost pile for us, including putting a whole bunch of it on top of the spot I’ve got marked out to become our great big garden next year. Yay! Finally! Can you believe I had a wonderful and fairly large garden while we were living in the city up till five years ago, yet since living on our five acres I’ve never had one? Of course it may have something to do with all the deer and rabbits we have around here, and the fence we’ll have to put up before I can actually start planting anything next spring… but we won’t ponder on that right now. For now, I have a beautiful spot for a garden with a ton (possibly quite literally) of horse manure/compost just waiting to be played in/with. lol

On a side note, if you’re an avid gardener and reading this, what’s your best tips for turning very highly acidic soil into soil that won’t burn your plants? We have lots of cedar trees, and the horse manure, and the acidity is much too high. I’ve got some ideas of what to do but would love to hear from anyone who has been there, done that!

Next on the list he moved a small retaining/rock wall for us and opened up the whole space behind our home. We cut down a tree and things are becoming much brighter back there! I was REALLY happy that the guys (hubby and son) knew what they were doing with the chainsaws when that tree came down. It was very close to the house! Kind of scary! The extra sunshine will be a good thing since it rains almost ALL winter. You want as much sunlight as possible when the sun does decide to shine through those winter months!

While our friend was working on these things, when 10am came along we zipped over to a neighbors house to pick up their one year old hens. They cull their flock, we do not. All our hens die of old age (or mink attack!) so this is the second year they’ve given us their ‘old’ hens. Our flock has now grown from 9 hens to 19, plus our 7 ducks. Our poultry ‘yard’ is looking pretty full! And then of course our 11 chicks are also getting pretty darn big! They reside separately from the hens though.

Oh, and that was another thing I had to take care of this morning. Up until today, we had the 11 chicks in a large guinea pig/rabbit cage but they were getting too big for it so we moved them to a kiddie pool inside a super large cardboard box to give them more space. I’m really hoping they don’t grow out of this next. lol

So by this time it was about 10:30, the new hens were ‘meeting’ our other hens and ducks. The chicks were all content in their clean (not for long, all they do is eat and poop!) new residence. Everyone was happy. Well as happy as hens can be when you put a whole bunch of ‘strangers’ into their pen. lol

After my part was done, I finally had my first coffee at noon and only had a third of it down by the time I had to go pick up Alesia from work. If you know me, you know this is big. I NEED coffee and I NEED it before anything else in the mornings. lol So I went and picked up Alesia, and then came home and answered some biz emails, did some printing and more packaging, all the while checking on things when ever called to offer my point of view on how things were shaping up outside.

When I had picked Alesia up from work she asked if she could PLEASE make homemade lasagna for dinner? She was craving it. How could I say no to that?! LOL What a relief, I hadn’t even yet thought about what we’d eat for dinner today! Like I’d say no to the offer of not just dinner being cooked, but HOMEMADE lasagna being cooked?! Yum! I’d have to be crazy! It turned out VERY tasty!

To top it all off, after dinner she made an apple crisp for dessert!

Mind you, I didn’t get to actually eat the dessert until midnight when I finally came in from the sewing studio, but it was just as tasty at midnight as it would have been fresh from the oven! lol

And now it’s 1am, my dessert is done and it’s time to get to bed!

Until next time! 🙂

Meet our newest pet.

This is Shaylah’s budgie/parakeet, Stevie.
She’s been saving all her cotton ball funds for quite a while now to buy a cage, food, toys, and at long last, an actual budgie! She’s always LOVED birds (well she likes LOTS of animals, but birds are one of her favorites lol) and has rescued many a little wild bird. We’ve had a lot of finches she’s tried to save this year because we had stronger winds then usual in the beginning of the year and it seemed these little Pine Siskin finches kept being blown out of the air. Each time we’d find one on the ground and she’d try to keep it safe and strengthen it, only to have it die anyways. 🙁 She’d be so sad each time.

Finally we decided it was time for her to just get a domesticated bird. A couple of weeks ago Elsa and Julia went camping with their grandparents (Shaylah’s a REAL homebody like her mama, and doesn’t care to leave too often lol), so hubby and I took Shaylah shopping by herself and she picked out her new pet.

I’ve had budgies myself in the past, but this one tops them all! We’ve had him for less then three weeks and already he’s completely tame. He sits on our fingers, shoulders, heads (lol) and has SO much character. Shaylah is hoping to teach him to talk and has been watching all sorts of help vids on youtube.com in hopes of success!

He seems very healthy and happy too, so I hope that means he’ll have a nice long life with Shaylah! 🙂

I thought I’d share a peek into a typical day here at the Homestead.

First off, one should know we are not early morning people. You would think with all our animals that we would be, but they are all accustomed to the feeding schedules we have in place for them all that requires us to not be up ‘too’ early. lol I am a night owl and with homeschooling, it seems our children have inherited this trait. It’s always worked out fairly well for us. We don’t sleep in super late, but you won’t often see us up before 8 am, unless it’s because of a work schedule etc. as this past Monday, when I had to be up at 5:20 to get my eldest daughter to work before 6 am. Yikes. lol I saw the sunrise, well, I would have if it hadn’t been so dreary out. lol

Anywho, today was a typical day around here so I thought I’d share.

First off, I woke up and most mornings I usually spend some quiet time in bed reading for a few moments each morning and mentally going over what I need to do that day. During this time the kids wake up and one of my daughters (usually Alesia or Julia) will bring me a cup of coffee after they’ve gotten up and at it.

Animal chores are done first, right now there are 5 horses to feed and Alesia (19), Joshua (almost 17) and Julia (10.5) usually do the morning feeding. Elsa (12.5) and Shaylah (10.5) will let out the hens and ducks, check for eggs, clean out the water dishes and check on their feed. We have 9 hens, 3 muscovy ducks and 4 khaki campbell ducks. The muscovy’s lay eggs, but the other 4 ducks are still young and do not. We’re not quite sure yet if they are boys or girls. Sadly, I think three are boys and this may mean they’ll fight come spring. Right now we’ll do more research and then kind of ‘wait and see’.

Then there are 2 rabbits to be fed, one is Shaylah’s, a typical rabbit named Bugs and the other is Julia’s and is a German Lop who’s about 12 or 14 pounds (VERY BIG) named Snowball (he’s all white!). Right now we also have 11 chicks to be checked on, fresh water given to and feed checked.
At the same time, they usually throw out some scraps and/or hen scratch for all the hens and ducks. They love this and come running to the fence when they hear someone coming in hopes of goodies. Free range is a big thing right now, but we have all sorts of large birds around here such as eagles, hawks, owls and even vultures. We also have minks and racoons so we don’t dare allow our birds to range free. Instead they have a nice big run with a net covering over it, and a good sized hen house. Some times we’ll let them out if we’re going to be right close enough that no animal would dare come by but for the most part they stay in their run.

While chores were being finished up and breakfast eaten, I checked on some emails and did some work online. At 10:30 I took my eldest daughter to work, came back home and said goodbye to my hubby and son who were on their way out the door to go stain a deck they were working on.

Once back home Julia helped me make a healthy smoothie before we began school.

Frozen fruits, yogurt, milk, ground flax, omega oils, honey, real vanilla and usually some frozen spinach but I didn’t have any this morning.

Yum! The really big cup is Julia’s, she LOVES her smoothy which is why she always helps me make them. The other two, not so much. Elsa likes the taste but hates the strawberry seeds (she says they feel like she’s drinking bugs, one day I’ll share some more about that lol) and Shaylah would simply prefer to just eat the fruit rather then drink it. lol So those two have smaller cups. 😉

We sat down at the table to tackle our school for the day. Today we worked on math, reading, writing, and spelling.

We don’t usually cover every subject, every day. I think that’s pretty normal?

And yes, my table usually looks pretty much like that when we do school every day. Since we just have the one table in our home, it does get cleaned up after school but during school, it’s pretty much a mess.

It doesn’t seem to distract them from their work though. 😉

This little thing however, DOES try to distract us ALL from our work.

This is Jasper, begging me to let him up on my lap while we’re doing school. Sorry Jasper, not right now! lol

I shared on our first day of school that it didn’t go so well. Well the last couple of days have gone much better.

Call me a bad mom, but I’m using bribery now with my most difficult learner. Joshua (ds) has an xbox that the girls LOVE to play with when they get the chance. I decided to bribe this difficult learner with the privilege of playing on the xbox once school and chores are done “IF” there is no arguing with me. Oh my… why didn’t I think of it sooner? She’s SO into games, this has worked out perfectly! I hope it sticks because schooling her is SO different when she has a reason to co-operate rather then fight me! lol Makes things much more enjoyable for everyone. All three of them even scored 100% on their spelling tests today! 🙂

Once school was complete we put everything away, Elsa took Jasper outside for a quick walk on the property and checked on the chicks. A couple of them are not doing so well, they each have bruised a leg, not sure if it happened in their travels or what? Hopefully they’ll be ok. And yes, I’ve been skirting the topic, these chicks are meat birds. And yes, it is difficult to raise cute little chicks knowing they will not be pets, but, this is one of the big reasons we wanted a homestead, to be more self sufficient and to know what we are feeding our family, and because of that, this is a fact of our lives.

Soon it was time to feed the horses again, this time Julia and I went out and fed the hay. This was the biggest reason for us wanting to move to more land. Our land here can not provide grazing for our horses so we have to feed them hay three times a day and then grain twice a day. I used to dream of big rolling pastures and the horses running through the fields of hay. LOL But I know we’re blessed to even have horses, so even though the dream is no longer, I still have a dream come true in having horses. 🙂 There was a time I thought that would NEVER be possible!

Once we were done tossing some hay to the horse, it was time to get out to the cabin/studio to do some work!
Today I needed to snap photos of some products for an upcoming ‘guest spot’ at another shop before the sun shifted and my good light would be gone.

While I worked on these, the girls cut out some cotton balls. Then it was time to sew. While I did the sewing, they played on the xbox as promised earlier.

Later in the afternoon they got some eggs ready for sale and set up their little table. That’s Levi, one of our two Shelties. Such great dogs! I always recommend this breed to anyone wanting a dog that’s great with children. If they grow up with children, they really are awesome. Shiloh, our other Sheltie, ALWAYS follows our son EVERYWHERE. Levi prefers the girls and is always with them. He wasn’t enjoying the camera too much though. lol

The girls sell their eggs from the driveway where I can see them while I continue working.
They are so proud of themselves. They wanted to save up enough ‘egg money’ to purchase all day ride passes for the fair, and today they hit their mark! Just in time too, the fair is on Saturday. They hope to sell another couple dozen tomorrow for some games. 😉 Shaylah was the most surprised and said to me, “Thank you for believing we could do it Mama!” I knew they could, she wasn’t so sure. lol

At about 5:00 it was time to go back inside to make dinner. Shaylah helped me cook up some steaks on the stove top while Julia sliced up some onions and Elsa got the table ready. Just before dinner was done, dear hubby and son pulled in from work.

(cell phone picture, not so great lol)

We were going to be tasting our side of beef for the first time, and that was kind of scary. LOL That first bite has a lot weighing on it. You know if it’s not to your liking, you’re stuck with it until the freezer is empty again! Thankfully, it was good. We’re considering raising our own beef next year, maybe one or two miniature herefords. Still researching at the moment though. Trying to decide if we (mostly me and the girls) can handle having an animal for over a year before it goes to ‘market’. The largest animals we’ve done so far were pigs and that was kind of difficult but we just kept reminding ourselves that these were NOT pets. Hopefully we could do the same with cows. We’ll keep pondering that one over the winter and in the mean time, I’m hoping we may be able to see some at the fair this weekend.

After dinner it was time to edit those photos I took earlier today and upload them. I finished editing just in time to go pick up my eldest daughter from work just after 8:00. The photos uploaded while I was gone. Elsa had a quick bath so she could wash her hair so I can trim her hair here in a bit. While this was taking place, I paused for a few minutes to snap some photos of the gold sky outside tonight. We have a great view from our small upper balcony!

I absolutely LOVE that this is my view from my work desk in the house.  Zoomed in, you can see the mountains in the distance.

Now I’m writing this after getting the twins off to bed and I should go, it’s time to trim that hair of Elsa’s. It’s 10pm and those twins had better get to sleep soon! I hear them giggling, no sleep yet, tsk tsk! In the meantime, dear hubby and son are out changing the fuel filter in dh’s truck.

And that’s a fairly typical day here during the week. There’s other things that go on such as more sewing, sewing, and yet more sewing, more product photos, lots of emails to attend to, more computer work, more animal play, cooking, and sometimes even a little baking, but that’s a peek into a typical day here on the homestead. 🙂

School began today!

Wish I could say it was a great day, but… when teaching my most difficult ‘learner’, things can get a little stressful, but, we had our first day and it’s over and hopefully tomorrow will be better. I think I need to learn to ‘breathe’ a little more while teaching that one particular child. 😉 If I had more hours in a day, we’d do two classes, one with just the one child, the other with the other three school aged kids. Wonder if I can buy more time somewhere…?

I shouldn’t make it seem like it was ALL stressful, it wasn’t really. We did have some fun too. Even tried out our ‘new-to-us’ microscope. I’ll just remember to relax a little more tomorrow, breathe a little more, and hopefully it will go better. 🙂 I honestly do not know how teachers do it with so many children in their classrooms if one child is at a different pace from the rest!

In other happenings though, hubby and two of the girls picked up chicks today! It was a nice way to ‘end’ a stressful first day of school.

Speaking of chicks. Remember those ducklings? Here’s some pics I snapped today of them now.

And to think, it wasn’t too long ago they were just a handful like our new chicks!