Our Week In Photos

      This cold weather is kicking my ass!! The ever present worry about the welfare of my little flock   has got me doing chores several times a day and still I am not there in time to save the eggs from freezing. Mike is enjoying the extra baking that I am doing, to use them up. My favourite cold weather activity has got to be spending the day making bread and buns and all sorts of goodies. It has been too cold to venture out and deliver some to friends and neighbours, so a lot of the baking is going into the freezer. I don't see any end to the frozen eggs, so pretty soon we are going to have to think of something else to do with them - or go buy another freezer.

  On Friday, I had the great pleasure of being Peyton's "special person" and attending school with her.
The class was studying the letter "h" and Peyton wanted to bring our little pet hen, Sunflower. I tried to talk her out of taking the chicken, but she was adamant - so Sunflower went to school! I think that she was so frozen - being plucked from the barn and placed in a warm chair, she just sat there and thawed out. I was a little nervous about how she would react to a dozen children trying to pet her - but she just sat there and went to sleep in the warmth of the classroom. Peyton got her microphone hooked up and gave a very good presentation on chicken care.

  There was a little panic and giggling when the chicken pooped on the chair.

  Okay, maybe a lot of giggling! Mostly the boys.

  Go figure!

    Then it was time to head home and take our pictures for Peyton's Christmas card gifts. Ever since she was old enough to realize that she wanted to give a gift to everyone on Christmas Eve, we have made a special point to set up a holiday photo shoot. She approves the pictures that are going to be printed and she hand writes a card for everyone on her list, encloses a couple of photos and hands them out in person. Peyton is very serious about the whole process.

    Serious to the point that she made sure the photos were cropped to hide the fact that she had gotten grease from the Bobcat on her new red coat and she didn't want it to show. Her attention to detail scares me slightly. She is only five!

    Heaven help us when she is a teenager....

It Has To Be A Man!

   Who decides to move cattle on a day that is not fit for man nor beast? It has to be a man!

   Who was asked to put a "patch" over a hole in the west side of a barn (at 2:30 in the afternoon, with only about two and half hours of daylight left) and ends up tearing off all the exterior siding and begins to reset the interior log beams to straighten out the wall of the log barn... when a blizzard is supposed to blow in within 24 hours? It has to be a man! 

   Around these parts, men were not popular last week! LOL

   Then the cold hit and I had to eat a little crow. I guess that when we were trying to put the barn wall up and I couldn't feel my fingers, I didn't really know what cold was... because, HOLY SHIT BATMAN, now it is COLD! And I have to admit that I do not know what I would do if the cold and snow were able to come through that west wall!

   The last few days have just been peachy. It takes me five minutes to put on enough layers to be able to be comfortable while doing chores. As soon as I round the corner of the house and head into the wind, I am starting to feel the cold creeping up between the layers. I have a freaking amazing pair of chore boots - my feet have never been cold and I have some Costco version, leather gloves that I can not live without, but somehow I just can't seem to get enough layers on to keep my body warm. Or maybe I am just a wimp. 

   This week has been a week of changing things around to make (my) life easier. Basically, that means that I screwed up with Plan A and had to switch to Plan B before - 1) something died or 2) Mike killed me! LOL. First thing on the agenda was to catch my poor little Dutch bantam and bring her into the safety of the greenhouse. (She stayed one night in the house before my husband told me that I had lost my mind and "no chicken was living in our house for the winter!" ) So, poor Sunflower was banished to the greenhouse with the quail. I am pretty sure that she must feel like she left Siberia and went on vacation and ended up in the Bahamas. It is a pretty sweet deal to end up in the greenhouse - with the beautiful light and the green plants, it even looks downright tropical.

   Secondly, the flock living in the granary had to be moved. Of course, I picked the -30 day to admit that I was wrong and ask for help to move all the paraphernalia and catch the gang. (Can you imagine what Mike had to say about that?) Because, of course, I needed help. And because, of course, he had told me to move them about a month ago... There is only one thing worse than being told that you were wrong and your man was right, except maybe hearing the lecture when you are standing outside on a -30 day - holding onto a flapping rooster that is trying to pick your eyes out! By sundown, all of the gang and their belongings were safely moved into the new chicken house. I still did not like the temperature in there, so I figured that things could not get much worse, I might as well just go ahead and go against Mike's wishes and install a heater. My theory was that if he was going to be mad, I might as well make it count! (Sort of like when my mom would tell me that she would give me something to cry about! LOL)

   All week has been a marathon of hauling warm water, cooking oatmeal and soaking corn - anything and everything that I can do to keep those little guys from freezing. If I don't go to the barns every couple of hours, I have frozen eggs and even if I do go that often, I still get frozen eggs. It has been a nightmare! The only things that have made it bearable is my awesome, kickass boots and my loving husband, who has endured the cold to lend me a hand. 

   What a man!