Clara turns 4!

Today is Clara's 4th birthday. I don't know how she can be four, it seems like she was just born. She keeps us entertained and on our toes. She is wild and  funny, you never know what she is going to say or what crazy face she is going to make. We are always laughing when she is around and it makes it very hard to discipline her when she is making you laugh at the same time.

Some updates on Clara:

• She loves to color, draw, make art projects, and cut lots of tiny pieces of paper.
• She loves to sing. She knows the words to lots of songs from school and church. She also makes up songs, so she is always singing. We recently got a piano, so she likes for me to play songs and she sings along. 
• She is a true farm girl. She loves to be outside, playing and exploring. When there is a choice of what to do she almost always chooses to go outside and play. If there is dirt or water, she will find it.
• She knows all her letters and numbers. She likes to write things, so is constantly asking us how to spell things. She loves school and her teachers love her. She loves to help and is eager to learn.
• She is still big for her age which has always been the case since she was born.  She is now wearing the same size shoe as Esther and can wear her clothes. It won't be long before she passes Esther in size. 

We celebrated her birthday yesterday with a few friends. It was a nice day, so the kids were able to play outside and see the animals. Clara requested chocolate and vanilla swirl cake, with white icing and Dora decorations.

Today we celebrated by taking the girls to a performance at the Walton Arts Center. The Symphony of Northwest Arkansas had a family performance where they played some Christmas music. Then they played the film The Snowman, and the symphony played the score to the film. They love the book and have seen the film before, and Clara has been learning about instruments at school, so it was a great opportunity to introduce the girls to the theatre/symphony. We all enjoyed it.

Clara has requested homemade "chicklin" (chicken) and dumplings, corn off the cob, and black beans for her birthday supper!  This makes Josh happy because chicken and dumplings has always been his favorite and his request on his birthdays, and it is something his grandmothers always made for him growing up because of how much he loved it.

Spectacles

About a month into school Esther came home with a note from the school nurse saying she had failed part of her eye exam and needed to see an eye doctor. We were quite surprised by this, as we have never noticed any problems with her vision. We thought maybe Esther just wasn't being cooperative with the eye exam. We made an appointment with an eye doctor and expected everything to check out just fine. Esther is not a very compliant patient, so the appointment was interesting. The results are that one of her eyes is "lazy" and does not see things well at a distance. Her other eye has compensated, which is why we haven't noticed any problems. So she needed glasses which was kind of a shock. Before we got them, Esther said she did not want to look different with glasses. We asked her what she meant and she said she did not want her looks to change which was kind of sad to hear. But we explained how much they would help her and we let her pick them out and she mostly went with it. The doctor is hopeful that her brain will respond and start using that eye more and maybe not have to wear them forever. Her prescription in the one eye ended up being quite strong. The first day she said "things look so huge!" The first couple of days were a bit tough getting her used to wearing them but we are all getting used to them and I think Esther sees the benefit in wearing them. After just a couple weeks of wearing her glasses they have become a normal part of her looks and now she looks different to us without them.

Fall Fun

It has been a while since we posted. We've been busy with a big project (post about that coming soon). Here is a recap of some of our family fun from the past couple of months.

We made our yearly trip to the Washington County Fair. Josh won admission and ride tickets through a local contest, so we rode more rides than usual. We all love seeing the animals and riding rides.



At the top of the ferris wheel

Riding the carousel

Over the long Labor Day weekend we went to Austin, TX to visit our friends Walt and Annie. They recently moved to Austin from Germany. We are glad they are much closer now! Their girls are 5 and 2, so Esther and Clara had a great time playing with them. We ate some good food, went swimming, went downtown and saw the bats fly out, and just spent some good time hanging out. We hope to make it back sometime soon to see/do more of the "Austin" attractions.



Hard to see them, but there are a bunch of bats flying in the air

Naomi, Chloe, Clara, and Esther

In October we went to Mena (Josh's hometown) for the weekend. We stayed with our friends Steve and Kathy (the site of the infamous scooter accident). We took the girls to Queen Wilhelmina State Park. They have recently redone the Lodge, so we wanted to see that. They have a little train that goes around the park and an old train engine that you can climb on. Those are childhood memories of Josh's that we wanted the girls to experience. There is also an old fire tower near the Park that we went up in.



Riding the train

On top of the fire tower

For Halloween we asked the girls what they wanted to dress up as. We were talking about unique and funny costumes and Clara came up with "a box of tissues." Esther decided that is what she wanted to be, and we came up with an Etch a sketch for Clara. Josh and I crafted their costumes and they were a big hit. We once again went to the Fayetteville Square for their Trick or Treat event. We also went trick or treating with some of our friends. The girls sprinted from house to house. When we got back to our friends' house they spent the rest of the evening handing out candy to trick or treaters. I think they enjoyed that almost as much.

School days

When you have a baby (or adopt one) school seems like a very far off thing. And then all of the sudden it is time to start Kindergarten and your like.... what the heck just happened.  And then you get all nervous and emotional about it and worry about if they are going to be ok. Then they start and it seems like no big deal.  It is kind of a roller coaster of emotions raising kids.

So,Esther started kindergarten 3 weeks ago, just like that. As far as we can tell Esther is loving it and is doing well. We worry about her because she is not super outgoing and does not like to talk very much (except around us). So we are worried that she won't ask for help when she needs it or she won't find friends easily. In fact that is the thing I pray for and hope for most, is that she will find good friends. I think that may be one of the most important things to a happy and fulfilling life is good friends that are a good influence.  One thing we are not worried about is her doing good in school and being a good student.  She is very smart and very well behaved.

Most days we get spotty details of what happens throughout the day. Here are some of the highlights:

• She loves riding the bus. There was no hesitation the first day (even though we were worried about it). One day she said she even rode at the very back of the bus. The downside of the bus is she gets on at about 6:55 every morning. Clara also loves to walk with us for Esther to catch the bus and to pick her up at the end of the day at the end of the driveway. 
• She gets chocolate and strawberry milk. On the first day of school when we asked her what her favorite thing was she exclaimed "I had chocolate milk 3 times today!!" (Breakfast, lunch, and after school program snack) Up until that day she had only had chocolate milk 2-3 times in her life. We now encourage her to choose white milk at least once a day.
• She also gets bubblegum as a reward (something she had never had before). As a reward for good behavior and following the class rules, her teacher gives a penny for students to get a gumball out of a gumball machine. She got her first penny the second day of school (very proud parents) and knew she was not allowed to have gum previously so she brought her penny home instead of getting gum (very, very proud parents). We told it was ok for her to have gum (we had just never rewarded the girls with candy) Since Esther is quiet, keeps her hands to herself, and always listens to the teacher she has gotten quite a bit of gum.
• She likes the extra classes they do weekly--Art, Music, PE, Health, Library, and Computer Lab
• So far in class they have just been working on writing letters and numbers, learning about shapes and colors. All of that is a review for Esther since she knew those things when she was 2-3 years old. But she says she loves doing the worksheets.

We hope she continues to enjoy school. We have Parent/Teacher Conferences in a couple of weeks. We are very interested to hear her teacher's perspective.

         

Summer Farm and Garden Update

It has been a while since we have talked about the farm on the ol' blog. It is not because stuff has not been happening, blogging just seems to get forgotten at times.
The garden has done pretty well this year. It has been a weird year with lots of rain and lots of hot temperatures. Some things have done great (especially the weeds) and some things not so great. Being our second year in this place, our berry production has really ramped up. We had tons of strawberries this year. We froze 6-7 gallons and sold some too. We also had a lot of them rot because of so much rain early on in the year. We also had lots of raspberries this year to eat fresh and we froze 2-3 gallons. We had mulberries as well from our mulberry tree. Our blackberries produced tons also. We froze 3 gallons of those and sold gallons also. We were also able to make 10 pints of mixed berry jelly.
The garden has been a love/hate thing this year. Weeds have been out of control with all the rain and heat, I could barely keep up with pulling them. Some of our early veggies did not do so well like onions and potatoes but the later veggies have done much better. This was the second year for our asparagus bed and we were able to get quite a bit from it and it will only get better in the future. We have been doing tons of canning the past month or so but that is starting to wind down. We canned 12 pints of pickled peppers, 20 pints of salsa, 35 pints of spaghetti sauce, 10 pints of tomato sauce, 15 half pints of hot sauce, and 30 pints of green beans. Our corn struggled a little this year but we were able to freeze 100 ears of corn. We also had lots of fresh squash, cucumbers, sugar snap peas, okra, spinach, radishes, bok choi, cabbage, broccoli, eggplant, potatoes, and peppers. We should be able to harvest sweet potatoes soon as well. I have been planting some of my fall garden and some of it is already up and growing...winter squash, more summer squash and cucumbers, and more corn.
When we moved into this new place I increased the size of my garden from our previous location by about 50%.  I have come to the conclusion that this is too much and requires too much of my time to keep up with it.  I am planning to reorganize during the winter and downsize a little bit. I don't want to be spending so much time in the garden and farm that it takes away too much time from more important things like doing other things with the family.
The animal part of the farm has been doing great so far this year and is growing. We had several baby goats and sheep born which have mostly been sold now. We bought 10 new weaned Holstein steers to raise through the year and sell this winter.

We also decided to try pigs this year so we got two young ones in the spring. We had never done them before and were not sure what to expect.  But they have actually been pretty easy to deal with and not caused any real problems or anything. We plan to take one to the butcher in a month or so and sell the other one. I think we may continue to do some every year in the future.

And the biggest news on the livestock front is we were finally able to buy some young heifers to start our real cow herd. They will be ready to breed later this winter so I will need to get a bull for them. Then we can start having our own calves and hopefully grow our herd to maximize the use of our land.

Since we have not built up enough animals yet to eat all our grass on the farm we had our hay cut this year again. We were actually able to get two cuttings this year since we had good rain. A neighbor cuts it for us and we split the hay with him. Total, we got 32 round bales the first cutting and 300 square bales along with 11 round bales the second cutting.  Our part of that should take care of our hay needs for the winter which is great. I am anxious to see how many total animals we will be able to have in the future with the great grass that we have.
We are slowly working this place into "our" place and getting the farm set up how we want it.

The big 5!!!!!!

Today is Esther's 5th birthday! I know I say this every birthday, but the time has gone so fast. It seems like we just brought her home. She is such a smart, sweet, and fun little girl. She is introverted, shy, extremely independent and stubborn. Getting her to comply with a request is sometimes quite challenging. But she is a really great kid and we are proud to be her parents.

Some of her favorite activities:

• Drawing, coloring, creating artwork. She brings home a stack of artwork everyday from school and she is always drawing and coloring at home. We think she is really good and are quite impressed with some of her drawings. She has started writing and illustrating some little books. It is so fun to see her imagination.
• She loves to read. She has progressed really well since she learned to read last summer. She is reading books on a 1st-2nd grade level. At nap time and bedtime she sits on her bed and reads books until she falls asleep. She loves to read and look at books, but she hates to read for other people. She will read for Josh and I, but won't do it for anyone else.
• Playing dress up and make believe. Her and Clara are always dressed up, playing with their babies, playing school, and pretending to have restaurant or a store.
• We spend a lot of time outside and her and Clara have lots of adventures. They do lots of digging in the dirt, riding bikes, drawing with sidewalk chalk, and playing in their playhouse. She loves our cats and dogs and is always hugging on them. Feeding the cats is one of her chores. 

We had a little birthday party for her this weekend. We let her decide all the details including who she wanted to invite. She wanted an afternoon party with cake and homemade ice cream. She wanted a Frozen cake and wanted it to be blue with white icing. She wanted hats and blowers. After cake and ice cream we went to the pool to swim. Several friends and some family were able to join us and she had lots of fun. Here is a little video collage of her birthday party. She was feeling shy and didn't like us singing to her and didn't want to blow out her candles.

She starts kindergarten in less than a month. We are excited and a little bit nervous to see how she does at school. We know she is ready. 

Little Swimmers

Last year the girls' swimming lessons were ok, but we knew we wanted to put the girls in swimming lessons again this year. Esther is more tentative in the water, so we knew she really needed some more personalized attention to actually make her try to swim. And we knew Clara could probably progress a lot with some good instruction. So when a friend of mine was offering semi-private swimming lessons we knew that it would be great for the girls.

The first day Esther didn't even want to get her face wet (while Clara was dunking herself), but by the end of the first lesson she was willingly putting her whole head under water. That alone was worth the price of private lessons! They both did really great. The practiced going under water, bobbing, floating, kicking, and paddling. They loved it and had so much fun. 

By the end of the lessons they were both swimming. Esther will swim short distances. Clara is a little fish and can swim across the pool. Clara would also jump in to the pool and then swim back to the side all by herself.

 We are looking forward to going to the pool often this summer so the girls can keep practicing. 

Vacation 2015

I wanted to capture an overview of our vacation before I forget about it. We went to Navarre Beach, Florida for the third year in a row. You can read about our 2013 and 2014 vacations. We once again went the week before Memorial Day. It is cheaper and less crowded to go then. With Esther starting school in August, our future vacations will have to be later in the summer.

On our way down to Florida we stopped in Little Rock to visit the dinosaur exhibit at the Clinton Library. The girls love to play with dinosaurs so we thought they'd love it. Esther was a bit scared at first, but once we convinced her the dinos weren't real and weren't trying to eat us she was ok. It was a fun exhibit with big, moving, roaring dinosaurs.


T-Rex, notice Esther's tight grip on daddy.

Our beach vacation was pretty similar to the past two years. Beach, naps, beach, pool, eating lots of seafood. The beach is a great vacation for the girls while they are young. They are happy to play in the sand for hours. They were braver this year and went out in the waves with me. They had their floaties on and would "ride the waves." They were both a lot more confident in the pool this year too. With their floaties they "swam" all around the pool. Clara loved to jump in to the pool over and over. Esther was happy doing synchronized swimming/dance moves on the stairs!


The Gulf Coast National Seashore is just a few miles from our condo. We like to go down there because we usually have the beach to ourselves and the sand is really soft. 

Clara loved to get buried.

We went to Fort Pickens one morning. Josh and I really like historical sites and museums, so we are glad the girls are getting old enough to visit some things. They enjoyed exploring the old fort.



Family selfie at Fort Pickens

Esther and Clara at Fort Pickens

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Josh likes to look for shells, but unfortunately this year there were hardly any shells. There had been a bad storm the day before we arrived. The water was really rough the first day and the currents were strong. The last day we were there the water was filled with a thick green algae/seaweed. It was really gross and we didn't get in the water that day. The shells were lacking, but Josh did find a live starfish and a crab. The girls loved seeing those things.


                               

First Graduation

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
  Ferris Bueller

It always drives me crazy when people say enjoy your kids because time flies and next thing you know they will be gone, because in day to day life time seems to drag on. But then all the sudden the little baby you swear you just brought home the other day is graduating Pre-K.  And in a couple months she will turn 5 and start kindergarten.

Last Friday was Esther's Pre-K graduation.  I don't get to exited about those kinds of things because it seems like they do those kinds of things all the time with kids these days.  I think it is more for the parents most of the time than the kids and this parent isn't really in to it. We were also taking bets on whether Esther would actually go up there and participate because you see Esther is kind of like her father and is not into those kinds of things either. But she did go up on stage and wear a cap and gown but she did not sing the songs.  Overall it turned out to be pretty fun.  The kids sang a couple songs and when they walked across the stage they gave the kids' answers to questions about themselves....Esther' favorite color is pink and purple, she wants to be a doctor when she grows up, and at school she enjoys coloring. Both sets of the grandparents came which was fun also.

Esther is growing up fast and it seems to go faster the older she gets.  She is definitely a little girl now and has her own distinct personality. She is a daddy's girl.  She is really fun to be around (most of the time) and is very bright. However she is not into performing for people or being put in new and different situations. We always kind of joke when Esther talks or interacts with someone she doesn't know well and tell them how special they must be that she actually interacted with them. She is very contemplative and likes to know what she is doing before she does something.  We always try to explain everything to her so their are no surprises.  She is very head strong and things have to be her idea if she is going to do them, so we never know if she is going to choose to do something or not.
She and Clara are the best of buddies (and also fight like crazy). It is fun to see them playing together.  Esther loves to draw and color and is really good at it.  She also loves to read and is an amazing reader for her age. Most of the time she would rather read than do anything else and always wants to be read to. She is currently reading on about a 2nd grade level which is crazy. It still shocks us when she reads the menu at a restaurant, signs on the road, or things at the store. She is ready for kindergarten, and we are excited to see how much she'll grow and learn.

Water Collecting

One of my goals for our farm is to collect rain water which in turn conserves water by not using "city" water. Part of the reason I chose the locations for our garden and orchard is the proximity to buildings. I hoped to collect the water off the roofs to use for watering. I finally got around to getting my system up for the garden and finished it this past week just in time for this week's rain.

I started my water collection last year with collecting water off of our chicken coop to use for watering the chickens. You can read about that here. I put it in last May and never had to water the chickens again until we started having freezing temperatures. Unfortunately one night I forgot to empty the nipple water line in the winter and the pvc pipe froze and burst. But it worked out ok because I got to rethink my chicken waterer and try something new. The nipple waters worked fine but a lot of water was wasted by the chickens because they did not catch it all when getting a drink and therefore it kept the ground constantly wet under the water line. This time I decided to go with a pan type waterer that uses a float system to keep the bowl full. I was able to connect it to my existing 55 gallon barrel set up. So far it is working great and I like it much better than the nipple waterers.

For my garden water collection, I am collecting water off of my shop roof which borders the garden. It is a really big roof so it will collect a lot of water which will be great for watering my garden. I decided to go with IBC containers because they are relatively cheap and easy to find. I bought two 275 gallon containers so I would have 550 gallons total. I read lots of posts online about different set ups and watched lots of videos until I had an idea of how I wanted to set it up.  Unfortunately the shop roof line comes down kind of low so I was not able to do it exactly like I wanted but I was still able to make it work. I had hoped to raise the containers up to increase the water pressure but was only able to raise them 18-20 inches. I had to build really sturdy supports because that much water weighs over 2 tons. I connected the two containers with PVC pipes and then have an outlet that I can hook up my water hose to. I decided to cover the containers in black plastic to prevent algae growth. And I have it so when the containers are full and I can switch the pipe to have the water empty out into the pasture instead of just overflowing right next to the building. I plan to eventually have this run in to a livestock water trough. Our first rain since I finished the set up was last night and we got 1.5 inches which was enough to fill them up.  I was really happy that it worked out. I hooked up the water hose and there is enough pressure to push the water out of the nozzle on the setting we use for gentle watering.  I hope to set up another system like this one sometime to use for watering our fruit trees.

Here is what it looks like. It is not pretty but luckily it is behind the shop.

I connected the two containers with a pvc pipe that connects to their outlets. The gutter only empties into one container but both of them will fill together having them hooked up this way. 

Here is my outlet hooked up to the water hose

Biggest Farm Project....Done

The biggest and most expensive farm project on all the farms I have had (3 if you are keeping count) is fencing.  Our first place in West Fork did not have fence and I had to put in everything from scratch. Our last place and our current place both had fencing but not in good shape and not good enough to hold goats and sheep.  This is our biggest farm so that means a lot more fencing.  By my calculations I put in about 6,000 feet of fence including perimeter fence, yard fence, and cross fences.  I have been working on fence off and on since we moved in but have really been working on it hard this winter.

Our current farm was completely fenced but some of it was in bad shape or just piecemealed together, A lot of the fence was leaning over really badly also. For the most part it was just several strands of barbwire which would not keep in goats (goats are notorious for escaping).  The type of fence I need is field fence with a strand of barb wire on top.

One good thing was part of the yard fence and some of the corner posts were steel tube so I could use them. And I was able to reuse all the steel t-posts.  But I still had to dig and put in a lot of big posts for corner and stretch posts. About half the fence I was able to straighten up the posts without taking them out of the ground and then I just put the field fence right on top of the existing barb wire.  The other half of the fence I had to completely take down and pull up the t-posts before putting up the new fence. Around the barns there were to many different paddocks with fences fencing in fences it seemed like so I re-organized them. I also moved around the yard fence a little bit. 

I am really happy to have it done. It was a long, hard project. I can now put any of our animals on any part of our land without worrying about them getting out. I am also happy that I can move on to other projects that I enjoy more and are not so daunting.