Chickens Chickens Chickens 2!!!!

The fun continues!!!! I really thought this one deserved it’s own special post. Once the chicken shows are over, it’s time to slaughter the show chicks. This really is for the best. Trust me. Josh and I tried to keep some cornish crosses last year after the show, and it didn’t go well. Many of them became lame after just a month or 2. And then ones that didn’t just ended up dying from heat stress. We had one (Speedy). She was literally so tiny on slaughter day last year that it would have been silly to kill her. She made it 10 months. I was so attached to her. She was the highlight of the COVID lockdown for me. Just so fun to have around. There was a point in time where I’m a little embarrassed to say it, but I was taking more photos and video’s of her on my phone than I was of the kids…

None of these birds were Speedy material.

Last year Jen and Matt came to help us with the 60 or so birds we were slaughtering. This year we had twice the daunting task ahead of us. It really wouldn’t be possible for us to get it done in just one weekend without additional help. Fortunately, I have the best friends ever! Rachael and Brittney both stepped up to the challenge and enlisted their husbands! And Josh got a couple of guys from work to come along and help as well. It still took basically two exhausting days, but we got it done! And our 10 kids got to spend the weekend bonding and playing like crazy! It was such a fun weekend.

The best part for me though had to be when they surprised me with the #targetdresschallenge!

I spend quite a bit of my Facebook time on a group called Chickens Chickens Chickens, and one of the silliest things that occurred this year was this spontaneous challenge that came from these ridiculous dresses that Target was selling during the pandemic. They were straight out of an episode of Little House on the Prairie. Seriously…I’m not sure that anyone except for people from this chicken group were actually purchasing these dresses. And they were only buying them to take silly photos with their chickens. Or to put them on their husbands to take silly photos with their chickens. Anyway, I’d send photo after photo to Jen, Rachael, and Brittney in our group text, and we’d all laugh and laugh. Or at least they all humor me as I laughed anyway.

So imagine my surprise when like 80 chickens into slaughter day Jen walks out of the house in prairie dress!!! I totally lost it!!! And then Brittney came out in one, and Rachael too!!! All I could think was…”Oh my gosh…I want one too!!!” And they had one for me as well!!!!

So, Anna did our photoshoot. Please keep in mind the last post about how exhausting it was to raise 150 chickens…. I don’t look quite so strung out all the time!

Y’all! Target put these on their racks! It’s not Halloween!!! But seriously, how great are these girls? All this planning, and I had no idea!!!!

I look like I’ve been doing most of the chores while Jen sleeps in. lol.

We quickly scrambled to braid our hair!

I have the flightiest, most non-friendly birds. lol

Just holding my chicken and getting my hair braided.

My new FB cover photo. Maybe the Chicken group will notice when I comment on and like their stuff. :)

The chickens had enough of it, and then we all laughed at ourselves.

What a weekend!!!!!

Promise the 4th of July won’t be so stinky!!! Or so much work!!!!

Thank you so much for all of your help! Please, let me know when you need any disgusting thing taken care of at your house. I will be there!

And thank you for making my prairie dress photo shoot dream come true!

Chickens Chickens Chickens!!!

Right after we got back from the ski trip it was time to get the FFA chicks! It was a bit of a shock to our systems to go from having absolutely no extracurriculars to having 150 baby chicks and having all three kids in basketball all in the same week…

Wallace is old enough to be in FFA now, and he wanted to raise chicks too, so that doubled our load. I thought we were fully prepared for this though. I mean, we had pretty good success with Anna last year. So, we set up the spare garage, ordered the feed, and got down to business.

Everything started out okay. When we picked them up we were informed that one of Wallace’s birds had lost a wing band, which is kind of bummer, but that’s just one bird out of 75…no biggie. We went ahead and took it home to feed out. And took all sorts of fun baby chicken pics while they were super cute!

Then the next day we found a few loose wing bands in his shavings…and the wing band nightmare began. For the next several days I just continued to find wing band after wing band… Every band represented a bird we would be unable to show. When we got to 10 the ag teacher and I were both pulling our hair out… When would this stop??? I’d never heard of this happening to anyone before. I was no longer having fun, and I honestly wasn’t handling the stress of it very well. How would I explain this to Wallace? “Sorry bud…someone didn’t band your birds correctly, so you’re just getting a raw deal this year…” I didn’t know where to start. It was just so upsetting to find band after band after band. The ag teacher was a miracle worker though. She did what I thought was honestly impossible. She got the extension service to reband the birds! We ended up taking 20 in all back to College Station. Some still had their bands, but they were getting close to falling off…so we took them too. It was like someone breathed new life into that garage full of birds that day!

So…being back on track…the birds quickly hit their ugly teenager phase….

And everything really progressed great from there. We were plugging along…stretched way too thin between all the basketball practices and getting up early to feed chickens. The kids and I were so exhausted. There were nights Anna would get in late from basketball, would be crying because she was so tired and knew she’d have to get up early, and it would just break my heart… And other days when everyone was just good to go. Having twice the chickens in the garage meant we had to change out their shavings twice as often. Twice a week. It was an effort every time. The kids were such troopers. And Wallace got his own snow shovel (which…ended up coming in handy for several reasons…more on that later) which we’ve found to be the easiest tool for scooping up shavings in the garage.

I think one of the things that added to our stress was the decision to try to take some chickens to the San Antonio show this year. The thought of showing at a major really freaked me out. When I showed hogs at majors as a kid I pretty much just walked straight through the sift every time… I never really even made it to the show. So, knowing that we would be taking our best birds to San Antonio really had me on edge the whole time.

When it came time to sort the birds for the San Antonio show, just a few days before the show, the ag teacher felt Wallace had 4 birds that were in good shape, but Anna only had 2. You have to show 3, and you can’t mix up the birds…Wallace’s birds belong to Wallace, Anna’s birds belong to Anna…. Anna was devastated. She cried for hours. It’s very hard as a parent to watch that. In many ways I’m glad that we had a whole other pen of birds that we can compare to so she didn’t take her best birds to SA just to have them taken away from her so that she couldn’t show them in Comal… but I wanted so bad for her to be able to show in SA as well. It was a rough night.

So, the next night we worked with the ag teacher to determine Wallace’s 4 best birds that we would take for certain (we’d pick the final three in the car in the parking lot at the show), and then on the morning of the show…it was a little icy… BUT we just slowly drove over there. And it was so worth it! Although we were in the second call back class, Wallace’s birds managed to make it through that sift. Josh and I looked at each other like “Well, all right!” And we kept telling Wallace “Bud…this is so awesome, you’ve done so well to get this far at a major!” Then as we competed against the 3rd callback class we made it through again!!!! I mean you literally could have knocked me over with a feather. I just couldn’t believe it. And as we were in the arena with the fourth and final call back class, all I knew was that there were two pens in the arena that weren’t going to make the sale. I was so worried we were one of them. It was driving Josh bananas. And we’d literally been in the arena for nearly 3 hours, which is just not normal at all for a chicken show. We just weren’t apparently sorted well in the pre-sift when we arrived I guess. We all ended up getting pooped on. Wallace literally had his chicken poop on his face! It was exhausting, and we were starving. But he ended up 18th place! Which is not bad considering only 35 make the sale. We were beyond thrilled.

And then all hell broke loose. Literally! I mean, the snow was cute for like a day, but then once we lost power and water, it was no longer cute. We ran out of fire wood… So, we cut up what we had in the yard. We pulled our ski clothes (that it took me over a month to put away) out of the attic, and did the best we could. As one point we drove up to Josh’s Mom’s place in Blanco to cut more fire wood for ourselves, my Mom, and some of Josh’s work friends. Nothing really sets you back to pioneers days quite like losing your indoor water… Can’t say I really enjoyed catching snow melt off the roof to flush my toilets. Pretty sure my neighbors didn’t either.

In hindsight, it would have been nice to have some pool water available, but…I’ve seen a lot of people still dealing with pool pump issues from the freeze, so…maybe this was a blessing in disguise.

We let the dogs out to enjoy it.

This is a photo of my dog literally running away from me. We didn’t see her again for 6 hours. Finally got a call from a neighbor who found her.

Then it all slowly got better… And believe it or not, a week after that SA show, we had the Comal chicken show. It seemed impossible. These poor chickens had been through so much. I struggled to keep them warm, discovered they might actually prefer being closer to 50 degrees, but probably not so much 40…and then they had to deal with us changing their shavings in the middle of it all.

The Comal show went well, but not without drama. Wallace did great with his pullets (female birds). He got 6th overall. Wasn’t expecting that! So, a blue ribbon. He hit every goal we could have set this year.

Anna was in the final 8 with her cockerels when one of hers unfortunately died of a heart attack. :( It happens. We’ve recovered from this, but it was tragic. She ended up in 8th place. Still a blue ribbon. She wanted to do better, so I know that probably bothers her, but she really did just fantastic. She also decided to compete in chicken showmanship, which I love at this show. It tests the kids on their knowledge of chickens and also tries to feel them out for how much they participated in the raising of the chicks. She won Jr. Showmanship!!!!! She got her first belt buckle! Y’all. That’s a really big deal. So big in fact that I will (for the first time ever) break my fancy pants camera picture rule for my blog and post an iphone photo here….

So….after all that, we’ll see if these kids ever want to raise chickens again. I think I want to.

Wallace Lost a Tooth!!!

This poor kid had to wait until he was 8 years old…and really over 8 and half to finally lose his first tooth! His little sister legitimately lost a tooth before him… But I tell you what…when he finally lost it, he lost it in style!

Wallace’s tooth had been getting loose for a couple of days, and on the day after Christmas it had been annoying him all day. Right before bed he went to his room with a candy cane to finish packing for our ski trip. Anna and I were in the kitchen and heard him whining…which…unfortunately, was a bit normal for the day. He had been a bit strung out on sweets and toys and all that jazz. So, she and I looked at each other, rolled our eyes, and I said, “I’ll go check on him…”

I went back there, and he moaned and said “My tooth hurts soooo bad!!!” So I asked him to let me see it, and he suddenly got this alarmed look on his face and ran to the bathroom. He was staring in the mirror and just hollered at me “My tooth is gone!”

Wait…what? So, he hysterically runs back to where he’d been sitting and eating his candy cane…there was no sign of it. All we can figure is it got stuck in the candy cane as he was eating it, he ripped it out, and then unknowingly ate it.

The Tooth Fairy still visited him that night, but he was wiggling around so much in his sleep he managed to push his dollar off his bed and onto the floor, so there was a moment of panic in the morning when he thought maybe she hadn’t come. Talk about drama.

Happenings

A few weeks ago Josh’s Mom hosted a small Thanksgiving in Gilmer, and that week Bodie happened to be playing in a playoff game. I’ve been to more high school football games this season than I’ve been to since I graduated from high school! It’s been great! And this time I took my camera. I do wish I had rented a longer lens for this, but…I did okay with my 85mm.

Gilmer won! And then proceeded to win the next three games. Next week they will play in the state championship game. They made it look so easy!

I probably should have switched to my shorter lens for this. lol. I had to stand soooo far back, and then no one knew I was taking photos. I just flat out refuse to ever switch to a zoom lens. It’ll never happen. I’ll just continue to awkwardly move myself around and fumble with my lenses. Whatever.

The next day Meredith talked Big Momma into an LOL Surprise extravaganza!!!

Nora got to partake as well!

And then it was just great to get to see a little bit of extended family. It’s been a while.

Not long after we got back Little Miss Meredith lost her first tooth without running into something and knocking it out! And she actually pulled it out herself (with the promise of a trip to the store for an LOL Surprise doll of course…). She was hysterically proud of herself. It was an awesome moment.

Now if Wallace could lose his first tooth. lol. Poor guy is such a late bloomer.

And last night I decided to get some photos of some of my favorite ornaments. Years ago I got these fun little filters that turn the bokeh into special shapes. I haven’t pulled them out in years! And guess what I found right next to them in my camera bag….my Lightroom CD with my activation code…. *sigh*

Josh and I got this guy on our first ski trip like 13 years ago….

Josh’s Mom got me this one. I think it’s so cute! And look at the snowflake bokeh!!

I actually just got this one for Josh this year. It’s Cousin Eddie’s RV! He recently purchased a older model RV for us, so it seemed fitting. :)

My Mom made these with Anna and Wallace when Wallace was 1.

Anna picked this one out. It’s just simply adorable.

We got this ornament this year too. It might be my new personal fav. And Anna and I tried out the Christmas tree filter. Meh…I don’t know if I like it as much.

This year I made some cinnamon ornaments with the kids. It was a fun and easy little activity that made the house smell wonderful. I got all Martha Stewart on them and turned into a bit of a perfectionist, which was silly….But, I think they like them and had fun with me… hopefully.

So, we’re all kind of excited to wake up to Christmas at home this year. Meredith was all confused and thought we were skipping the ski trip and the cousins would be having all the fun without her. I had to assure her that was not the case. :)

In addition to all of this, Anna got her braces off, but I haven’t gotten any fancy pants camera photos of that yet. Maybe next time!

Joe's Birthday

Last weekend the kids and I did something we haven’t done in ages….we piled in the car and went somewhere! To Gilmer! It was Joe’s 70th birthday, and so the family got together for a small celebration.

We even got to go to one of Bodie’s football games! I miss going to high school football games so much. I feel like I went to a million when I was a kid. My sisters and I were pretty spread out in age, so I started going to them before I even started having memories. I remember watching Jenny perform with the drill team when I was like 4 or 5. And then we’d go watch Sarah’s boyfriend play when she was in high school. But my Mom, being a teacher at the high school, always worked at the games, and she always worked the high school section, so I felt like such a badass getting to hang out in that area all through elementary and middle school.

At Bodie’s game, Big Momma got the kids all kinds of goodies...the best were the horns she bought all the girls so they could drive everyone sitting around us away. lol. Not that anyone was actually sitting near us. It’s kind of nice not being all crammed into places, but a little weird going to a varsity football game in a small town and there only being about 25% attendance. Regardless, there was a fight on the field, and Gilmer won the game! So all in all, a very eventful and exciting night!

Then the next day was all about prep for the party. Well, sort of. Josh’s Mom did most of it while Wallace and I played Monopoly. The girls hung out at Sarah’s all day to play with the new puppies, and so it was just me and Wallace at the big house. It was kind of fun getting some special time with just him. And we played “friendly” Monopoly, so our game lasted hours, and we didn’t get into a family feud. :) All you have to do is only buy one house per property, and don’t buy them for the expensive properties. This prevents bankruptcy and tears.

Then we watched our favorite movie together…Thor Ragnarok…and then it was time for the birthday party!

And some pictures! The game horns got a lot of love all weekend long!

My personal fav. :)

I’m so glad the kids ended up having a random Friday off school and we got to have a nice relaxing long weekend in Gilmer. Happy birthday Joe-Joe! You don’t look a day over 29!