The Snowball Saga

 

Well, the rest of the story goes a little something like this….

Snowball went on after her weird little ditty of having a premature kitten, to having a weird little litter of 2 more.  They didn’t make it either.  Poor Snowy was having a hard summer.  Then, lo and behold, she had a nice normal litter of 4.  Life on the farm was just as it should be.  Snowy was taking care of those babies up in the mezzanine of our new shop.  I know the guys in the shop just loved to see her licking and feeding those tiny little meowing kittens every day!  (insert sarcasm here.) 

This is snowy with her brother/suspected Baby Daddy, Orange Juice.  He’s a feminine type of Tom.  He’s been known to let babies nurse him.  This is freaky. 

Suddenly, Snowball’s kittens were gone.  We were busy mourning the loss of the kittens here in the house and wondering what we could have done differently, when we received a phone call from our good friends on the other side of the countryside.  They had a MIA mother cat at 5 babies to feed.  Whatever shall they do? 

At this very moment, I heard God say….”tadah!”  So Snowball became the foster mom and head milk provider for these 5 babies that very evening!  It was perfect fluff ball bliss.

Well, little did I know, her kittens were just on a little one day visitation to kitty daycare and now I had strapped our poor ole’ milk maker with 9 kittens!  Like I have said before….she is a good mother and she did her best with our help.  She got extra handy water and soft chewy food by her bedside daily.  That Snowball has a God-given talent and she raised up her littler of nine for a week or more!

Tragically, however  it became too much for her (seriously, I cannot believe I am writing a tale of the farm cat capers here folks:) Three of her four just were not strong enough to fight their way to the top and suddenly passed away. 

Talk about tragedy!  I got the tongue lashing my kiddos for allowing the fostering in the first place and the guilt was horrible for me!  Poor Snowy, a good mom, doing her best.  Her best just wasn’t good enough in such an impossible situation. 

The good news is, the fostered babies returned to their goat farm on the other side of the countryside and are flourishing.  That is, with one exception.  Little Olivia found a new home, here with her adopted sister America (Snowy’s real daughter and sole survivor of the litter.)  They are living in the lap of luxury in the shop, lounging on the trampoline, making piles of furballs on the stacks of old tires and frolicking with their wild cousins in the barn.  The milk?  It overflowith.

The circle of life is definitely felt hard out here on the prairie.  Joys and jubilations are shortly followed by tragedy and then, if you look really close, you can see the meaning of it all! 

 Snowball, sister, you’re the greatest!  I’ll try to get some pics of little Olivia and her sis America for your viewing pleasure.  It’ll warm your heart and fill your soul.

 

A Good Mother

 

Meet Snowball.  Snowball is the best farm cat on the place!  And she has ALOT of competition.  It’s foggy as to how many cats actually live here, as we aren’t able to put the lovins on most of them.  But Snowy is different.  The girl is a love machine. 

Snowball is also a machine of a different sort.  She’s a kitten factory!  The girl has 2-3 litters every year.  The Guys do not appreciate her for that, but birthing three “kittens” myself, well the sister and I have some common ground. 

It’s probably high time Snowy gets her appointment with the Vet, but she keeps having the most delicious little white kittie cats.  I am a totally sucker for a white cat, or a black cat with long hair.  Not a single of those on the place though.  Her second to last litter was weird, if you are totally bored, let me tell you about it!

 

She did her normal end times routine of hanging in the garage and making me wish she was an inside cat.  And then sneaking in and lavishing herself on the carpet like a princess in a penthouse suite.  I can almost hear her every time….”ah the carpet, the possibilities the lushness, let’s roll and lay and stretch and lounge!”  Seriously folks.  I speak the truth.

 

Well she ended up with 4 kittens nestled appropriately (according to Hubster) in her birthing “room” aka tub, in the garage.  Things were amiss though.  The kittens were small and she was not!  She still looked pregnant.  I’m no cat OBGYN, but patient 2354’s womb was still occupied. 

 

Long story short, those four didn’t make it and she then had a single kitten, many, many, many days later.  This cat Dr was on call for a long shift!  Sadly, when the most precious WHITE, did you hear that? WHTIE kitten appeared, it only lived a few days as well.  Cat’s do weird things gestationally I think.

 

So after our po’ po’ babies loss, I couldn’t get her fixed!  And soon……she was “with child” again! 

Hang with me, this is a good one.  It has it’s ups and downs, tragedy and triumph……

 

 

It’s What They Do

It’s a normal everyday thing in these rural parts.  A shiny John Deere driving through the farm lot.  This tractor is new to our farm.  Well, it’s just plain new, but it’s also new here.  He’s kinda little, comparatively.  I think he’s cute. He’s a whipper snapper of a green machine. 

 

But today is special.  It’s practice day!  Practice what?  Well, it’s time to start serious training up of The Boy. 

You have to pull your weight around here son.  Starting in the first grade!

See in there, that tractor is being driven by my Little Guy and the Baby is along for a joy ride!

The concentration is fierce.  Fierce I tell ya. 

It’s serious business you know.  The laps around and around the house.  Through the farm lot they go.  If it isn’t obvious by the pale and pasty skin and the bare trees, not to mention the black dirt peeking through in those field…well this was actually a few months ago.  Errr….several months ago.

I’m a little weird, but just look at those guys.  Adorable!  So many similar features…look at their mouths.  Same stinkin’ expression.  Aren’t genetics freaky cool? 

This one looks like he is alone in the tractor…at the wheel!  Yikes!

Around and around and around….  It’s how we roll!

Growin’ Corn

You will notice I totally love to use ellipses and I love to throw in the twang…growin’ for growing, eatin’ for eating, workin’ for working.  It just sounds better that way.  I don’t talk like that, well, actually I throw that in my speech occasionally just for fun.  I do alot of things for the fun of it.  I don’t have a southern accent (but I secretly wish my babies did!)

 

These are the menfolk of the family.  They were in sunny Florida in the winter.  We don’t do Florida in the summer.  Dear Goodness I would melt.  I am positive of it.  The guy in the middle is not in our family.  But, we like him, we like him alot.  He helps us with our seed.  It’s a big decision.  My Main Squeeze makes these decisions along with his Dad.  They consult, they think.  He pulls the trigger. 

Last year our fertilizer guy (hmmm…aren’t you jealous now, we have a guy, a guy just for fertilizer) well he asked us to do a little test plot.  It was out by our house in a field I can see from my living room.  They threw everything they had at that little plot.  They cared for it and  fertilized it and treated it just so so and they talked to the corn…nah, but they did tons of stuff to that plot!  Careful calculated stuff here.  If a farmer did all these things to every acre he farmed, well, he’d be broke.  Well our guy urged my Hubs to enter into a contest about corn yields with this little section of land.  So, being the guy he is, he did. 

Imagine how shocked we were when our Seed Guy (that’s him, the big dark haired dude) called and said we won the contest for our state.  OUR… STATE!  Seriously, we won the highest yield for corn in our state last year.  Crazy.  So we got to go to Florida in the winter (did you hear my heart pitter patter) to accept the award.  Rock on! 

I’m not really one to brag, but this was seriously cool and since it was a totally a freak thing and we totally weren’t really expecting to win, somehow I don’t feel like it’s tooting our own horn. ( I do think the guys do a great job on our farm and I am so thankful and respectful of the work they do though.) Toot Toot!

See, they even let us women folk get in the photo opp.  They’re cool like that. 

The Little Brown Bag

 

The Little Brown lunch Bag….not!  Humungous white bag. Last year was the first year we used one of these ginormous, I mean ginormous bags to store our corn as it was harvested out of the field.  Forgive me for the lack of technical details when it comes to farm equipment.  This thing is seriously cool!  Of course, I’m not so up on the latest and greatest when it comes to this stuff, so I was just pretty amazed when I saw one of these babies for the first time.

See there, there are two extremely long tubes, filled with field corn, fresh out of the well, field. The person that thought of this is a flat genius I tell ya.  Why didn’t my hubbster think of this, he and his brother farm together and they are always “customizing” stuff and well, maybe they’ll invent something else wonderful someday. 

 

That’s buncha corn peeps!   See how they put the corn right in a little hopper that deposits in right into the bag.  The bag kind of crawls along the field and gets longer and longer and longer as they add corn.

See that tractor in front of the auger?  Nobody drives it.  How cool!  It is somehow pushed along by the hopper?  Maybe? Maybe this is where my imagination takes over for lack of real knowledge.  But the tractor runs the PTO that makes that hopper shove the corn into the bag.  Sweet! 

Our poor, poor truck drivers.  When this is going on, they get to hang out a little and supervise instead  of feverishly running to dump their load and get back before the combine has to stop cause it’s brimming.  Insert note here, a combine stopping in the field is a big NO NO.  I mean serious game changer here folks.

I showed up just at the right time.  This is a rare scene, more than one guy NOT driving something and hanging out to eat.  The guy in the cowboy hat?  He is my favorite guy to bring supper to.  I’ve been known to call him after he has left the farm and he comes BACK to get his food.  Warms my soul.  Don’t know why.  Just a nice guy! The other guy is my FIL.  He’s a nice guy too.  I like to feed him , but not as much as Cowboy!

 

Speaking of chow time.  This is the chow wagon a few times a week for our crew.  See, if I drove a cool car, not a not-so-cool vxx.  Then it wouldn’t function so well as a buffet.  I can’t even type it….vxx, best I can do.  Think today was something gourmet like hotdogs and mac-n-cheese. But I have never heard a complaint!

Back to the bagger.  This is the auger coming from the auger wagon pulled by it’s own tractor, getting ready to put corn into the hopper of the bagger. 

A better view of this contraption. 

 

You can kind of tell how big the bag is in this one. I should add, that last year we rented a bagger from another farm family that we are friends with in our area.  But this year, she’s mine all mine!  We got our own.  It was an exciting day when she was delivered.  I will post on that later. 

I just started noticing these bags last fall.  Maybe they are just new to us here in these parts.  So, have you seen these in the fields in your area? 

Maiden Voyage

My first post.  It’s been a long road of researching that has finally brought me to here.  I have looked at thousands of blog posts and analyzed hundreds of blogs to decide how I want this one to go.  Typical me. 

Let’s dive right in with my first post about life here on our farm.  Just how it is!

It’s 4H Fair week here.  We have 2 piggies at the fair.  Piggies makes it sound sweet and cute.  That, they ARE NOT!  They are big and muscular and loud.  My baby is a bit  a whole buncha sceered of them.  I think he’s totally justified there.  

The Big Girl, now, that’s a different story.  She is all about them hogs!  She is as serious as a heart attack about her 4H projects.  Who knew (I sure as heck didn’t) that pig showing involves daily walking and bathing of the pigs.  I can’t even say I even take a walk every day, but those pigs do! 

 

The my Big Guy isn’t yet able to show in the 4H fair, but next week he’ll make his debut with his piglet at the Open Show!  He isn’t quite as driven, but a bunch more laid back then his older counterpart!  

Seriously, though, 4H rocks. We did projects on art, tractors, sportsfishing, soil, pre-flight and laundry picking up, just kiddin’ on that laundry one, but we sure could use a little lesson or two on that one!  I have learned a ton, and my hubbinator got to do a few out of the box things too.  Like, reading a tractor owner’s manual with his young daughter.  I mean, who does that?  No one! Unless you have a project due at the fair in a week.  So, thanks 4H you are da bomb! 

A few 4H fair photos for ya….

 What do you need to know about fishing?  She’s gotcha covered.

What do you need to know about space buggies made from paper plates and hot glue and a bunch of dirt and sweat?  He’s got you covered! I mean, he is covered. 

And what does a baby do at the 4H fair you may ask?  Get filthy as a piggie!

Thanks for taking the time to read about our full little life here on the farm!