Robert: He is enjoying his job and being very productive at it. He is just now pulling out of the exhaustion of post-Covid recovery. And he stays busy around the house doing different things to improve our lives at home. He scheduled our first ever family vacation for August. We will be going to Yellowstone National Park. Lindsey: I am excited to finish up the school year. Its been a hard one. I've struggled with distractions and joy. But I have already started thinking and planning for next year which will be our first and only school year with all six kids officially schooling. I am still blessed with getting to assist at births with some local midwives. And I am enjoying spending time with friends that I've made here. The joy the kids and I have in taking care of all of these animals is just amazing! Tender: She just finished her classes at SBU for the semester but will continue working on her math at home throughout the summer. Her dad has also assigned some theological studies for her for the summer. Tender will be a senior in the fall. She got to attend a public school prom with a good friend from church and that was such fun! Since it has been forever since I updated everyone, she has also gotten a job at the same hospital Robert works at. She was a Temp. Monitor but is slowly leaving that to work registration at the ER. Hurricane: She is busy with farm animals and homeschooling. She has also had a couple of jobs this year. She has been cleaning a house every other week and babysitting for a community group at church. So its exciting for her to have some cash. She was baptized at church a couple months ago and really enjoys our church. She just finished up eighth grade. The Boy: His big news is playing baseball for the first time ever! We have been trying to practice a little every day but overall he is enjoying it immensely! Some friends from church moved into a house right beside us and The Boy spends a lot of time creating adventures with the neighbor kids. He is finishing up sixth grade but will be working on math throughout the summer as well. Wild Man: He is finishing up third grade and continues to be pretty wild. The biggest thing to him to happen lately is a run-in with pepper spray (by his own hand). Wild Man will work on math throughout the summer too. He really needs to get better at writing but I think that is because he is such a large motor fella. Hopefully his fine motor skills will catch up. Meanwhile, he is running around barefoot catching frogs and enormous snapping turtles. Hulk and Bug: I'm just going to do them together because they are basically inseparable. They play at the creek everyday. They play with cars, wrestle, play on riding toys, and chase Marmee around all day. It seems like they entertain each other so well that I rarely reign them in to do something formal for learning. Although Hulk did work on reading this year and did well with that. They also liked to play math games on the iPad. In the fall I'm going to have to get stricter with them learning how to sit still for tiny amounts of time. : ) Hulk busted Bug's forehead open with a golf club.... again. Farm Update: the fourth
Ok. We've had a few thing happen since last time. One, Cresent died. Of mysterious causes. Two, we got two new rabbits and I named them Montague and Capulet(if you have any class at all, you know those are Romeo and Juliet's house names). I didn't gender them at first so the boy ended up with the girls name. Montague(the girl) was slightly crippled but got around surprising well. However that didn't stop her from being the first to die. Capulet died a few weeks after. Both of whatever mysterious causes took Cresent. Hazel remains alive and well; possibly the killer of her brethren. Who knows. Three, new chickens!!! Only one has died so far and the rest are doing great. All different breeds. So far I've only named three; Heather, Veronica, and Heather Chandler(don't ask, I don't know myself). They're very good layers and only mildly aggressive when they're hungry. Which is always. Four(I guess there's more than I thought), we got rid of Jake. Eventually he just got dangerous to be around. Very temperamental. Unpredictable. He would randomly buck and kick at us for no reason. So we sold him. And replaced him with... Five! A pony! We got a pony. Her name is Honey. She is eight years old and 12 1/2 hands. We drove three hours there and back to get her. She's quite a bit better at riding than Jake was and it took barely any time at all for me to be comfortable on horseback again. I got a riding lesson back in March, and while it was very helpful, she still started to act up and tried to bite my feet no matter how I was sitting or if I was using the saddle or not. Eventually I stopped riding her(that was about a month ago) because I was worried I would screw her up if I kept trying. I was planning on getting more lessons but that hasn't happened yet. Dad said I should still do things with her though, so I kept giving her baths and making her walk on concrete to get the mud out of her hooves(I remain too much of a coward to pick out her feet and concrete walking beats it out better than I ever could). Anyways, there's some backstory for you, onto the real story. Six(5 1/2?)! Last Thursday (the 6th) we were outside for the morning and while they were in the garden I went to give Honey a bath. I noticed she was looking and acting a little weird. I didn't think anything of it until I was rinsing her belly and noticed her udder's were not only full, but dripping and waxing as well. I called mom over and we pulled together as much information as possible. Either she was full-term pregnant (I didn’t mention she’s enormously fat) and we didn't know it this whole time, or she had a tumor, or some other unknown cause that just happened to have all the unrelated symptoms of equine pregnancy. I was convinced it was the last, not because I didn't want her to be pregnant but because I was both unbelieving and knew it was safer for her not to be. For one thing, I had ridden her up until a month before we found out. Horses are pregnant for eleven months and you're supposed to stop riding at six months. Another thing is we have a kind of grass called fescue. It's toxic to pregnant mares. It can cause prolonged gestation and a thickened placenta, potentially causing the foal to suffocate. Another thing is if she was pregnant, that would mean that the father was not a pony, but a quarter horse. So it would be a miracle if it even got out of her. That Saturday I dragged dad to the vet and watched nervously as he stuck his entire arm into her and confirmed she was pregnant. He said the baby was alive(for now) and he couldn't tell if there would be complications. We watched nervously for five days and the second I came to terms with the fact that I didn't need to watch it happen for it to happen, it happened. It was the next Wednesday morning(prom day. YES I KNOW ITS WEIRD IT WAS ON A WEDNESDAY). I woke up at seven a.m. And laid in bed for a full three minutes before I heard dad on the phone downstairs. I could tell it was mom and immediately checked my phone and saw she had called me right before dad. I was outside in a manner of minutes and mom was yelling for me already(how she knew I was outside before I'd said anything or alerted anyone to my current existence in the premises, I don't know). She said a jumble of words that eventually translated to: HONEY HAD THE BABY AND IT’S IN THE OTHER STALL FOR SOME REASON! I went in the barn and sure enough, a pitch-black colt was in the corner of our bigger(unfortunately mold and maggot infested) stall,(Honey was in the smaller one before, we still have no idea how he got there) Mom had let her into the other field and she was losing her mind trying to find him. Eventually we got them together and got a good look at the situation. I’ll have mom tell the whole story, it’s very complicated, but here’s the end product: his name is Theodore Laurence(Laurie or Teddy for short), he is pitch black with a white mark on his forehead (don’t you dare suggest we should’ve named him something like Blackey or Midnight or Obsidian! I’ve had these suggested to me and I turned them down for a reason! Have some class). He is perfectly healthy and definitely part quarter horse, which means he’ll make a very fine steed. I’m still in shock at the fact that everything went fine and there were no complications. It really is a miracle that she even got him out of her birth canal. He’s very big. Anyways, I’d end on that, but we just got a pig too, so... Her name is Charlotte, she’s black and adorable and we should’ve named her legion. She’s certifiable. It’s terrifying. Her screams sound like the souls of Hades. She escaped for a couple of days but we just got her back. All’s well that ends well. Signing off with a crazy few months of farming– Hurricane P.S. Also our Silkie(Helen) had both of her feet fall off. So... That happened. And now, my (Lindsey's) version of the Pony's birth. Once we discovered that Honey was pregnant I went outside to check on her every morning before my walk to make sure that she hadn't given birth in the middle of the night. On Wednesday, May 12th, when I checked on her she was pacing back and forth frantic and I figured she was in labor. So I texted the girls (knowing they would still be asleep for a while but hoping they might see it soon) and took off on my two mile walk. When I returned, Tender met me at the barn to check on Honey again. She was still acting the same so I got her out of her stall so she could have space to move. I had her on a lead in the yard and she was just frantic. I could barely control her. I noticed some blood on her tail, assuming it was more sign of impending birth, I sent Tender to check her stall for anything other than the normal types of things. She came back saying it looked like there was a placenta in the hay. Well, not being able to control Honey well I walked her to one of our fields and released her while I called Robert and told him we ought to call the vet because I thought Honey had placenta previa and the foal is surely dead inside of her. I went back to the barn to fetch a shovel for the placenta so that I could take it outside and look at it in the sunlight. The shovel was over by the other stall, which we had left open since we werent using it. When I knelt down to pick up the shovel I glanced over and there stood a black foal staring back at me, alive and well, and obviously lost from his mommy. I screamed in shock, he jumped in fear and I ran out of the barn yelling for help. Honey was sprinting around the other field, not in labor, but searching for her missing baby! Robert came out with Tender shortly after I came out of the barn and I told them to get Honey back, her baby was in the barn. Hurricane came running out of the house and yelled at her to follow me, the foal was born and fine but somehow squeezed out of the stall he was born in and wandered into the other stall. Finally we shooed Honey through the open gate back into the field with the barn and gave the trembling foal a little nudge out of the stall and into Honey's eye line. And they were reunited. Phew! And that all occured before 7am. We went on to preparing for a prom and anxiously watching the colt and mama to make sure they were doing well. I slept like a rock that night.
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LindseyI'm the mama and wife. Updating you on our life! Archives
January 2022
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