Marci, over at Down on the Farm, shared this video for the trailer of a new movie that looks to be wonderful and hopefully make a great impact on people.

This is why we are on the path we have chosen, as well.

To my dear sweet hubby, Mike.

Today is the first day of a new life for us, we hope. He left on a bus to Dallas at 5am this morning to attend school for CR England. He said the bus ride wasn’t great, could have been worse, but 8 hours on a bus kind of stinks.  Then the hotel they stay in is terrible, he says.  They have to turn off every light and the A/C when they leave each day or the hotel fines each of the students in the room $10 a day for extra electricity. Can you believe that?  Gotta love those small hotel owners….especially in 100* plus heat in the DFW area in the summer.

So, to my dear husband and wonderful father to my children, Happy Fathers’ Day! This also goes out to all the brothers, sons, fathers, grandfathers, uncles….of everyone!

This picture is of Mike, Felicity and Gregory in July 2004. Felicity was 3 years old and Gregory was 3 months old.

We love you Daddy!

No, I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth, though some may think so.

There’s not been much exciting going on around our house right now, plus “writer’s block” equals no posts.

Anyhow, here’s what I’ve been up to.  I’m going back to work.

Conception and Beyond is a turnkey store for Momma, Baby and Young Children. The business/site is for sale. You can see it live at www.conceptionandbeyond.com. This business is being sold through my new web design business, www.workathomedesignworks.com

Most of my readers aren’t aware that I designed and manufactured a line of cloth diapering accessories a few years ago.  In 2006, I sold the business, thinking I really just wanted to be a Stay at Home Mom.  I’m coming out of retirement with a fabulous line of products very soon. I’m ready to “rock-n-roll”! I’m so jazzed about my new businesses!

Other than that, not much is going on around our house.  Too many chickens equals we re-homed 9 last week.  We have about a dozen more to re-home, but we’re waiting to find out if they are roosters or pullets first.

I’ll be back soon!

During the kids spring break, we went to visit with Curt (works with Mike) at his farm. Curt is helping mentor us with information and advise for our new farm. Here’s lots of photos…enjoy!

We were there for hours…we had so much fun!

That lamp oil would be so hard to find.

We have started a new tradition at our house. Each night, we eat dinner over oil lamp light. We turn off the lights and fire up the oil lamps. It’s really quite a nice thing we have started.

Now that daylight savings time has changed, we don’t do this much at dinner time since it’s still daylight outside. Instead we light the oil lamps after dark while we watch tv, play games, etc. Not only is it saving electricity, it’s quaint and cozy. We like that.

For the past three days, I’ve been on a scavenger hunt for lamp oil. I can’t beleive there is not any to be found in Amarillo (well at least on the west side, that is). I have gone to 4 different places and nada…no lamp oil to be found. UGH.

Thank heavens for the absolute neatest store I found online several months ago, Lehmans. They carry lamp oil year round, along with TONS of other self-sufficient and homesteading products. By the way, if you’d like to see a very unique “Amish” site with thousands of products, click here!

As well as oil for my lamps, I found the “granny” fork that I have been wanting for years. My mother had one she used constantly when cooking and I’ve never been able to find one.  Now I have.

Have a great day and a fun time parusing Lehmans site!

I’ve been quite preoccupied lately and haven’t posted like I should.

I thought the best way to catch up would be to catch up with photos.

Here we go!

Here are some pictures of our farm. It is pretty much a “clean slate” for us to start with, just a small amount of clean up work. We will plant fast growing trees around the back and side property lines as a windbreak and also to hide the view behind us.

February 20 would have been my Mother’s 84th birthday. We had our first two Serama’s hatch that day. Felicity named the first to hatch Tina. I named the second to hatch Nonnie. That is what my Mother’s grandkids called her, and being her birthday, I felt it appropriate. If it turns out it’s a boy, we will call him Jack instead. Jacqueline was my Mother’s middle name.
This is Tina.

This is Nonnie. The baby chicks love Beanie Babies to nestle up to.

Here are the two of them together.

Gregory loves to hold the chicks and is a very good incubator monitor. Here he is holding Tina.

We also celebrated the birth of our first Naked Neck (Turken, aka Transylvania Naked Neck) chick. Her name right now is Liza, but if it turns out to be a boy, will be Curly.

Mike once told me he thought the Sicilian Buttercup chickens were pretty neat. Since they are on the critically endangered list, I though I would surprise Mike with some eggs for these chickens. He thought it was neat, but we figured we wouldn’t be able to keep the chicks, since they are LF (large fowl, meaning full size chickens, not bantams). Well, once we signed the papers on the farm, he decided he wants to keep them and raise the breed. Here are his first chicks to hatch this past week.

Here’s ONE ROTTEN CHICKEN, Gabe!

Yet another baby in the house, Bunny is her name.

I am participating in Judy’s Quilt a Long over on her blog at PatchworkTimes. Here are the HST (half-square triangle) sections that were the assignment for part 2.

Last but not least…a full incubator! 75 eggs inside!

Have a wonderful Sunday evening!

Well, today was supposed to be a day of sewing on quilt blocks for Felicity and I during Judy’s Quiltathon.  We got nothing done today because….

We signed the papers on our 5.4 acres of land for our farm today!!!  We even got a farm truck along with it!!!  We are all eggstatic (lol). It needs a bit of clean up work, but nothing serious.  It is down the road from where we used to rent before moving to our current rental house.  We looked for land when we moved out of that place, but could find nothing where we wanted to be in our price range.  God made our week this week AWESOME!

Also, obviously I was off count on hatch day for the first of the many batches of eggs in the incubator.  I had planned on hatch day for Sunday. We had 3 baby chicks hatch yesterday and 4 so far today. WHEW! What a tired Chicken Mommy I am tonight.  Photos to come soon.

So in getting back on track for the Quiltathon, tomorrow I will have photos as proof that Felicity and I are participating lol. We’ve got so much to do and are excited to have the day after Mass to work on it all while Mike is at work.

I received another batch of eggs from Lisa on Backyard Chickens (same place my other eggs came from).  They arrived Saturday, and I put them in 2 egg cartons in order to let them warm to room temperature.

Well, as I have told everyone before, Gregory is really fascinated with the eggs in the incubator. Soooo…. Felicity found him in the kitchen with 2 of the eggs in his hands. YIKES!  We put them back in the carton and moved the carton back on the counter away from Gregory’s reach.

Later in the evening, as I was checking the incubator temp and humidity….. I found 2 of the eggs already in the bator!!! GREGORY!!!  Well, one was fine but the other he had cracked, looks like he dropped it. BUT only the shell cracked, not the membrane and nothing was leaking out. So, we duct taped the egg and we’ll see if it develops. LOL  Gotta love my little guy.

So, all the rest of the eggs went in the bator late Saturday night…so 21 days from then, we’ll have more little chickies running around.

On Friday, Gregory actually started holding Tuff and Gabe. Actually picking them up and holding them!!!  I was so excited! That is an incredible accomplishment for my little sensory boy!

We’re keeping Tuff and Gabe from the first hatch and Charlie from the second hatch. The rest we will sell and place in good homes only.

Have a great Monday!

Well, instead of completely filling in about the past 3 weeks.  I’ll just pick up here and let you know everyone is finally healthy and things around the house are getting back to normal.

All is well again. Hopefully it will stay that way for a while.

I will be back to blogging on a regular basis again. I missed it!

Sorry I’ve been MIA. After a few way too long nights of finishing up handmade Christmas gifts, my mental health took a nose-dive.  I had a few days that I just felt blah and didn’t want to do anything but “nothing”.  I’m rested again and back on track again.

We had an AWESOME Christmas!  Katie was here with us the entire days/nights of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  That’s the first time since Christmas 2001 when Felicity was a baby.  She even helped out on the making of gifts, too!

Christmas Eve, we had our friends, Mike, Dorey and their dd, Stephanie over.  Katie’s guy-friend (not boy friend), Jessie and his 17mo old son, Coleman came over and I made homemade Vegetable soup and Muffeletta.  Everyone ate until they were stuffed!  Mike, Dorey and Stephanie opened their gifts from us.  Coleman did as well.  It’s pretty fun having a baby around to make Christmas gifts for. We enjoyed catching up with Mike, as he is a OTR truck driver and we don’t get to see him much. 

Christmas Day, we opened gifts, then went to Mike & Dorey’s for Christmas breakfast.  We opened gifts from them.  Then, since we were up so early to go eat breakfast, and were to bed so late on Christmas Eve, we went home and everyone except Felicity took a 3-5 hour nap.  I fixed dinner around seven o’clock, cleaned up the kitchen and our day was done.

I’ll add some Christmas photos to this post later today.

Hope all our readers had a fantastic Christmas!!!