All our yard's critters...part 2 (the chickens)

 

 

So these are our six chickens...hens, to be exact. They are known as Rhode Island Reds. Actually, we started out with seven chicks when we bought them in March. They were guaranteed 95% to be "sexed" right. Well...one of them after a few weeks was obviously not a female. He turned out to be a rooster. We kept him for a short time, but then before he could get too big and start waking up the neighborhood, we gave him to a friend who has a ranch. That put us down to the six hens. Jason built them a beautiful chicken coop and a nice sized chicken run. Once in a while he lets them become "free range" and wander around our backyard for a while. I have to giggle when Jason gets out there with a stick and starts "herding" them back toward the coop. Who knew that I married the chicken man?

Soon Jason will be building their nest boxes since they are nearly old enough to start laying eggs. The girls are excited to be able to go out and gather our own farm fresh eggs!

All our yard's critters....part 1 (the rabbits)

 

 

 

 

Last year Jason decided that we'd try to have a little "mini-farm" here in Bloomington...as much as we can for not being zoned for farm animals. We started out with rabbits, and then last Spring we got the chickens. The plan for the rabbits is to have them for meat, not as pets. Its all a part of Jason's preparedness ideas. Obviously, the chickens are for eggs and we could eat them too.

You'd think that raising and breeding rabbits would be a lot easier. I mean really, don't they just reproduce all the time on their own, and that's it?? This has not been our experience. First off, we somehow ended up with all males rabbits to begin with. Apparently their gender was not easily determined at first, so we ended up with all males. That's not exactly going to work and we wondered if rabbits could be gay???? So we switched some around and ended with both male and females eventually. Two of our does got pregnant and gave birth in the winter. We believe that both of them had premature litters, because the babies were very small. None of them survived. That was a loss of 13 bunnies.

Along the way, we have acquired more rabbits. One of them is white New Zealand rabbit, who we have named "Big Mama". Its pretty obvious which one she is. Jason has tried several times to breed her. One time she did end up pregnant, but ended up with a very premature single rabbit. She just had two babies last week...one died at birth and for whatever reason, she ended up not feeding and caring for the surviving one. So the past few days Maegan and Emily have been rabbit mothers, and have been feeding him by dropper with goat milk we got from a friend. Sadly, he ended up passing away on July 24. Jason says he'll try breeding her one more time. If it doesn't work, she'll probably end up in the freezer!

One of our mama bunnies named Becca, had a litter of 9 earlier in the Spring. They lived for about 10 days. Then for whatever reason, she killed all of them the same day. This was very upsetting for all of us! However, just a few weeks ago she had a litter of 10 rabbits. TEN! They were doing well, but then one day she killed off half of them. We assume that having that many babies probably overwhelmed her, or perhaps she wasn't capable of producing enough milk for them all. So that brought her litter down to five. Happily, those five babies have survived and the girls have had so much fun playing with them! They understand, however, that once these babies are all grown up they will be meat and not pets. Its a hard lesson to learn but, that's the reality of having a farm, right?

Jason....shopping....

 

 

He'll probably kill me for posting this, but I know he'll laugh about it later! This actually happened in June. He, Maegan and I went shopping at Downeast Outfitters. Maegan was trying on bathing suits and I was looking around the store to see what they had (it was a new store and our first time there). Being at the end of a very busy Saturday, Jason found himself a cozy chair...and promptly fell asleep! I couldn't resist snapping these pictures of him!! hahahahaha!

Emily got braces!

Just a few days after her 10th birthday, Emily got to go to Dr. Robert Prince to get her braces put on! This is something that she was nervously excited about. She chose red and blue bands to be patriotic for the month of July! Initially, Dr. Prince is just putting the braces on those front four teeth, and then as needed the others will be put on. Just in the past few weeks we can already see big changes in her smile!!

 

 

Bowling with cousins!

 

My sister, Jodi, and her boys were here in late May. They had been playing the Wii bowling game at Papa's house, but wanted to try out real life bowling too. We took them to the bowling lanes out on Sunset Blvd one night and they had a great time! There were a few "oopsies"...like Aidan's ball rolling down the lane next to us, the positions the kids would get themselves in to release the ball (including upside down and backwards!) and all sorts of other wacky stuff! It was worth the money just for the laughs we all got and the kids really enjoyed themselves!

Emily Anne is now 10!!

 

Its been two months since I've posted anything, so I have much catching up to do! One month I was completely without my normal computer and picture files, and another month I've just been busy with stuff in the house! But I had to share Emily's 10 year old pictures first! She sure is growing up on us! Emily is one of the sweetest girls on the planet, always so loving and willing to help. She is a big help with the bunnies around here and we love her oh so much!