Happy Mother’s Day to all my mother friends and family. I hope you have been enjoying this day set aside for you and are getting some much needed relaxation.

Now that the days are warmer and brighter we are spending more time outside. I know that I’m an avid indoorsman (much to Mike’s chagrin), but I must say I can’t resist devouring this South Dakota spring. As soon as we got home from church today we all threw on some comfy clothes and headed to the exterior.

Lewis is really bonding with Mike and seems to consider him to be his “mama”. He’s really taking to his bottle and guzzles it down quickly.

When allowed to roam Lewis doesn’t leave Mike’s side.

The killdeer seems to be getting used to us spying on her each day and will stay put even when I get only a few inches from her nest. Can you see her eggs peaking out from underneath?

I couldn’t resist a picture of my girls and me on Mother’s Day. Of course, I was hoping again for one of those Sunday dress portraits, but I’ll take what I can get these days.

And did you notice my shirt? It started out as a one 3 for $10 South Dakota t-shirt from Walgreen’s (the other 2 t-shirts were for Mike; in fact, Mike is wearing one above.). I saw this tutorial on Pinterest and felt okay about the possibility of losing $3 if it didn’t work for me. I think it turned out pretty darn cute for my first t-shirt redux. Now I have a South Dakota t-shirt to make myself an official resident (that’s required, right?) I want to go back to Walgreen’s to buy three more t-shirts to repurpose.

ETA: The link for the t-shirt tutorial is HERE.

Our farm has been officially upgraded to a “real” farm due to our latest addition.

Meet Lewis.

He was born on Sunday as a twin. Unfortunately, mama didn’t want Lewis which is why he now belongs to us. He is what the cattle industry refers to as a bottle calf.

The girls still aren’t sure what to do around him, so they are keeping their distance.

This will be an adventure, for sure.

In other news, our niece Morgan is here to help whip our farm into shape. We get her for two whole months. Needless to say, the girls are quite ecstatic to have their cousin here for so long. So far Morgan seems to be enjoying this new lifestyle.

Luck has not been on our side when it comes to barn cats. I won’t go into details, but let’s just say we’ve had in our possession a total of 8 barn kitties and are now left with 2. One of which was added to our brood yesterday thanks to Annie’s teacher.

Meet Charlie. The name indicates that we are unsure whether Charlie is a boy or a girl. Time will hopefully tell. Violet loves “her” and will not let anyone come near her. We think she’s about 6-8 weeks old.

Mike is most excited about this spring addition. Wild asparagus is growing all over our property. A side of it was served with dinner the other night and was delicious.

Mike noticed a killdeer limping around in one of our pastures, and he knew her “limping” and “broken” wing were only a trick to steer predators away from her nest. We played her game for a little while letting her lead us away from her precious eggs, but we eventually found the nest.

Poor Mimi has pink eye in both eyes. She had to miss school today and was not happy because it was lollipop day. The girls discovered large lollipops in our china cabinet and begged to take them to school for this occasion. Surprise, surprise, Annie was not able to finish hers at school. Being the generous big sister that she is she shared with Violet.

I’m beginning to think reverse psychology works really well on me. If you remember in my post about the kitchen pegboard, Mike declared “no more projects for the house”. This statement lit a fire within me and made my brain explode with lots of ideas to do for the house. Now, I can’t claim that if Mike had said the opposite that my inspiration fountain would have dried up. Who knows though.

Anyway, while Mike was out of town last week at his yearly AAE convention I got the urge to get creative one more time for this little farmhouse of ours. There was a blank wall above our t.v. that was silently driving me insane. Why? Because this wall was a huge, empty canvas that was just screaming for something to be done to it. The obstacle I was having trouble with though was the giant t.v. right smack in the middle. I didn’t feel like it would look right if I just hung a bunch of family pictures above it because then I would be constantly reminiscing about the memories in the photos instead of watching my important television programs. We can’t have that now can we?

I had pinned a bunch of ideas on Pinterest, but nothing seemed like the right thing to do. I’ve always loved seeing the way people hang wall letters randomly among other wall decor, and then it finally hit me. I would go crazy with wall letters! It turns out Joann Fabrics has quite a collection of paper mache and wooden letters in various fonts and sizes, and I happened to purchase them when they were 50% off and also found a free shipping coupon code. Score! I decided to take the initials of each of my family members and randomly scatter them around a giant H (please don’t make me explain why I would use an H…tee hee). I went to the local craft store and found acrylic paints for way cheap, and I got to work. I also painted a couple of the letters metallic silver just to add a shiny pop. I must say I’m very pleased with the outcome. And, if you’re wondering, I used velcro to hang the letters on the wall. Why didn’t “they” come up with this idea years ago?

Another project I’ve been aching to do is organize my darn den. When we moved in I just kind of threw things into drawers/bins/shelves/etc. and didn’t really focus on organization. This method has really come back to haunt me as I’m constantly finding myself trying to track down receipts, bills, documents and such. I decided I needed to get my act together and get the den organized. I’ve always been bothered by the lack of space on my desk, so I opted for a new system. I found this desk organizer on Amazon and loved how it keeps all the supplies off the desk. Another thing that troubled me was the lack of light, so I bought one those clicker lights at the dollar store. I’m so relieved at how much simpler and cleaned up the space is now.

One last thing before I depart. While Violet was supposed to be eating lunch today she kept turning around and just being plain cute. I couldn’t resist grabbing the camera and snapping a few pictures of her. I really need to get into a better habit and take pictures ‘just because’.

A few weeks ago the neighbors completely gutted a tree strip that was behind their house. They moved in only a couple of months before us, so they’ve been busy working on their house as well. Both of our yards were completely covered in trees, so they’ve decided they actually wanted some grassy yard for their kids to play. The neighbors have friends with lots of big equipment and were able to use an excavator to literally push all the trees over and uproot them. I told Mike we’ve been approaching our tree removal from the wrong angle. Forget chainsaws, just push the darn things over!

Mike asked if he could have his friend use his backhoe to also make our stock pond bigger. First of all, I didn’t even know we had a stock pond. Second of all, why does it need to be bigger? Apparently, Mike wants it to be big enough to use as a water source for any future livestock. The stock pond, or watering hole as I’ve named it, is now the size of an ice-skating rink, to give you a reference for size. Apparently, there is a small stream that runs into one end of the pond and out of the other end, so this is how our now bigger pond filled itself up. The frogs have also already taken residence. When we drove up to check it the pond the other day, the frog chirping was almost deafening.

A longview of the watering hole.

On the right is the stream feeding into the pond.

The stream running out of the pond.

Daddy and the girls up atop the hill. Mike is planning to seed the “hills” (or the dug out earth) with grass seed.

In other news, Mike showed up last week with new specimens for our farm. We are now owners of guinea fowl. 10 of them. Apparently, they are master bug eaters and really love wood ticks. We’ve already been finding wood ticks on the girls, so we’re hoping the guineas will keep the tick population down. They are also supposed to be good guard birds making a raucous whenever strangers (people or animals) come on the property. I’m not sure how this will play out in the long-term and if it’s something I’m going to be able to stand hearing all the time. We shall see.

In the meantime, they are cute, little keets (that’s the term for guinea babies).

When I took this pic I didn’t realize Violet had decided to pick up the bird to show it to me. Don’t worry, no birds were harmed in the making of this picture.

In case you’re interested, this is what a full-grown guinea fowl looks like. Handsome, huh? I think they kind of look like turkies in the face.