Our Little Princess

This is just a quick post to put up the latest picture of our biggest AdventureGirl. She just started pre-ballet classes at the YMCA, and of course is thrilled with the whole proceeding. I on the other hand feel like a duck out of water. Not known for my physical grace, not a dancer myself, and having never taken a dance class (thank goodness for my own kinder-gymnastic experiences at the Y or I would be completely hopeless!), I was shocked at how seriously most of the moms are taking this class. The age range is 3-5 people! Come on!!! Luckily M is oblivious to it, and we are meeting our goal of her learning a little more "mind over matter" when it comes to coordination :-) We'll see where it goes from there, but it certainly isn't worth an ulcer.

Not much else has happened of late. We all got hit with a double dose of the crud, and are slowly ridding the household of it. We also learned an unfortunate lesson about Dora (the dog, not the cartoon) and chickens, so now I am in the chicken-nursing business and Glenda is missing a lot of skin off of her back. No eggs for now, and I will be surprised if she recovers, but stranger things have happened. Luckily Cheep, Peep, and Banana are doing well, so there is hope of more eggs in the late fall.

AdventureDad also started putting together the second raised bed for the hoop house, and I am chomping at the bit to start my spring planting. We got a crop of turnips and greens over the winter, so I have high expectations for the summer !

Big Red

So, the AdventureFamily has recently acquired two red things that will have an impact on our lives. The first is Glenda (the good chicken), named of course by AdventureDad. Glenda is a Rhode Island red who was an excess hen on a friend's farm. She has since moved in here, and is faithfully laying us a delicious brown egg every day. Of course we couldn't stop there, and we also have 3 chicks in the basement that are rapidly growing. Cheep is a Wellsummer chicken, Peep is a silver-laced Wyandotte, and Pep is a light Sussex. Talk about a mixed flock, and if they all turn out to be hens (there is a 50/50 shot on both Cheep and Pep), we will be drowning in eggs. Doesn't sound too horrible to me!
The other item is "Big Red", the "new" tractor. Several decades newer than Jimmy's antique, it is a bit more powerful, more reliable, and has a bucket on the front, all of which should make our life on Nine Trees a little easier.
We made our first trip out to the farm last month, and succeeded in getting the truck firmly stuck in the mud (yes, it was me). Thankfully our neighbor Rod is a lifesaver who happens to have an astounding collection of equipment, and he quickly rolled up in his bulldozer and pulled us out like it was nothing.
Since then, AdventureDad has had surgery on his elbow. He had an old injury from his first deployment that has slowly been worsening, and finally had to go in to have a collection of bone fragments removed from the joint and the nerve re-routed to a spot where it will get pinched less. I'll post the gory pictures later, but the poor guy had a purple arm from shoulder to fingertips. He's healing well now, although very frustrated at the slow progress (we're coming up on the 3 week anniversary), but it should pay off in the end.
We are now in the "pre-hay" season, starting to plan our trips out to the farm and figure out a timeline for getting the weeds sprayed, the hay cut and baled, and the seeds and fertilizer put down for next year. On top of it all, we are starting to tease ourselves with the idea of starting construction on our house this summer. A bit earlier than the original plan, but we are hoping it will give us time to do a bit more of the work ourselves. We shall see!

AdventureGirl's B-day

Well, it has happened, another year has passed, and AdventureGirl is growing up. Simultaneously bittersweet and wonderful, this birthday really brought home to me how fast life can go by, and I feel thankful that I have two sweet and wonderful little girls to bring love and challenge into my life on a daily basis. This year we have actually been in one place long enough for M to have made friends, so we went all-out and had a rain-proof indoor party at a local place called Jump! that the girls both love. (Fortuitous since it rained all day!) Picture a giant room full of inflatable slides and bouncy castles and you pretty much have it. Nothing like non-stop jumping, sliding, and running to make a group of kids happy and cooperative! Needless to say they had a blast, and the parents got a nice chance to visit too. My daughter, a girl after my own heart, requested (without even a hint from me) a lemon cake with strawberry frosting, and I was more than happy to oblige.
Enjoy the pics!

After the Blogging Sabbatical

Well, I am officially back at it again. My deployment-induced facebook fervor has died down, and I am suddenly finding less and less time to devote to keeping up with my FB account. I won't even attempt to update all that has happened since my last post, but in a whirlwind of run-on sentences; AdventureDad returned from Afghanistan this last spring, and we immediately embarked on a furious summer of crash-course hay farming. We have slowly been acquiring the necessary farming implements, (although the vast majority of them are older than even the most wizened member of the AdventureFamily) and this spring we put them to use on Nine Trees. Nana and Grandpa joined us in their camping trailer for a week of haying fun that involved more equipment repair than actual cutting of grass, but in the end we did have a trailer-full of fairly respectable hay bales, the last of which the horses are currently munching on in the barn. The first cutting was followed by the barn-building. Yes, the first structure is officially standing on our farm. Of course to build the barn we also had to put in an access road, so next step this summer is to apply for an address. Exciting times! After the barn was built (not by us), we embarked on a field-improvement campaign that involved enlarging the existing hay field (it's almost double now), putting down some new grass seed, and fertilizing. At the end of the season we also erected a wind barrier for the orchard (we'll see if it is still standing this spring) and winterized the equipment. That was pretty much our summer... fun and exciting for us, and a little hard to fathom for most of the people we know. We loved getting to know our place better, and we did not love the 600 mile round trip that each weekend out there entailed. The AdventureGirls logged more hours in the truck this summer than many commercial drivers ;-). Our ancient pop-up trailer was our home away from home, and the girls luckily tucked right in to camping with apparent enjoyment. Hope it stays that way, as we have another full summer ahead of us this year! The dogs also love the farm, as they have miles of unimpeded exploring to do, the culmination of which was Dora getting skunked three, yes THREE times, one of which involved dragging a half-dead baby skunk into the middle of camp. Apparently for her the burning mucous membranes and week-long banishment to the garage do not out-weigh the thrill of the hunt.
Fall was spent mostly around Gig Harbor, slowly accumulating more trees to plant on Nine Trees, putting up a hoop house in the garden, and getting things a bit more organized here. We had a grand Thanksgiving here with half of the immediate Duncan clan in attendance, followed by a Merry Christmas (sans snow) at Nana and Grandpa's in MT. We are now currently thawing out from our annual snow-dump, which involved 7 inches of wet snow topped off by a full day of freezing drizzle. Post was closed for three days, power was out all over the peninsula, and my hoop house and the ancient wood shed in our back yard were both flattened into pancakes. They even had to close the narrows bridge (our only direct route to the mainland) for a full day due to giant falling icicles. Now we are rapidly thawing (and flooding) in preparation for a new week, the first full one for awhile for AdventureDad, which is good because he had some time to recover from catching a piece of flying wood on the chin. A sore (but thankfully unbroken) jaw, 10 stitches (on the surface), and a sure-to-be-tale-inducing-new-scar-in-the-making were the result of a kick-back from the table saw which has resulted in a plethora of new safety measures in the shop. Push sticks, eye glasses, and ear protection were insufficient, so we now have added feather boards, jigs, and a plexiglass face shield to ward off future projectiles!
The girls have been in fine form all summer, with M taking to preschool like a duck to water and O deciding that she would leap from single words to full sentences in the space of about 3 weeks. I am sure as I get back into posting more AdventureGirl-related shenanigans will surface, but my momentum has been exhausted for the time being. Enjoy the picture, and keep tuning in as I'll be back soon!

Long Time

It has been a shamefully long time since I have blogged. I admit that facebook has been taking my computer time and sucking it into a vortex... the ease of a quick update is just too tempting! A lot has happened in the AdventureFamily since my last post. So, in chronological order: AdventureDad is now "safely" in Afghanistan. He is on FOB Todd, which is a very remote, very rough outpost in the north-western mountains. He lives in a tent, gets water in tanks (they can only shower 3 times a week on a good week), and the only access is by air. It will be a long deployment for him, but he is doing well. Just after AdventureDad left (in fact while he was still in Kuwait), we also discovered that we had another AdventureBaby on the way. We had not planned on this one, but after the initial shock we were both thrilled with the idea. Sadly, I had a miscarriage at 11 weeks. We are both OK now, although still sad when thoughts of the family that was going to be cross our minds, but we both take comfort in our beautiful daughters and the joy and challenges that they bring into our lives every day. If there was no other Purpose to our sadness, the strength it brought to our family is a lesson in itself.
I spent an extended holiday month in MT with my parents. It was wonderful to enjoy our first white Christmas in awhile, and the girls really enjoyed having free access to snow. Grandpa got a radio flyer sled for Christmas, which he graciously shared, and AdventureGirl decided that it was the most fun ever. The driveway has a good 1/8 of a mile downhill run, and we wooshed down it endlessly... or at least until AdventureMom decided we had enough. M would have worn the runners off of the sled before she voluntarily quit!
AdventureBaby is a baby no longer, and is going to need a new nickname. She is walking and running, and trying so hard to talk! She has a few words now, like kitty, stop, etc., and she can mimic almost anything I say. It is so fun to hear the two girls playing together, which is becoming more fun for both of them as O gets a bit bigger and more able. We found a preschool for M to start this coming fall. She is anxious, and so am I! I know she's going to take to it like a fish to water, and I feel really good about the school we found. It was love at first sight as soon as I talked to the first teacher there.
We are settling in nicely on our little rental farm in Gig Harbor... the horse shelter is up and they have a couple nice pastures. There is endless work to do on the old fences, and a lot of patches of man-eating blackberries to keep trimmed back, but that is the kind of stuff that I enjoy, and the girls like the outdoor time while I work. My next project is establishing a garden plot. I have spring fever very badly thanks to a rash of good weather and sunshine (my bulbs are all up and the trees are budding), but the good old northwest freezing wind and rain are due to return any day now, so those thoughts will be put on hold for a little while.
We have big plans for our farm in Walla Walla (now called Nine Trees ... the first things planted on the farm were our 9 fruit trees put in last fall), with hopes for our first crop of hay this year. I am planning on heading out this spring to do some seeding and weed control, then hopefully we'll get things underway when AdventureDad returns from his travels.
So in a nutshell that has been the last 3 months in the AdventureFamily. Busy as usual, but in a good way!

Mystery Solved

AdventureDad and I have been hearing a mysterious splashing sound in the creek outside our bedroom window essentially since we moved in here... about a month now. At first it was only occasional, but lately we have been hearing a LOT of splashing, mostly at night but also during the day, especially when it was overcast. We would scan the area with a flashlight with visions of beavers or otters or raccoons floating in our heads, but we never caught anything. Today I was glancing out our window to see a dark "creature" in the creek, just disappearing under an overhanging tree. I wasn't sure what I had seen, just something dark in the water, so I yelled to AdventureDad to bring the binoculars. While I was scanning the water AdventureDad called out "it's a fish!" We hurried down to the creek and saw several chum salmon working their way upstream. So yes, we officially have a salmon stream in the backyard and the splashing mystery is solved.

We also had our first snow of the season today. AdventureGirl is thrilled (as well as the rest of the AdventureFamily!).

Update

I'm finally taking a minute to update the blog. Amazing but true. Since my last blog life has been a whirl-wind of preparation and adjustment. After looking through 100's of rental homes online, and at least a dozen in person, we found a place for the family and the horses to be happy for the next few years. Actually, we really lucked out and found the perfect place for us... reasonable rent on a larger (albeit older but very well-built) house with lots of storage, as well as several acres of pasture for the horses and a nice spot to put up the horse shed. The house is set back from the road far enough that we don't worry about the kids and dogs, a salmon stream runs through the back yard, and we are walking distance to the harbor and a city park with a playground. Doesn't get much better for the Adventurefamily's purposes.
So, after finding our little spot, the move began. This entailed MANY trips with the horse trailer and the flatbed trailer hauling all of our stuff about 45 miles (we're on the opposite side of post now). Boy, were we glad to get that done! Of course after the moving comes the cleaning, and I spent several days spit-polishing our former rental (probably more than necessary considering how fast the final inspection was). So, we are officially moved out of the old house, and at least all of our stuff is at the new house. It will take me quite awhile to unpack because we have had other priorities at the moment, like taking the tractor out to Walla Walla, putting up the horse shed, and getting storage in place to keep all of our farm implements out of the weather this winter, not to mention having a little fun before AdventureDad departs for less hospitable climes.
The AdventureGirls love our new home, although we'll have to do a little kid-proofing of the stream in the back yard before I'm completely comfortable. I didn't mention that there is also a beach that's about a 10-minute drive away, and M is enthralled with that. We'll soon have more shells and rocks than we know what to do with, although her current obsession is feeding the gulls (we haven't done it yet, but we read about it in a book so now she wants to try). Guess we'll have to go back! O just had her one-year checkup. We were shocked to find out that she's considered very tall and skinny... 85th percentile in height and 13th in weight. They're having us give her a bit more fat and calories and do another weight in a month, but to be honest I'm just not that worried. She is so active and healthy, and although she is certainly not (nor ever has been) a chubby baby, she looks healthy. I'm guessing we just caught her at the end of a growth spurt, not to mention that she hasn't stopped moving since she learned to walk. We'll see what the verdict is in another month.
We're all slowly adjusting to the idea that AdventurDad is going to be gone for awhile. M is a bit too young to understand the length of time we're talking about, so we'll have to take that part step by step. We're just thankful that his departure was delayed as long as it has been, essentially giving us a "bonus month". I don't know how we would have done all of the moving etc. without a little extra time. So, we're settling in, enjoying our last few weeks together, and looking forward to learning more about our new neighborhood.