09

Jun

2021

December on the Farm

The past few months have been jam packed. Because I was putting a lot of my free time into preparing for the birth of our baby, I got behind with documenting life on the farm. So I’m going to do a few posts to catch up. Each post will have some photos of things that happened around her during that month and a video as well.

We got the keys to our house on the last day of November so December was filled with a lot of unpacking, exploring around our land, taking in a lot of nature experiences, and enjoying having our very own yard for the first time.

We also added the first 3 animals to our farm… two kittens and a puppy.

And on top of all of that, we celebrated Christmas and our 12th wedding anniversary.

We founds some osage oranges and discovered that the squirrels like to eat them.

We noticed that we have some gorgeous sunsets here.

Bought a gorilla cart instead of a wheel barrow (it’s been veeerrry useful around here) and after putting it together we used it to haul out a bunch of trash in preparation for our first trash pick up day at this house.

Our moving truck didn’t arrive until December 7th so we spent the first week without any furniture and minimal household supplies. Not having furniture to sit on is not fun when you’re pregnant. haha.

We have lot of bluejays on our land. And although we’ve been told that they can be bully birds (to other birds…not to humans, as far as I know), they sure are pretty.

We had 3-4 deer show up in our yard quite a few times. It was fun to watch them.

We also have a couple pairs of cardinals. They are especially pretty when it snows and you can see them really well against the white backdrop of the snow.

Cleaning out and fixing up the chicken coop for the chicks that we thought we were going to get from my parents’ friends… but they ended up dying before we even got them.

Lots of playing outside means that the floor has to be cleaned more often because mud gets tracked in.

On December 6th (the night before our moving truck arrived), we acquired our first animals… Agnes and Aida the kittens. This was our first experience having animals and I think kittens are definitely a good first pet. The kids were instantly in love. And the kittens have proved to be our easiest and most low maintenance animals.

The moving truck with all of our belongings finally arrived and we were able to start officially moving in and making this house a home.

Our HVAC system was replaced the same day that our moving truck arrived so between the HVAC crew working and family in town to help us move in, there were a lot of people in our house that day. Luckily it was a nice day outside so the kids spent a lot of time outside playing with the kittens.

Starting a worm composting bin… this hasn’t been that successful so far…I think we need more worms.

The schoolroom was covered in boxes of books for most of the month while we awaited our shipment of bookcases from Ikea that were scheduled to be delivered on Christmas Eve.

One reason for getting a farm was so we could help our kids to learn how to work. Coming from the Townhouse city life, its definitely been a lot more work out here. And that can have some growing pains. haha. The boys started taking out the trash cans and bringing them back in every week. I could tell that they felt a sense of accomplishment every time they did this…even if they weren’t always thrilled about having this assignment.

the kittens found a nice warm spot under the dryer vent.

Shortest days of the years means that by dinner time it is already dark outside. We took advantage of these dark evenings to eat by candlelight.

We finally got our Christmas tree, a couple weeks later than I would have liked to (so the Christmas tree farms were already out of stock, so we just picked one up from Lowes)…but it’s complicated when you move right before Christmas time.

Jershon had fun trying out his new tools.

Starting our compost pile

Almost halfway through my pregnancy

Getting a little more unpacked and settled by the day

Jershon built a house for the kittens

My friend, Ashley, knitted (as well as spun the yarn) this sweater for me a couple years ago and then she just made me matching mittens for farm work. (I wore them all winter and they kept my hands so warm)

On December 13th we celebrated Sankta Lucia Day for the 3rd year in a row.

We loved watching Agnes do this mere cat pose a lot.

Jershon cleaned all the old ashes out of the burn barrel.

And then he put it to good use burning a bunch of papers and some food boxes.

We celebrated our 12th anniversary so of course I had to bust out the wedding dress! … my pregnant belly helped with busting out of the dress. haha.

On December 21st, we added our 3rd animal, a puppy named Merv to our farm.

The stars are really pretty here and we can see quite a few on clear nights. On December 21st, we got to see the “Christmas Star” (the alignment of Jupiter and Saturn). It was a fairly warm night so we enjoyed sitting on a blanket in our front yard, looking at the “star” while listening to the Nativity Guided Imagery from the Small Seed Still meditation app. (I am really loving the meditations on this app, by the way.)

On Christmas Eve we had our annual Bethlehem dinner.

First Christmas on the farm!

Our bookshelves came so we got them all put together and got our library set up. It’s probably my favorite room in the house. 🙂

It was neat to have our own piece of nature outside our back door so we could have a special experience with finishing The Book of Mormon.

Roxanne got this Anne of Green Gables dress and hat for Christmas and she wore them constantly for quite a while.

Reading Little Women to the kittens.

At the end of December, when we had only had Merv for about a week, he got really sick and almost died. You can read about that here.

By the last day of December, Merv was on the mend and doing much better. We were grateful that he had pulled through and regained his health.