September 15 - Farm Animals

Due to all the recent rain we have had to move the horses out of their water filled pen. We did quite of bit of pannel moving while we were down doing chores.

Gabriel was nominated guard duty while we put up a gate. 

Woodrow the mule.

After we were done remodeling the horse pens, I went up to get some picture of our migration. The bourbons (Brown turkeys) and three chickens were raised up here for quite a while because we got them late in the spring, whereas the other birds were gotten much earlier. Anyway, they started liking to be up by the house more than down with the rest of the flock. Every morning all our turkeys and three chickens will go up to the house and stay there until dusk. Then at the same time they will all head back down. That is what we call our migration.

Sargent York with the two ladies, Hannah and Gracie.  

Prince Henry with his lady Danielle.

Our other Tom, Samuel

Quincy has a very strange friend. She will follow that white rooster (his name is spots if anyone's interested) all over the place. She doesn't chase him or bite him or anything, just follows him.

September 13 - TCHAP

Tonight an event happened that we have been looking forward to for about six months. The second TCHAP is today!!!!! Hosted by the Hernandez family, we start at one in the afternoon with guest speakers this time the main speaker talked about Aquaponics. For all of those readers that are like me and have no idea what Aquaponics is here is a brief explanation of it. Basically it is growing a garden using fish. You have two tanks, one is quite a bit larger than the other. The larger tank holds fish, and the smaller one has a Styrofoam sheet floating on the top. In this sheet there is holes that are about 2" in diameter in rows drilled through the top. In the holes are little baskets. These baskets hold your vegetable seeds. You have to have something in the baskets so that the seed doesn't fall out into the water underneath. The speaker uses ground up coconut shells. The manure from the fish feed the plants above. You have a pump that runs water from the fish tank up to the vegetable tank, then that water free falls back down to the fish tank through a pipe inserted in the bottom of the vegetable tank. The speaker is a missionary to a little area in South America. The village that he started this "experiment" is on very poor soil and they live by a bad river, so they don't get very much nutrition in their diet. The village took to his idea right away about two years ago. He has gone back several times to work out some glitches in the system. They still have some problems that need work, but as a whole they are doing well. 

After the Aquaponics session they had two classes at the same time. Dad, Janessa, Zach, Shea, Garrett, and Gabe went to see how to use a Sun oven. Which is exactly what it sounds like. An oven that uses the sun to bake things. Mommy and Kacy went to a super-food/sprouting class. We learned about how to store seeds to sprout, what foods count as super-foods, and how to sprout seeds. Both classes were very interesting, but unfortunately we didn't get any pictures of either class. Then they had two more classes at the same time. Dad, Kacy, Shea, Zach, Garrett, and Gabe went to a well water/electricity class. Basically it was giving different ideas of what to do if your well runs out (with the drought we are having that is some good knowledge to have) and it told about different options of drawing water up without electricity. Mommy and Janessa went to a gardening class. They talked about how to garden in small spaces or bad soil.

After all the classes, we had a delicious pot luck dinner then a dance. We did English Country Dancing. Peter Hernandez lead the dances, and did a very good job of it.

Grand march. A favorite.

The following pictures are of a new dance we learned, The English Snob.

And of course the evening wouldn't be complete without the Posties Jig. The all time favorite dance.

Another one we learned tonight was the Spanish waltz.

We had a wonderful day. Lots of new things learned, and we are really looking forward to the next TCHAP. Thank you so much to all the Hernandez family for putting it together. And thank you to all the speakers that did such a good job teaching.

September 7 - Baseball

We went out for our family baseball game this evening. Something you should know about Gabe is, he has always been able to throw anything further than most people I know. Even when he was too little to play baseball he could still throw a ball quite a distance. Today he wanted to try his hand at being pitcher. During the course of the game, Gabe threw everybody out at one point or another.

There's the wind-up.

There's the victim 

STRIKE!!!!!

September 6 - Horse Shed Start

For the last couple of months we have been collecting Telephone poles for a horse shed, well today we got started on in. It was a beautiful day to work on the shed, all muggy and rainny. If you live in our area you find out really fast that those are the best days to do any kind of outside work. We are going to actually make two sheds. One is going to be in our small horse pen ( Woodrow's abode). It is going to have a rather strange shape. We put in three corners for it and then on one of the corners we have a much taller pole along with a shorter pole. We are going to attach a brace from the tall pole to the front of the roof inside the pen. Today though all we did was get the poles in the ground. Shea was nominated as the pole hole digger (not the most favorite job of all), Garrett and Gabe had to carry wheel-barrel loads of dirt from the high side of the pen to the low side to try to even it out some. And Dad and Kacy took care of the pole aspect of the project. They had to measure, cut, load the poles into the back of the truck, and haul them over to the holes. If you think that is an easy job you are as wrong as you can get.....I think those poles were marinated with pitch!!!!

The official Hole digger!!!

The length of the shed.

Cutting the bad ends off of the poles...I love Reacher's face in this picture. All of the animals were a little nervous about the chain saw, but Banner and Jenny absolutely hated it.  

First hole done!!!!!

First pole in and its only 2:00pm.

All finished...for today.

August Creations

Yet another addition of our family's creations for this month. I would like your honest opinion on this series. Do you like reading it or would you rather us take it out? How could we make it more enjoyable? Please let me know what you think!

And now to the Creations. 

A helicopter that Shea made using some instructions from the internet, but with his own changes.

The inside.

 In human body the boys learned about different kinds of joints, later that afternoon Shea brought in this arm that he had build out of legos.

 This a Bouquet that Elena Dowell and Kacy made while taking a pleasant walk while we were at Family camp.

August 31 - Janessa's Birthday

Today is Janessa's Nineteenth birthday!!!!!! All she wanted to do was have a family day. We had taken up playing baseball every Sunday evening after a family bible study together, and that's all she wanted to do. Today Dad let pitch some...or at least that's how it started out as. Gabriel has always been a good throw, but no one knew how good of a throw. When he started pitching he threw three people out and caught one person's line drive. He was almost as good as Dad and Zach when he started, by the end of the game we was as good as them. The teams were Janessa, Kacy, Zach, and Momma vs. Daddy, Shea, Garrett, and Gabe. Team 2 won!!!