Sunday, July 22, 2007

The Halands love Harry!



Can you tell what Max and Ted have been doing for the last couple of days??? Actually, the kids and I went swimming with friends yesterday and Ted worked in the ER, so both of them had to take their noses out of the books and neither could finish the final "Harry Potter" just yet, though through no lack of trying. (What fast readers and what a great book, apparently! I'll get my chance later, after I'm done re-reading #6.)


Ted took all three kids to a Harry Potter book release party at the Jackson Street Roundhouse (a great train spot in St. Paul) Friday night. The party started at 9 3/4, and they did fun stuff like ride the Hogwarts Express (not too "express" as it went about 3 miles per hour), get sorted into houses (Gryffindor for Ben and Ellie, and Ravenclaw for Max), and eat chocolate frogs & Bertie Botts' Every Flavour Beans, until midnight, when the load of books came steaming in on a freight car into the roundhouse. Fun was had by all, I hear. :-)

Jailbreak!

Someone forgot to fully latch the barnyard gate a couple nights ago, and Moose and Lily promptly raced straight to the house. I'm sure they wonder why that other very strange brown, black and white goat (Dixie) gets to go in the house and they don't. ;-) Here they are at the front door, demanding their evening bottle of water. (Too bad for them, since they are now weaned from those and they get to drink water from a bucket just like other barnyard animals.) I had to nudge the escapees out of the way with the screen door just to get outside.




Here is Ben trying to wrangle Lily to get her back towards their yard, but she was having none of it!


Friday, July 20, 2007

Fun on Lake Superior


Here are some pictures during our camping trip up north in mid-June. This day was absolutely perfect, and we enjoyed a picnic lunch where the Knife River meets Lake Superior, on the North Shore. We stopped for some delicious smoked fish, beef sticks, and beef jerky on the way, and then we spent a long time enjoying the sunny day and cool breezes. We did loads of agate-hunting, finding pocketfuls of mostly tiny jewel-like agates.



Don't let the towel in Max's hands fool you -- the water was ice cold, so we certainly didn't swim!




Ellie and Ben worked diligently to create their Beach People:




Ben and Ellie weren't quite as into the smoked fish we got from Russ Kendall's Smokehouse nearby, but Ted, Noelle and Max LOVED it, as evidenced below:

NEWS FLASH: Noelle Finally Allows Sparklers!



After years of Noelle prohibiting kids' sparkler use, the Haland kids finally got to enjoy the fun of 1500 degree heat and burning bits of paper on the 4th of July.

Actually, I'll come clean and admit that this is the second year in a row I've caved and allowed sparklers but only the first with photographic evidence. Notice the looks of intense concentration -- the kids had suffered my repeated lecturing about sparkler safety, which was probably more than Ellie and Max needed but was for Ben's benefit. We have no picture of Ben with the burning fun (not sure what happened to them, since I did take some), but he did pretty well in not burning himself or others. We did have to move quickly once when he started running towards somebody else in his excitement, arm and sparkler outstretched, but all was fine.

The long ones you see in the first picture had tons of colored paper that burned on the end, then they would sparkle and pop, then appear to die down, only to re-ignite and sparkle and pop again. Ellie and I were both rather surprised by that before we figured it out. Exciting, but probably not the safest thing in the world.

By the way, I especially enjoy two things in the picture below: (1) Ellie's expression, and (2) her socks with her red, white and blue flip-flops. :-)

Friday, July 6, 2007

More fun with the goats!



Here, the goats are intrigued by Ellie's 4th of July flip-flops. You can really see how little these goats are. They're both still young (Moose is 2 1/2 months old and Lily is 3 1/2 months), but they are a miniature dairy breed called Nigerian Dwarves. They will only get maybe twice their current size. We chose them because of their small size -- I never realized how gigantic full-size goat breeds were until I met some up close!! Nigerian Dwarves also have proven to be good milkers, and I'm looking forward to the day when we can milk Lily. She'll have to be bred and give birth before of course, which may happen next spring or may be even another year from then, depending on how big she is come late fall. (You don't want to breed a young goat too early or she may have troubles giving birth. By the way, Moose will not be the daddy goat since he is now a castrated fella. We'll probably take Lily to breed with one of our breeders' bucks when it's time.) I'm eager to try my hand at making goat cheese and other goat milk goodies, but that's still way in the future. For now, we're enjoying how baby-like these two little ones still are.




Lily really loves grain-feeding time! In fact, at dinnertime, she climbs all over and even tries to get inside the grain bins. I went out this morning, and there were goat berries (a.k.a. poop) all over one of the grain bins and on the ledge next to it, implying *someone* had probably *slept* there at some point last night. Today, those bins are being put into the barn room where the goats can't get to them, and so we won't have to fend off their eagerness at mealtime!



Moose and Lily both love playing on these old cable spools we got from someone on Freecycle.org. We had to nail plywood over the holes in the spools so their small hooves wouldn't fall through. We also have an old galvanized metal watering trough (which used to house baby chicks before their coop was complete) turned upside down for them to play on next to the spools. Goats love to climb and crave variety and fun, and we aim to please. ;-)


Can you tell we think these guys are awesome?? ;-)

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

More pics of the kids

Click on any of the photos in the blog to see them a bit larger. :-)


Max and Dixie




Ben the goofball




Ellie, taken yesterday




Max and Ellie in action (a few weeks ago)

Ben's DIY Haircut

It was bound to happen, at one time or another, with one child or another.....

BEFORE (two weeks ago on our camping trip):




AND AFTER (day before yesterday):



He also gave his stuffed horse a haircut at the same time, but, alas, I have no photo of that. Oh, to be five again.

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Fun with chickens


The chickens have turned out to be a lot of fun. Who knew? They're about 10 weeks old and they basically look like miniature chickens still and no longer little puff balls. We have 15 of them, and all but one are female. It turned out one is a cockerel (young rooster), whom we'd named Chicken Joe. So far he's nice and not aggressive, so we hope he stays that way. They were all supposed to be female, but we just figure we're lucky if only one is a rooster, considering how tricky sexing one-day-old chicks is. We intend to eat their eggs and not them. :-)

The birds actually have real personality, something I had never really expected. Here's a picture of their first day in the new coop, Ted's masterpiece. We had two old, "charming" (read: delapidated) chicken coops where Ted's family housed their chickens back in the day, but both buildings are so old and ramshackle from years of neglect that we figured it would be easier just to build from scratch.

I use the royal "we" of course since I was only a lackey, Home Depot fetcher, and now-and-again assistant. This was Ted's project and he worked long and hard on it. Every available free hour was spent on the thing for probably three months. Of course, it took more time and money than we anticipated, but the result is quite awesome, we think. It's got mesh in the floor and on the windows to keep out critters, as well as insulated walls. It also has perhaps the nicest windows of any chook house -- we used new Anderson double-paned windows from Michele's kitchen remodel 8 or 9 years ago that were unused because of a sizing mistake. They'd been sitting in the back chicken coop since then, gathering dust, so Ted built his plan around them. Now the birds have plenty of light and cross-breezes.

Ted also built a great roost for them to sleep at night. It's three levels of 2x4s, but all fifteen of them jockey for position every night on the top roost. It will be interesting to see how they manage and who gets booted to the lower levels once they're full-grown.




I'm so impressed by Ted's carpentry abilities. He really is a jack-of-all-trades! I've taken to calling him Dr. MacGyver!

Summer at Fat Beagle Farm!



Well, I think I may be finally getting the hang of this blogging business, months after actually setting it up then promptly neglecting it. But not anymore! Forward!

Summer is in full swing here at the homestead-lite! The exciting news this week is that our goats are here! We have two adorable goat kids, a girl named Lily and a boy named Moose. (Lily's the white one with tan patches, and Moose is brown, black and white.) They really are stinkin' cute, don't you think? We all just LOVE them. They seem to be settling in very nicely into their barnyard. They are very personable, really, and they wail like human babies as we walk away from their yard. They sound so pitiful, but luckily the wailing stops once we're out of view. ;-)

We ended up getting chickens after all, and they're quite a bit of fun. They're thrilled to be free-ranging during the day now, though they still don't go terribly far from their coop. (More on Ted's made-from-scratch chicken palace in another post!) Who knew that chickens would have such funny personalities?