This and That

What have I been up to? Trying to stay ahead of the kids and the deer. Yes, the deer are back. Haven't seen them all summer until now. The first evidence is the missing cabbage, the grape leaves, and pruned plum trees, and the beans have been shorted by half. But except for deer poop, I haven't actually seen them until last night When I caught a glimpse of a small buck.

It's not all bad since I'm tired of the garden and their arrival hustles me to bring in the harvest. Yesterday, it was the onions. Not a great harvest and they could of waited since the deer aren't too fond of them but since I cleaned the hay shed and picked up a few small piles of old hay around the pens, I had to have somewhere to put it. It seemed as good a place as any to deposit the heaping pickup sized load.

Let me give a word of advice to your first time livestock raisers. Always clear the area where you are going to store hay to the bare ground. Any left over hay or vegetation will collect moisture and transport it to the hay. That means mold and mold spreads. Our budget is small and hay is expensive. Not to mention the time and money spent transporting it. Mold is a money waister and needs controlled.

Our Hay sits in a shed but the shed is far from weather tight and so we cover ours in plastic with old tires holding it down from the winds that sometimes whip through the building. Before scraping the shed floor,I picked up a few small piles of old hay around the pens making the area neat and tidy.

And today, I worded inside emptying some canning jars that had old food in them and cleaned house. Something that just doesn't get done often enough.
But the delight of the day was watching the kids play Nurse Nancy. It's a book the kids delight in my reading. It's about a little girl that loves to play nurse. Toward the end her brothers join her and form an ambulance out of a wagon and take turns being an injured patient. You know the book is old because the little girl's dress is really, really short and is major outdated in style.

The kids took turns on Grandpa. It was fitting since he's been sick for three weeks. Yesterday, he went to the doctor and received several shots and some anti-biotic. The girls watched fascinated as the nurse injected the meds.

Shots were skipped today. A pretend hurt finger was bandaged and his heart checked to make sure it was beating. Okay, it was the stomach but how is a four-year-old to know where that's located.