My Love From Home

Thursday, February 15, 2018

August 2017

Looking back on August.

Skylar turned 13 this year! I can't believe I have a teenager!!! For her birthday I took her and her best friend Helen to the Jacksonville Beach to celebrate.

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We decided to add turkeys to our small hobby farm, and Mitch did an amazing job building this turkey tractor to house them. We enjoyed raising the turkeys for the experience, and later we were even able to successfully sell a few during the Thanksgiving season.

Saturday morning

Mason picking out letters he recognizes while at the farmers market

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On August 21st, 2017 we witnessed "The Great American Eclipse." I gathered all the necessary materials such as, sunkist soda, moon pies, and eclipse gum. We also made our own solar eclipse glasses out of a couple of poptart boxes and some welding lenses.

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Unfortunately, we experience a hard tragedy in August when Skylar's young horse Murray passed away from an incurable disease contracted through mosquitoes, EEE. This was an extremely hard learning experience for all of us. Skylar had dreamed of having her own horse for years, and she was ecstatic when her dream finally came true last Christmas. She did an amazing job grooming and training him, all while taking it upon herself to research how to care for and train a horse. Murray was a well mannered colt, and when he fell ill we felt hopeless that there was nothing that we could do for him or to spare Skylar of an incredible heartache. As soon as we noticed something wasn't right with Murray we called our Veterinarian for help. This fast acting disease had already laid Murray down before the vet could arrive, and after explaining to us that nothing could be done the vet euthanized him and we all cried.

Skylar saying goodbye

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On August 1st Mitch's sister Brianna gave birth to her second son, Isaac. He was born several weeks premature, but he was strong and by the end of the month he was discharged from the hospital and now he is home and is doing fine. Mitch and I are so proud to have another nephew in the family.

Congratulations to Cory and Brianna!

Isaac

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A good mother would have taken a picture of each of her children for the first day of school, like I have for the past 9 years that I have had school aged kids. However, this year I dropped the ball and only managed to snap this picture of the class that I am tutoring in our homeschool community, Classical Conversations. Mason is in the red shirt, this is his first year of kindergarten, and Josiah is beside him, this is his first day of Pre-K.

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

July 2017

Last year was my first year canning, but this past July I really went to work. I put away tomatoes, salsa, tomato sauce, green tomatoes, jelly, jams, pepper jelly, banana peppers, jalapenos, peaches, peach cobbler filling, and more. The biggest hit however has been our candied jalapenos.

Fried duck egg, grilled peach with butter and honey, and homemade buttermilk pancakes with my homemade peach syrup.

My weekly homemade breads

Our animals are continuing to grow and so is our feed bill!

We also found these beautiful muscovy ducks for sale. They have made a wonderful addition to our pond.

Our appleyards first swim in our pond

In July we continued to do well with our farmers market. We even made an appearance in the local newspaper. Skylar and Maddox joined in with their own booth selling homemade dog treats and essential oil bug spray.