Barnyard and Babies

Mitchell Mayhem: It's been cold and SNOWY. We have at least a foot of snow on the ground accumulated and it seems like it snows every day. We don't get a lot of outside time but we've been having fun anyways

 Chloe has been really into dressing up, doing her own hair, accessorizing, painting her nails and everything else girly. She is so cute and as always so beautiful!

 Zeyta's first sword fight! Blain was so cute wanting to sword fight his "Zeyzy"

 I took this picture because it shows the essence of this little one - she ALWAYS has something in her hands or is grabbing and reaching for something. It is so cute and just so her.

 Daddy and his babies :)

 Finishing up the meat: we took the Ham and Bacon down to Em's to use Theron's smoker after the ham cured for 5 days and the bacon for a week. We haven't fried up any bacon yet but the HAM IS DELICIOUS!!! It is super smoky, juicy and just all around good. Injecting each of the little hams made the cure penetrate all the way through and I think they are even better than last year. Next time we need to slice when they are cold because we lost about 3 ziplocks full of little crumbs. But I've been putting those tidbits to good use in soup, eggs, chili etc. Having them presliced is so nice! We had holey eggs in toast with ham tonight and just thawing it and frying it up was a breeze.

I caught Avenlea sharing her sucker with Zeyta the other day... Avenlea loves her little sister and Zeyta sure loves her too! I've had to put a baby door knob cover on Zeyta's door because Avenlea loves going in to "snuggle" with Zeyta during her nap aka wake her up by climbing in the crib to be with her.

The many faces of Zeyta - I didn't put all the pictures in but the succession of these pictures were hilarious with all her little faces.

Hard to watch the road when there's a cute baby lookin at you! JK, we hadn't left yet ;)

Once there was a Snowman: Chloe, Blain and Daddy had Monday off and of course it was snowing so we went out and built two giant snowmen and a snow wall which of course led to a fun snowball fight. 

 What a good Daddy helping Chloe with her gloves

 Sweet Avenlea joined us for a bit and loved eating the snow and walking in the paths so she didn't disappear into the deep snow

 Blain made that big snowball all by himself!

Notice the snowball in the Snowman's hand - he has since gained a scarf and lost is eye and nose

 Winter Tea with Em: Em has been trying to have all the girls over for a tea party for a couple months now and it finally happened. All our schedules aligned and we sat down together for pleasantries, yummy treats and of course herbal tea. Chloe was excited to get to use her new tea set and I used my teacups from Grandma for the first time in a real tea!

 Some of the cutie girls in their pretty pretty dresses

Aunt Molly, Zeyta and Chloe

 Sleeping on the way to tea

 Make that 2...

 and 3 babies asleep on the way. Love those cuties.

Barnyard: The animals are holding up pretty well under all the snow - even well enough to be wanting babies! We now have 2 broody hens and Bella is showing some signs of calving readiness.

 An americauna and we also have an orpington who are both broody. We are not moving them to the broody coop because we have to heat lamps or heated water so I'm gonna have to work on breaking them of their broodiness.

 Bella bagging up and a nice string of mucous. Looking at some pictures of other cows I think she still has a while to go but it's fun to track her progress. And hopefully we'll have her for a while so I think it will be helpful to reference for next time and in the future.