A Birthday Post About My Baby Girl

Fifty years ago today, at 2:28 a.m., I became a mother for the first time; my little baby girl, 7 lbs, 2 oz. was also the first grandchild, first great-grandchild, and first great-great grandchild on her daddy's side of the family.  She has brought much happiness to us in these fifty years.

To read her take on becoming fifty years old, visit her blog, http://musingreader.blogspot.com , post for June 12, 2012. 

Here are a few memorable pictures from her early years:

Mama's little helper

First birthday with that toy I wrote about, which babies loved and adults hated

Uh-oh! "I think I can do this by myself."

Four years old 

Happy Birthday, Greta Renee'

A Banquet

This morning I had a forced freezer defrosting episode, and you know how it is, once into the job you find there are some things too old to put back inside.  I poured these things into a bucket and this afternoon I took them to the woods for the wild animals.

Edgar Allen Crow was appointed to call out the invitations to a banquet, to be held around dusk this evening.  And, instead of the wolf and the lamb, the calf and the young lion, the cow and the bear, as told in the Bible, these guests will be raccoons, skunks, opossums, and maybe field mice and black snakes.  They'll dine in peace, for their hunger has grown in the drought, and they'll find the goodness of the old fruits and vegetables too savory to fight over.

Charlotte 

Edited 7-13-12:  It seems everyone thinks I threw out lots of food (lol) which wasn't the case at all;  there were a few boxes of things which had lost their color due to age and I knew they'd just keep being overlooked, so rather than put it in the compost bin, I fed the wild animals.  Every piece was gone the next morning, so I don't consider it wasted at all.

RAIN

I figured after all the whining I've been doing about the dry, hot weather, I should share the good news with you: last night we received six tenths of an inch of RAIN!  And we felt very blessed to get that much since some close communities got nothing.

In the past week I've started feeling a bit like Jonah (from the Bible, Jonah, chapter one) when he said, "Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you: for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you."  Now of course I didn't really think I was the cause of this drought; at least I hope not!

The hills are dotted with trees whose leaves are turning fall colors.

Many of the oaks have lost most of their leaves, making the ground look more like October than July.  The little pond almost dried up, leaving green, nasty water, so we had to move the heifers to another pasture.

So this morning I watch as clouds build up, hoping by this afternoon there will be more rain, if not for us then for our neighboring communities, because we're all in this together, and it's not easy to rejoice when others are suffering.

Charlotte

July ~ Little Quilt

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY

We will be getting baby chickens on Thursday, so that means our fourth will be spent working, setting up the houses for them.  So, Teddy decided he would celebrate early with a picnic; no fireworks allowed in our area this year because the danger of fire is so high.  He was hoping his friends from the sewing room would join him to eat the goodies in his picnic basket, while sitting on this month's little quilt.

He really wanted to go swimming, but I told him the water in the creek is almost dried up and therefore it might not be healthy to be in it.

The picnic part wasn't too pleasant in the hot air; a game of pick-up sticks inside was much more fun.  Have you ever played pick-up sticks?  It takes a lot of concentration and a steady hand.

We turned the quilt over to show the pretty lining.

We're hoping you have a happy day, swimming, eating, visiting with friends, but please be careful with the fireworks!

Charlotte

Kitty Love

I've found three litters of farm kitties, all put in places picked by their mothers:

behind the hydranga bush,

beneath the bulldozer,

and in the barn.

Two are white with gray noses, ears, and tails,  others are gray tabbies, or gray with white noses, and some are black or blue-gray.  This little white kitten has long, soft hair; she (?) is small and frail.  I put feed and fresh water out for them; the hot weather makes it very stressful for them I'm sure.  So far, The Dog ignores them, as long as he gets his own dish of food.  Stray dogs are the ones I have to watch out for.

I love little kittens; they make a farm happy!

Charlotte

Dry Weather Continues

Three weeks ago I wrote about the dry weather we're having this year, on the heels of a hot, dry summer last year.  We had a very mild winter, and warm weather came earlier this spring than usual.  Since March, we have had only 1/2 inch of measurable rainfall and now we're in a serious drought condition.  These two pictures show the toll it has taken on my flowers.  I'm not sure how many will survive; a lot of them are daylilies and irises so maybe their underground corms and bulbs will come again.  Even the things I have in containers on the porch are having a difficult time with the heat; Monday the temperature on the porch reached 113* in the shade!

The vegetable garden never got a start really; I did have a few little potatoes and tomatoes until grasshoppers invaded.  They thrive in dry weather!

But flowers and vegetables are not our number one worry, for they can be replaced.  The cattle are our main concern now.  They're used to having green grass in the spring and summer, and this year the grass didn't have time to come back from winter.  We have been feeding hay, put up for next winter, for several weeks and every day the row of bales grows shorter; how do we feed all of them come cold weather?  Even if there was grass enough to cut for hay, there is such a great fire danger that we don't dare take the equipment out and take a chance of the tines on the baler or rake striking a rock and making a spark to catch the grass on fire.

So we have started feeding grain to the cattle along with the hay.  They come running

and wait at the gate

while Popa puts feed in the troughs.

It's much too dangerous to be inside the corral with the hungry cattle, so he opens the gate from one side, climbs up on the fence and they rush in, stirring up a terrible dust cloud.  I can only hold my breath until the wind carries the dust away; the wind?  oh yes, it blows every day, pushing the dust up into our noses and  driving it into every crack and crevice of the house.

The calves don't have much chance to get to the feed, so Popa is bringing in more troughs.

Hope for rain is dwindling; I find myself praying less for rain and my conscience nags at me about that.  It's so sad to think about having to sell some of the cows just to have enough to feed the others.  How does one pick the cows that go?  How do you put Sulky, or number 748, or others on a trailer and send them off to market?  These have become our life.

Charlotte

This is only one herd of three that we have.  These are on a hillside pasture and the grass is eaten down to the roots.  The others still have a little bit of dry grass to eat on. The pond is so low there is a ring of dry dirt in the middle, and the creeks only have pools of water in them.

Playtime on a Hot Day, 1940s

On a hot day like today, this is how a little boy and girl would have spent their playtime:

Daddy was plowing the rows of cane, throwing the brown dirt against the little plants, covering new grass that had emerged.  Mama, Daddy and Wanda had already hoed the long rows; Charlotte wasn't trusted yet to distinguish the good plants from the grass plants.

Mama was in the tiny kitchen, canning peaches that Wanda had helped peel.  The cookstove made the little house hot, even though the breeze blew through the open windows.

So when her cousin, Dane, came to play, Charlotte was glad to get out of the house.  She picked out a few paper dolls, cut from a catalog (since no one would be ordering a bathing suit, Mama had let her tear out those pages) and they took them down to the branch in front of the house.  The water was cool on their bare feet as they waded into it to let the paper dolls go swimming.  When the dolls were so soggy they were in danger of coming apart, Charlotte spread them out on a rock to dry so they could be used another time. 

Now they turned their attention to the crawdads which tried to hide beneath the rocks.  With each movement of the kids, the crawdads scurried backwards to the safety of the rocks.  It wasn't easy to catch one with their hands, but they had learned to slip up behind one and quickly grab it behind its sharp "pinchers".  Those pinchers were strong and could really hurt little fingers, so they decided to "fish" for the crawdads with a piece of bacon fat tied to a twine string.  They lowered the fishing lines carefully in front of the big crawdads, and in a jiffy the pinchers grabbed the fat, and the kids eased their catch up out of the water and into a glass jar filled with water.  They would take the largest ones to Wanda; she knew how to open them up and find the little "pearl" inside.

Charlotte gathered up the dry paper dolls and they left the cool water until another day.

Charlotte