Miracle Puppy

 

 

Leah is a true miracle! Sunday morning we woke up and Leah had no control of her back legs. She was swaying all over and if she tried to run she would fall down. She could not walk on the kitchen floor without falling. We decided to take her to Deland Animal Hospital. When we got there they looked her over and had asked if we had found any ticks recently. I told them no. I rub her everyday and have not felt anything. They were stumped over what it could be. The Dr said it could be GME. That is an immune disorder and the only way to find out is to go to the University to have an MRI and a spinal tap done. He sent us home and said to just watch her. We decided we would go to our Dr Monday morning and have him look at her. As the day progressed, she got worse. During the night she became completely paralyzed and her breathing was getting bad. I called my mom at 4AM and asked her to come watch my kids while me and Tony take her back to the hospital. I was convinced that she was going to have to be put down and I wanted to be with her when that happened. She is not as close to Tony as she is to me and I knew she would be scared. I then began to wake the kids up at 5:30 to explain to them that she was very sick and if they wanted they could come sit with her because I wasn't sure she would be coming back home. That was very hard!!!! I told Tony I wanted to sit in the back with her so I did. She layed on my lap and I just began rubbing her to comfort her. We got a few miles down the road when I felt something. It was a tick!!!! That's when I began to have a feeling of maybe she doesn't have to die today. When we got there we told them we found the tick and they immediately pulled it and began her on IV fluids, steroids and antibiotics. They said they would keep her till the next morning. We called at noon and they said she was not any better. I just had a feeling of doom! At 4:30 Tony called to check on her and the said oh yes you can come get her. Tony then asked if she was better and they said she can stand but is wobbly. He asked if she could walk and they said no. Another girl said she is really not any better than she was when you brought her this morning. We decided we were just going to get her and bring her home. So we got there and waited for along time. Finally they brought her in the room and she was running around!!!! Totally not what I was expecting from the phone call 2 hours prior! We took her outside and she ran all over their yard. It was a miracle.

I am so glad I sat with her and found that tick! If I had not done that we would have put her down. When we brought her home and she ran in the house the kids were so excited! They couldn't believe it. I have a huge vet bill but I don't really care. I have my puppy!!! She is so much part of our family that I can't imagine her not being here. Thank you Lord for allowing us to continue to enjoy her!

 

 

Summer is Over!

The summer is over and the kids are back to school. Most people are really happy their kids go back but not me, I have been very lonely! They are having a great time and love their teachers so far. Brooke has a huge work load this year. She is taking Algebra 1 honors, advanced civics, advanced science and spanish 1! She will be a busy girl for sure. All of these classes are high school credits and she is only in 7th grade.

We didn't do much for the summer but the kids ended the summer with a chicken clinic for 4H so they could learn more about chickens. Pretty much it was just to go because I don't think we really can learn anymore!!! Brooke got a new chicken that is only the size of a pigeon. She is so cute but has to stay in her own cage because the other chickens try to kill her. Her name is Lemon.

New chicken- "Lemon" sleeping during class

 

My friend Karin had to find a home for her 2 chickens so we offered to take them also. They are cute! They are Cochins and are only 5 months old but they are bigger than our laying hens so they will be giant for sure. I have a picture but for some reason it won't post right! It is sideways but here it is anyway! HAHA!

Weird I know but what can I do! Spotted one is Bobalena and black one is Cozy! I did not name them!!!

I start back to school on Monday and I am really nervous about this semester. Two of my hardest classes on top of fair time! I hope I can dissect that brain and eyeball without throwing up! I just keep telling myself it is only 15 weeks but that seems like a lifetime.

So not much else going on. Brooke starts the new show year September 8th and Ashlyn will start December 1st at her show. So I am praying it will all go well and they will be safe. Fair will be in November so it will all be a very busy few months.  I will try to keep up with posting but I'm not sure how good I will be at that!

Busy!

It's been so long since I last posted! It has just been a tough month and a half!

The babies are growing fast. We had a little set back though. We found out that they are not pure bred chickens so the kids can not show them! Becky made a mistake because she thought there had been enough time passed when she took the other rooster out of the pen but there must not have been. She gave the girls 2 pure breds of hers and ours went to live with my mom.

On Father's day Brooke's new horse, Summer, got sick. She coliced for 2 days and the vet said she needed surgery. We just couldn't afford to do it so I was going to put her down. They wanted me to wait but everyday she was sick was vet bills that were rising. The vets husband said he would take her and try and save her so thats what I did. She ended up living but we don't own the horse anymore. It was a huge blow to us! With purchase price, vet bills and other things done to her we have nearly $6000 in her that we have lost! I am still paying on the vet bill she incured while she was sick and I owned her so every week I have to pay on a bill that causes me to just be ill. I am just ready to move on and forget the whole thing. In the mean time we have brought Kitty back home and hopefully we can make her work for Brookes shows right now. There is noway I can get her another horse right now.

On top of all of that my truck blew its engine!!! I have been without it for 2 weeks now. They are putting 2 new heads on it this week I hope and maybe it will be done by next week. The guy that is working on it has been really good at trying to get us the best price for the fix. $1600 is what it will cost and we have been told that it is a good deal by other people.

So our summer plans have been really pushed to the side with all this set back. Now I am focusing on getting what the kids need for school. They start back August 20 and I start back August 27. It seems to be right around the corner! It has seemed like a really rushed summer and its getting b use so quick.

The kids bought a pool with their gift cards from Christmas so we have been chilling in there. Its nice to be able to cool off when its so hot!

I will try to post back soon!

Hatching early!!!!

So the babies are coming!!! Let me tell you they were supposed to start Thursday but they picked Tuesday. Two were hatched yesterday and one hatched over night. I spent an hour yesterday putting crates together and putting the chickens and their babies in them in the garage. Now the garage is a chicken nursery!They are so cute!!!!

Here is a little one peaking out!

They are just too cute!

Each Hen has her own cage. One hen has 1 baby and the other has 2. We will see how many actually hatch. There is a total of 10 eggs that I put under them. I seperated them because yesterday one hen took the other hens baby so they were not happy about that. Now they dont have to fight!

One Little chick

Our experiment with the 4 eggs under the chicken failed. The day after i put the eggs under her 2 eggs dissapeared! the other 2 were not fertile. So i got 5 more eggs and put them in a friends incubator. Only 1 of those eggs hatched and now we have peeps the chick.

Last week Becky gave me 10 more eggs so I have two chickens that are broody and they are laying on 5 eggs each. They are due to hatch on the 31st. Hopefully we get atleast 1 from that batch so this little chick will have a friend! The hens are sitting in the same nest together laying on there babies. If this doesnt work this time, we are done for this year. They are both getting really skinny because they don't like to eat much. They don't want to leave the eggs for very long.

I will update as soon as we have babies!!!!!!

Drill Performance

Brooke had a drill team performance at Cracker Day. We just met the group at 11am to do the performance at 12 and then had lunch and came home. It was way too hot to be hanging out there all day. It seemed to be 100 degrees out there. Willow did awesome and all the girls looked and did great! They all worked really hard all year and it was nice for them to perform for a crowd. I posted a video for all to see. It is a little shakey because I was standing on the bull shutes and they were moving.

Drill Team Performance Video

Project of the Month

This is Chelsea chicken. She is the baby we got last year and raised with the stuffed animal bunny! She is sitting in this nest because she is broody. This means she is laying on eggs, that are not hers, because she intends to hatch them out. Only problem is, we don't have roosters and it doesn't matter how long she sits there, there will be no babies!!!!

The eggs she took over were not even her eggs. They belonged to the big chickens so they were double the size of her eggs. The picture shows the big chicken egg on left and her eggs on right. Very big difference! Soooooooo.....

My friend Becky has bantam chickens and does have a rooster so she brought me 4 of her eggs to trade out for the big chicken eggs so Chelsea will not be sitting for nothing! I hope they are fertile! So we wait now for 21 days to see if Chelsea will become a mother to babies that are not hers. In the mean time we have to take her off her eggs 2 times a day to make her eat and drink because she insists that she is not leaving the eggs.

I really don't know how I get myself into these things but it is what it is! I should really be worrying about my math final in 3 weeks but to be honest, this is more fun! I should really think about changing my career plan to being an AG teacher, but thats probably not a good choice! Anyway I will keep every one posted. I will check the eggs in 10 days and see if I can see a glimpse of the little guys in the eggs by using a light.

The Computer Curse

Most of you know that I am in school and this is my second year. This year has been my most challenging so far. When I started school last year, Tony bought me a laptop to do all my work on since I was taking online classes as well as in class. It was a very nice computer and I loved it. Well 1 week before I started school this January, My laptop crashed! It is only 1 year old and 9 days out of warranty. Needless to say I had a major breakdown and had no idea how I was going to start school. Especially when the online class was a computer class on Office 2010!!!! So I race it down to the computer guy begging for help. He said it would take a few days. He called me several days later, we are now down to about 4 days till class, and said to come in because he thinks it is fixed. I get there and he turns the computer on to show me how well it works but the screen is black! Really?! I knew then that I was in trouble. He says he needs to keep it and look into it more.

Tony decides we will go buy another computer so I can start school and when my computer is fixed he will take it because he needs a computer to start back to school himself.So we go to Walmart to get a new one but this time get the extended warranty. Don't need anymore breakdowns for school!From day one I hate the computer, it just wasn't like my other one. 1 week later computer man calls and says to come get computer, it is not fixable because it could be 1 of 3 things and it would cost more than the computer cost us originally. Now I'm really freaked out because now Tony still needs a computer and that one was only a year old.

Well time allowed me to chill until my new computer, which is only 3 months old, crashes on me this week!!! I have 3 PowerPoint presentations due Friday and have a broken computer. I call the warranty, they send me to Dell and I get to talk to people that can barely speak English. They walk me through a bunch of tests and say the computer is fine. I just about lost it, the computer is not fine.They say they fixed it so today once again it has crashed. I made Tony do the call relay tonight, they found 5 crashes to the driver and now say it is fixed. We will see!!! I'm using it now so we will see if it can hold up.

So I am now sitting here waiting till midnight because fall registration opens the 4th and I need an online class that has only 27 openings.I really need this class!!!  I have 2 classes left and then I can apply for radiography. I am hoping the computer will be OK and allow me to register. Mean while we have ordered computer # 3 that will be deliver Thursday so I can at least finish this computer class, in the event this computer goes out again, and allow Tony to start back to school next month. I think I have for sure been slapped with the Computer Curse!!!!

New Horse

This is our new horse, Summer! Brooke needed a horse to move up to because she is getting too big for Willow and Ashlyn would like to have her pony back! HaHa! We have only had her for a week and she seems to be a very nice horse. It is a big adjustment for all of us because she is much younger than the other horses we have owned and she is also much bigger than our other horses. We are learning more and more about her everyday and are hoping she will be a nice horse for Brooke to grow with. The journey begins and hopefully it leads us into many wonderful things!

Sheep Show

So Saturday Night Brooke showed Lily in Showmanship. It is judged on the way the person handles the sheep and sometimes they ask them questions or feel for how clean they are.

She did a really good job. There were 41 kids so they split the class into 4 separate classes and just brought back the top 3 or 4 from all 4 classes do judge the final class. Brooke didn't get called back but she did receive a red ribbon and she will receive $40 for that class.

On Sunday we pretty much spent the day at the show ring. It was the day of the sheep show. They judge on the quality and the way the sheep are built. It started at 11 am so we just had to hang around till her class came about.

Lily waits patiently for her class!

Brooke is in the center with the white shirt.

Walking the sheep so the judge can see a side view.

Lily is one of the smaller sheep in the class

Brooke ended up with 7th out of 9 so she wasn't last. Lily just wasn't as big as the other sheep. Alot of them are pregnant so they do give the illusion that they are bigger. The judge did give her a blue ribbon so she will receive $50. Brooke had alot of fun!

While we waited, me and Tony took turns floating Ashlyn around the fair to look at things. Mostly the chicken barn and the milking parlor! There were alot of chickens for sale so she kept going over to tell me she wanted to buy another chicken. We have no more room for chickens so that would require a new coop. She says well just build one!!!

She liked watching the chicks hatch. They are so cute!

Alot of chickens to look at!!!!

We didn't get done till about 5pm so we ate dinner at the fair and headed home about 6:30. It was a very good trip and a wonderful experience for the girls.

Day Two at Fair

The second day at fair, Brooke didn't have to show till 5PM so we had the whole day to visit the fair. There was no way we could see everything but we tried. Ashlyn was fascinated with the milking parlor. Every couple hours they would bring cows in to milk them with machines. It is amazing how fast they can milk a cow. It only takes about 5 minutes to fill half of the containers hanging on the fence with milk.

(I have to say, Ashlyn was so happy about being at that fair. When we pulled off the interstate and she seen how big that fair was she was full of excitement. She said, "I'm so happy that my eyes are watering"! She had tears of joy over the fair.)

It wasn't bracelet day so the kids couldn't ride everything. There is over 100 rides there so it would have been a fortune. They went through $30 in tickets each in about 30 minutes!

After the rides we checked out cracker country. It has an old post office, church, school house and general store from the late 1800 to early 1900. They were really cool. I forgot to take pictures there! We then found a really neat petting zoo that had a giraffe! he was neat!

The kids thought the alpacas were cute. One had some really crazy teeth!!!

We then headed over to see the lawn mower races. That was very interesting! it was really muddy because we had severe rain there on Friday for hours. They were getting stuck alot.

So that was pretty much the end of our day before Brooke had to get ready for her Show at 5:00. That will be the next post.

Obstacle Course at State Fair

So we went to the state fair for 3 days. Brooke took her sheep Lily to show. She had alot of fun! It was alot going on and a very busy 3 days but we had a good time. I have alot of pictures of things going on so I will break it all up into different posts.

We left the house Friday morning at 5:30 AM to be at the fair grounds by 8 AM. That was the time that check in started. We waited in line for about an hour to have Lily checked by the inspectors to make sure she had a health certificate and then we went and found her a stall. She made friends right away with the baby next to her. At 12:30 we had a parent/exibitor meeting and had lunch. At 1:30 Brooke had to do her first competition which was a skill a thon, knowledge of sheep, and then a record book test, a test to see how well they can put a record book together. While she was doing that, Tony went to find our motel and me and Ashlyn watched a miniature donkey show. That was very funny! Brooke was done about 3:30 and then we walked around a bit before going back to the barn to get ready for the obstacle course that was at 5:00.

The obstacle course had things in it that the sheep had to get on or put up with and a judge scored on how well they did it and the speed.

The first obstacle was two tires that the sheep had to walk on. Lily just stepped around them!

Second was brooke had to tie her to the rail with a quick release knot. We had to have a crash course on that 5 minutes before it started! She did it perfect.

Third was jumping a jump. She practices that all the time so there was no problem there. I got the picture after the jump! Slow camera!

Fourth was a platform that Lily and Brooke had to walk over. Lily really wanted nothing to do with that but Brooke finally got her on it.

Fifth was Lily had to back up the length of a pole. It took alot of muscle on Brookes part but she made her do it.

Sixth one Lily had to walk on a mat and Brooke had to make her go through a hula hoop. I really thought she would not do that but she did it!

So she did really good! She didn't win anything but she had a good time doing it. She had 2 more shows that weekend but I will post those on another post. We don't know how she did on the tests that she did earlier that day. We are thinking they will send them when they send her premium money in the mail.

Social Studies Project

Brooke had to do a Social Studies project over Christmas break. We all were not happy about that! It was on the floods in TN in 2010 and she made a gameboard to go along with it. She got a perfect score on it from her teacher and then it was excepted to the social studies fair. She didn't win any awards at the fair but she got a certificate for competing. We are very proud of her!

Valentine cards

 Me and Ashlyn went on the Internet and found some cute Valentine cards to make for her friends and her teachers. We are doing a few of them a day so it is not so overwhelming. The teacher cards are popcorn and the kids cards are lollipops. She is having a good time making them!

Brooke doesn't want to make any. I guess she is too old for that now!!!! I'm so glad there is so many years between them so I can hang on to the fun kid moments a little longer.

Here are some close up shots of the Valentine cards taken off the website:

We found them on the Family Fun website if anyone is interested!!

Talent Show

The kids had a 4-H talent show on Saturday night. They performed a small skit with their club. It was called Rosalie's Cupcakes. It was about a cupcake baker that came up with the invention of sprinkles. An old grouchy man bought a dog that stole the formula and started his own shop. Rosalie the baker made up some cupcakes that had Happiness in them and the old man and his dog were suddenly happy forever. At the end of the skit, the kids handed out mini cupcakes with sprinkles to the audience.

Brooke was Rosalie the cupcake baker and Ashlyn was the dog. They had a really good time! They got second place in the group act division and they were really proud.Tony took video but I have no clue how to get it on here! If I figure it out, I will post it.

The funny story about this skit is that Brooke and some friends at school came up with the skit as a school project. Only it was a little different than the one they performed for 4H. They had to change it up a bit because the one for school had that they fed the old man poison!!! And he died!!!!!! Brooke got an A on it in school. Surprising that it was allowed at school huh? Never shocks me what the public schools allow.

Anyway, she got double use of the skit and saved us alot of time coming up with something for them to perform.

Sugar Mill

Last week on Monday we took the kids to the old Sugar Mill in Port Orange. They  had the day off of school and we wanted to do something with them before life got crazy again. I started school on Tuesday so things have been really busy and just seems like there is not enough time for everything. Ashlyn is just amazed with the old sugar mills. She says she wishes she could see them before they fell apart! She is always so curious! There were lots of plants and stone dinosaurs. Brooke took about 80 pictures of plants just trying to get a really nice picture for her photo contest for 4-H.

The kids are staying busy! Brooke made it to the social studies fair with her project. Brookes still doing drill team with the horses and preparing for a performance at the balloon fest in March. Ashlyn and Brroke have been preparing for a play that they are doing at a 4-H event on Saturday. I have been spending every spare minute I have doing math!!! It seems to be the worst so far. I also have a microcomputer apps class and I actually like that one. My computer crashed on me 5 days before class started so I had to get a new one. That really made me mad considering my other one was only a year old and was 9 days out of warranty.Iit cant be fixed so I had to replace it. Tony got a new job as an engineer so he is off to school again himself! He should start next semester. It will really be crazy around here with 2 of is in school!

Anyway, thats what we have been up to the last couple weeks!

Ashlyns Show with Willow

Brooke and Ashlyn had a horse show over the weekend. Ashlyn showed Willow in leadline for the first time. She got a little trophy to be proud of! Brooke got Reserve Champion for the day! They both had a good time and Willow was a girl like usual.