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Two Weeks In The Life: March 25-April 7th

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And yet another TWO weeks have flown by with no regards to my feelings! Seriously, try writing a full life update once a week and you will realize how fast time goes, and how few pictures you have taken. I will try not to wait two weeks….too much happens here in that amount of time!

Painting Update:

The bedroom is painted!!!

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It looks so beautiful!

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This week was spent trying to keep the house somewhat in order while being spread completely out and having construction going on everywhere. Remembered quickly how much big house projects can disrupt life! Thankfully we have much more space livable than last time and there was no drywall dust or blistering summer heat involved!

Kevin got asked to work on a friend from church’s project during the evenings a few nights this last week so that put us a little behind his original schedule. He worked super hard though and was able to wrap up painting everything and getting it touched up over the weekend so we can start preparing for flooring this week.

Kevin’s Projects:

On other fronts, Kevin has been working out consistently for over a year now in the mornings (so proud of him!) and just this week broke the 5 mile mark on his morning jogs! Wow! He is looking and feeling great!

When we lived in Oregon we had a pull up bar and he loved using it to work out with. He has been wanting to build one the whole time we have lived here and finally tore himself away from all of our/my projects to knock out his little baby:

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It’s looking fabulous so far! Hopefully the concrete setups up the way he wants so it is nice and sturdy.

Dani’s Projects:

This week and past month I have spent A LOT of time in our office. I have been slowly chipping away at creating good systems for us to work with to keep all of our personal and blog paperwork under control. I’ve gotten our filing for the last couple of years finally under control and my desk organized.

This week the biggest thing on my list was creating an Excel program to track all of our projects and keep our checkbook better balanced.

We’ve tried Quickbooks and Quicken and a number of other programs to try to keep track of all our receipts and they have never worked right for our situations or were major overkill and required an accountants help to sort things out at the end of the year.

When we ran our painting business in Oregon I built Kevin an Excel program that we tailored specifically for his needs. It worked awesome! We went from being totally confused about what things were really costing us and whether paint jobs were actually profitable to knowing all that information in a matter of minutes each day.

So we decided something similar to that with tweaks for what a farm needs and a way to keep our checkbook automatically balanced at the same time would be just what we needed. Of course taking a rough idea to a fully functional multi page spreadsheet is quite a project. Especially when I build one of these maybe every 2-3 years so all my excel is a bit rusty.

But after a few 1-2 a.m. sessions and a couple hours each day while Noah naps I am excited that I am getting very close to being finished with it!

I have started inputting our data for this month into it and will be tweaking as we go for the next few months as we learn what is needed.

On The Farm:

This week (March 25th) we realized (with a slight amount of panic) that Digger was due to kid any day and she was still in with all the babies! We did some moving around and got her, Remi and our newest and last (for now) breeder into the largest rabbit pen.

This is our new little lady whom I have dubbed “Snow”. And yes I realize this will be totally ironic if we ever get white bunnies haha:

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Digger didn’t actually kid for a few more days but it was nice to let her settle in a bit and build her nest. She surprised us with NINE babies this time! Her first litter was 7 and last one was 8 babies. Up until this litter she has yet to lose a baby for us. 

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It appears we do have a runt in this litter though and by morning 2 his little belly was not full at all. I went ahead and held momma and him for a while and helped him nurse but as of this morning it looks like we are going to lose him and potentially one other baby. So sad. Update: We did end up losing both of these babies. Next time we will have two does at breeding age so hopefully we can swap kits if momma has too many, these guys were super tiny though so it probably wouldn’t have mattered anyhow.

We had tried rebreeding her after 24 hours (supposedly helps to increase her litter size) which she did not like at all. She is normally very good for Buck, but the second day she was very difficult to handle with him. While it’s hard to definitively say if this was the cause of the large litter I don’t think we will be rebreeding her like that again with this result.

Butchering:

On Sunday we had Jordan and Michael over and the boys were able to process all 6 rabbits and 3 chickens that were looking like their legs wouldn’t make it another week. It was a long afternoon but they had a good time while I worked on starting more seeds and taking inventory of our seedlings to finalize the garden plans.

Garden:

It appears that we are finally out of freezing weather!! The seedlings are going strong in the greenhouse and we will be planting out as soon as we can get the fencing up to keep the ducks out of the garden.

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I finally finished our garden planning with the help of GrowVeg.com’s amazing Garden Planning Software. I had really been struggling with plotting my garden out on paper and was getting really frustrated until I discovered their software. It’s quite literally point and click!

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Plus it then prints out a full list of all the plants you need to plant in one simple list! Hallelujah! They have a 30 day free trial with no credit card too which was great to really put it through it’s paces.

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All the seedlings are going nuts with the warm weather! I overplanted tomatoes….again. So we will have some happy friends adopting out some of these in the next few weeks.

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We are battling an aphid infestation in the greenhouse which I stupidly introduced with some seedlings that had been exposed to an area in our garden that was being attacked over winter. I have been hand removing them and need to get some castile soap to make up a spray for them this week.

The ants have slowed down with the treatments I used but are still pretty heavy on the heavily infested seedlings which are being quarantined in one corner of the greenhouse.

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We finished the other back garden bed!!

We had a packed weekend this last weekend with friends helping us get more spring work knocked out. We were able to borrow a friends truck for Saturday but our strong backed helper, Jordan got called into work last minute so Kevin was expecting to have to load the trailer with mulch all by himself.

When he arrived at the mulch pit they had a tractor there and were able to load him up both trips! God is so faithful to take care of our needs!

Our good friend Bridget came over to help and between the three of us we got the bed laid with cardboard and the trailer emptied TWICE! This bed is now ready enough to plant, we will be adding more aged manure over the top as soon as we can get some more. I even snuck out this morning and got some really late potatoes planted in it.

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We have the watering system ordered and it should arrive tomorrow. The electric fencing system we needed has been purchased and the solar panel is charging (it takes 3 days to charge).

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Which means we should have plants in the ground this week if all goes well!

Food :

We have been joining some of our friends, Matt and Heidi, for Friday night Sabbath dinner at Heidi’s house the last two weeks and are loving it! They are exploring a more traditional sabbath (Shabbot) and we found out many of our new contacts in the Homestead Bloggers group also take a more traditional sabbath. We tend to work on projects pretty much 24/7 it feels like around here to try to keep up with everything. But we are prayerfully considering how we can incorporate this into our life soon. So far though we have just been thoroughly enjoying the traditional Jewish style dinners that Heidi has been whipping up!

Two Sundays ago was Easter (which we don’t celebrate much as most of the traditions originated from practices we don’t agree with) but we did have a lovely church service and a great dinner. We decided that it would be great fun tradition to eat the “Easter bunny” for dinner:

Kevin and Jordan barbecued the rabbit with wood chips, made some delicious red quinoa, and had a fresh garden salad. The rabbit was so smoky all the way through and yet the exterior was crunchy like chicken skin. This was by far our favorite way of eating rabbit.

We also made up some Au Gratin Sweet Potatoes with bacon, pecans and coconut milk. The sweet potatoes tied everything together and made a delicious sauce that perfectly complimented the smoky, crispy meat and the nutty quinoa. It was so good we put some ice cream on top of it and called it dessert too!

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I finally broke down and splurged on this new tripod for my camera. Hopefully once things are planted and the watering system is in I will have a spare second to work on improving my food photography skills!

Noah:

Has been having a blast learning new words and kissing everyone. This is a much appreciated improvement over biting everyone.

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He has also been head butting me like crazy, laying his ear on momma’s belly to listen to “baby” (which he is convinced is my belly button), and absolutely loves that our bed is in the living room so he can have pillow fights and jump from couch to bed to couch.

He’s been quite emotional the last few weeks, probably because of how swamped we have been and the house being pulled apart.
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And has been having frequent melt downs at the dinner table.
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But in the last two weeks he has finally figured out how to say “Momma” which means I have gotten virtually nothing done during his waking hours as he tugs on my pants or sleeve and pulls the “momma” card. Forget the dishes, forget the blog…..nobody can resist this sweet little boys requests.

Baby:

We are 31 weeks pregnant this week! Wow!

I am feeling good but huge already….I’ve already started getting the sympathetic looks from people when we go out. I had some bad sciatic pain this last week and had to lay low for a few days to recover from that. I realized I was carrying Noah exclusively on my left hip and stopping that combined with more stretching and walking has helped some.

We finally settled on a name for our precious little bundle of joy!

Phinneas True Meyer

We will probably call him “Finn” for short or “True”…..or he may get earn himself an entirely odd ball nickname like Noah did with “Noah-Bear”  and Cocoa did with “Bean”.

It took much longer to pick a name out for this baby then it did with Noah, but we are so excited about it! The story behind names is really important to us so we thought we would share why we picked this one…

Phinehas was a priest in the bible who rose up and took a stand against evil in his generation, and by doing so ended a great plague. He then received this blessing from God:

“And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,

Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, hath turned my wrath away from the children of Israel, while he was zealous for my sake among them, that I consumed not the children of Israel in my jealousy.

Wherefore say, Behold, I give unto him my covenant of peace:

And he shall have it, and his seed after him, even the covenant of an everlasting priesthood; because he was zealous for his God, and made an atonement for the children of Israel.”

We particularly love that he was not a passive man at all in his convictions. This is something that we find very important to instill in our boys and love that his name embodies that.

By definition Phinneas means: mouth of brass or oracle.

Not suprisingly the meaning of True is…….truth or true. We loved it when we heard it and were waiting for the right first name to go along with it for the last 3 months. Once we talked about Phinneas it just clicked immediately for both of us.

So combined what we have decided his full name means is:

“One who rises up, proclaims and acts on God’s truth ”

We just love it and can’t wait to meet him!

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About Dani Meyer

Hi, I’m Dani! I’m most importantly mama to 3 wild little dudes. I spend my days cooking, photographing and exploring the Pacific Northwest. I'm a full time food blogger and online business coach.

I’m the author of Stress Free Camping, a 120+ page guide on making epic food in the woods. I’m also the founder of Food Blogger Entrepreneurs, the leading online academy and private community for food bloggers. → More About Dani

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