Miss me?

Long time no see, lol :) I have missed you guys, we have been swamped trying to get ready for winter. [WARNING: THIS POST IS A BIT OF A RAMBLE :) ] The great clothing switch out is finally over, the chickens are butchered (I even made some chicken breakfast sausage, yum!) Thanksgiving was a challenge until we found the awesome Oster Extra Large Convection Toaster oven (not a paid advertisement), it is deceptively small looking in the store but after much deliberation and many pans being inserted in the display model, we got it. It's about the size of a microwave so it's not tiny but it is great. It holds the really large lasagna pan with some room on each side and cooks evenly. Kansas mom brought us a delicious baked mac and cheese (it is very similar to my macaroni pie) that was a great addition to our Thanksgiving dinner. I found a terrific meat grinder for $5, I made the chicken sausage and then did ground sirloin for the Thanksgiving stuffing. The stuffing was delicious, but boy did I have doubts that it would turn out right. The night before I began working on some Black cake (think + rum fruit cake and lots more rum, lol), preparations, I cut up the fruit and got it soaking in a bottle of rum and cherry brandy. I completely spaced and allowed IL to have the left over raisins, forgetting that I would need them for stuffing. DH and I had discussed the menu and I asked about olives and he assured me that we had a jar, turns out there was all of 6 in said jar. So I was cutting up the handful of raisins that IL left and the 6 olives to put in the stuffing on Thanksgiving day as I hadn't gotten to it the night before. Not being a fan of turkey we had a nice fat chicken and no one even noticed that I forgot to put out the cranberry sauce :). Hmmm, what else have you missed . . . oh, now that we don't have pigs the layers are in their glee as they are the recipients of all the produce. Though the cows do like the cabbage leaves an such, the girls are doing well and have fattened up rather nicely for the winter. I am really glad we found a new hay guy, I prefer the quality of this hay over last couple years. It's not as cheap and we don't have a way to buy in bulk (his bales are HUGE, there is no way we could push them around), but the girls are MUCH happier. All the kids are doing well, they are super excited for Christmas (Go figure). The baby is getting big and I think he recognizes me, he even smiles at me :) Oh, thanks for all who have been praying for my mom, she did wonderfully and is recovering very well. How could I forget, we took the kids fishing this week. Now, we didn't catch anything but I don't think that's the point of the exercise :) They had a blast and we had a great bon fire after so they could make real s'mores. Now it wasn't quite what they had in mind, they were hoping to have the full camping experience but 20 degrees seemed a bit too cold to sleep outside, especially for a first time camping trip. We will continue to collect camping stuff as we find them and get ready to go in the spring. Fortunately we don't have to go but a couple miles to be in the woods, lol and a friend owns a great property over by the river that he maintains much like a camp ground. We didn't fish there as we could find any great places to take the kids down safely but we found the park off the old highway in our used to be city and it was perfect, though I think the mini waterfall may scare away the fish. It was really great to finally find it though, I had been hearing about it for sometime and never new where it was. Well that's all I've got for now, DH has a few new irons in the fire, keep us in prayer as we try to see where He is leading :) Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. Oh and here are a few (actually quite a few really) pics :) Enjoy.

























It was this big, honest. lol :) No fishing trip is complete without a one that got away story :)

Ever peal a raw egg?

AR was thrilled to see what the egg looked like minus the shell for his science experiment :)