Joy: House Tour and Other Happenings

As promised, I filmed a tour of house.

I apologize that I move the camera around too fast and am not good on screen.

The things I forgot to talk about in the video: When we refinished the floor we stopped at the hallway and did not do the kids' rooms due to the fact that we will be tearing down walls and renovating. That's why the floors look so bad still in their rooms.

The little kitten that I said is available has since found a home. Ember's babies however will still need homes.

The day after we got Lucy and Lance home we noticed that Lucy was having diarrhea and acting lazy and lethargic. Then she stopped eating. We took her to the vet where they did a Parvo test on her and unfortunately it was positive. The treatments started a $600 with no guarantee she would live. I told the vet we would have to put her to sleep. Thankfully, the vet also runs a non-profit for animals and because of Lucy’s adorable cuteness, she said she would take her and treat her and adopt her out if she gets better. It was so sad to sign her over to the vet. It’s crazy how attached I had become to that sweet little girl in the few days that we had her.

The vet office was so kind. They didn’t charge me a dime for the office visit or the parvo test. The worst part about the situation is that Parvo is incredibly contagious and therefore Lance could get it too. So far he has been fine and but I told the girls not to get anymore attached than they already are.

In other news, we accidentally caught a racoon!

It was so fun to see a raccoon in real life. None of us ever had. This little guy was very docile and asleep when we found him. We had to deliberately wake him. He was confused and happily bounded into the woods when we released him. The last cat is still on the loose. He taunts us and watches our every move.

This week we have been concentrating our efforts on building garden beds. The soil here is good but because we are on the tail end of the Ozark mountains, it is chock full of rocks. It would be impossible to have an in ground garden. Well, when we explored the barn a little while ago,

we discovered that under the 3 inch layer of rat feces, there is a large amount of raw milled planks up in the hay loft of the barn. (I have extensively googled Hanta virus and I believe we are going to live)

We used them to build our garden beds along with some spider ridden tin that we found on the property. (I have extensively googled brown recluses and I believe we are going to die.) So far we have made 5 large beds.

That is all we will do this spring. We will add more later. Filling the beds can be expensive (I know from my tiny container garden in AZ!) I couldn’t justify buying soil so we came up with a solution. My dad uses the tractor to get a load of dirt from the many piles on the property,

he made a sieve and he shovels the dirt into while we sift the rocks out of the dirt.

The good dirt falls into the wagon below where it gets wheeled to a bed and unloaded.

The large rocks are thrown in a pile to be used around the culverts my dad is making and the rest of the rocks and gravel are shoveled into the wheel barrow and used to fill in the pot holes and low spots on the loooong circular driveway out front.

We were about to spend hundreds of dollars on gravel but feel very resourceful killing 3 birds with one stone, all for free from what we have on the land and little hard work.

All the kids pitch in one way or another. Everyone feels satisfied after a good day’s work. The only money we spent on them was for a truck load of compost that we drove to Little Rock for and that only cost $40 bucks for enough to top all of the beds.

Several times now, we have all been busy with various tasks and one of us will realize that Jack is missing. We call and call, and start to get worried and search for him just to find him fast asleep somewhere.