Happy Mother's Day! ;)

During school my Mom always tells me, "Don't write with exclamation points. They make you look like an amateur. What you write should be exciting enough that you shouldn't need one." I would have added some exclamation points in there, but didn't want to look like an amateur. She was an English minor in college, so any time we say something like, "That don't look right." or "That ain't funny." she goes full English teacher on us, telling us the proper thing to say, and how to say it.

If you are wondering why I put a random picture of a flower in this post my answer is, because it's pretty.

Nash is our mamma bunny. She's a chinchilla rabbit and goes for the taxing price of thirty dollars. She was bred with our manly, huge, rabbit known as Hulk, and produced 8 squirming, slimy, lumps.
We were so proud of our first time mamma bunny, until one stopped moving. Uh-oh. One died, then two. By the time number three died, we had decided that Nash was a serial killer. Those were the exact words my mom used in a post on her blog post and some one told us our problem. Nash was not in fact killing her babies, but when she would hop into the nesting box to feed them, they would still be attached to her as she left the box.

 We tried to save number four. We found him in the space in between the box and the cage. We held him in the warming rays of the heat lamp, and checked on him daily, but on day three he was lost to Elsewhere. The other four all lived and are currently fat and happy.

We all get to keep a baby bunny if we like, so I chose the little white one.

Meet Little Jerry Seinfeld.
The rabbit. We call him Jerry for short. I chose the solid white one from the start. We went up to look at them for the first time and I saw said, " I call dibs on the white one!"

I love you Jerry!

This is Pooh Tat. She is mamma to the other two cats we own. She is by far the favorite. She has many, many, nicknames, and I couldn't tell you all of them if I had to.  

 

 Pooh is a guy's cat. If she is given the choice between a guy, or a gal, she will always choose the guy. If my brother has one of his friends over to spend the night, she will sleep on their chest, right by their face. In the evening before bed, she can usually be found sleeping on dad's stomach.

This is my Mamma! I am so very blessed to have such a beautiful, funny, kind, easygoing mother.

She loves to work in her garden, and she loves to have fun. She is an amazing cook, and is teaching me to be one too. One time we were in the car and she said,"I think I just came up with my own motto." I looked over. "Oh? What is it" She turned to look at me, and with a huge smile announced,"If there's no food, and it's not fun I'm not going."

She will work in her garden all day, weeding, planting, and watering, and have fun doing it. She has a gift. I weed four garden beds and I'm done. She'll weed twenty one or more still having a good time.

Happy Mother's Day Mommy! I love you!

Short-Dog Tacos

   Would you eat your cat in an apocalypse? Our answer to that question was no. No, we would not eat our wonderful, little, grey, fluffy cat. No way, no how, nada. But the short dog........Maybe.
   I have a basset hound named Duke. He is short. He is stinky. He is slow. No, he will not catch the tennis ball. No, he will not fetch the stick. If you need him, he can usually be found asleep in his bed.

Meet Short-Dog!

   He's so happy to see you. He has many nicknames such as; Shortness, Short-Dog, Taco, Stinky, Frito, Frito Man, or Dookkus. We dubbed him Taco after we decided not to eat the cat. 

We were discussing what animals we would eat in an apocalypse, and Parker said, "Were not eating the cat." He hesitated. then shouted, " Short-Dog Tacos!"  So, no we will not eat the cat, but we might eat the dog.

.Parker said, "He's a hamster."

More hamster. 

Even though he is ugly, we love him. He is my Short-Dog Tacos. 

He is easy, laid back, and thinks he's a lap dog.

And we might eat him in an apocalypse.

Love,

Shelby 

My First Cow(s)

I have decided to make a post in memory of my first cows. Some of them died, and some of them got eaten. But they were still my cows, and deserve to go on to the blog.

This was when I got my first cow, Faith. My cousin was spending the night, and was one of the first people Faith met.  I did not get to give faith her a name, because she came with one. Before we got her we went to her farm to look for a cow to buy.  We went into the field with them, and they all ran the other way. The family that owned the cows said, "Oh, you don't want a cow. You want a pet that you can milk." They took us into the barn and their son brought two cows into the barn. One was named Faith, and the other Peppermint. My first thought was, why would ANYONE name a cow Peppermint? My second thought, well, when you have 800 cows, I guess you run out of names pretty fast.

The owner of the cow, witch happened to be their son, showed me how to milk her. When I walked over to Peppermint, she backed away from me. Then I turned to the other cow, Faith, to see her put her head into my mom's lap so that she would pet her. At that moment I decided that Faith was my cow, and that I would take her home, and feed her, and milk her, and call her George.

When we got her she was already bred. We took her home and stuck her in her new field.We say that she hit the jackpot when she came home with us. We put her new field in the middle of a peach 

grove. Jersey's are curious little cows. when something is new, they want to eat it. And lick it. And try to swallow it. So as soon as she discovered that peaches were edible, she ate, and ate, and ate, and bloated, and ate some more.

This was her baby. My dad had to help deliver him, because Faith was having trouble.

I named him Henry. At the time, Henry was the best baby cow name I could come up with. Later on I came up with Crumple,(Yes, Crumple) and Norman. 

 When you went up to the little red barn to feed them or just to say hi, he would be right there at the fence, waiting for you. If you got into the field to play with him he would fall asleep in your lap.

Faith would be there too. She thought I was one of her children. She would give me baths, and mother me, like she would Henry. It seemed like I had a baby brother. Henry would run around the field with his tail sticking straight up like a little race horse. He would do laps around a big pile of dead trees, and we would cheer him on.

 Faith got a nickname that would be the nickname of all the cows to come, and that name was Boo Tow. Boo for short. Boo is my name  for all things fluffy and cute. I use it on the ferret, I use it on all of my cows, I even use it on the cat. Parker tells me not to call his cat Boo. I told him that she should be PROUD to be a Boo.

Once Henry was nine months old, he turned. 11 yr old me could have been innocently walking through the field, going to feed them, when suddenly, I would be launched into orbit. Once I landed I would look behind me to see Henry, head down, in "Give me whats in that bucket or I'll throw you across the field" position. Then I would promptly run screaming across the field to the gate, hurdle it, and finally stopped screaming. Then I would turn around and see the bucket of feed in the middle of the field. Ugh.

Well, we don't need the bucked THAT bad, right?

Shelby

My Cute Schnookems, Norman

So I'm sure you're all wondering what the word "Schnookems" means. It is a word that we have created to describe my (not so) baby cow, Norman.

He is the cutest cow I have ever owned.

We,( I ),bottle fed him as a calf. He was less than a week old when we got him. At first the thought of bottle feeding my own baby cow sounded great! It would be like having a baby.

There he is! 

Look at my Schnookems. He got two bottles a day, one in the morning, and one at 2:00 pm.  As you can probably tell, this was the AM feeding, because I'm in my pajamas.  In this picture he was a week old.  

Today he is a little over 6 months old. My Schnookems is growing up!

This is Norman before his bottle.  He sees me coming.  He runs to the fence.  He bats his adorable giant eyelashes at me and says, "MOOOO!"  

After a feeding, this is what he would look like.                   what he would do when he had eaten all of his bottle, and wanted more.  He would lick, and nudge, and sniff me, looking for an udder.   

And while he was searching for an udder, he would smear milk foam all over me  .Mom thought it was   " cute ." Now he is growing up :(  Mom and Dad said that I had to go through an entire bag of milk replacer before I could stop bottle feeding him. That bag was never ending. 

I know what you are all thinking.

" Look how fuzzy he is!"  I know. He's cute. I'm glad I didn't decide to starve him as a baby. All of those bottle feedings wereworth it. Something funny I found out taking pictures of him is that he loves it. He loves the attention, and the people. It makes him feel like a superstar.

Look how sweet he is. Cute, little, schnookems, pumpkin.  We all love him. Mom says that he is going to turn mean, so I'm enjoying my sweet little boy while he's still nice. In case you didn't know, boy cows hit a point in their lives when, they decide that terrorising the girl that raised them, cared for them, and bottle fed them( ugh )was fun. He's turning. His subconscious was 

whispering "Cooommmee to the Darkkk Siiide."

 Choose life Norman!

A Glitch In The Matrix

A couple of days ago, I was babysitting my neighbors little girl for them as they took there boys out to see Star Wars The Force Awakens. I would be babysitting her from 2:00 until 7:30 (ish) . When the little girl found out that I would be watching her, she bounced, she danced, she squealed, and she sang with excitement.

 When the time came I grabbed our family go-phone (so I could talk to her mom if I needed to) and headed over. Little did I know that she had spent the previous day coming up with a list of fun filled activities to entertain us all that evening.

 Once I got there I was greeted with, " Mommy!!! Shelby's here! Oh, Hi Shelby! Come on in! I'm soooooo excited."  Once properly and rather enthusiastically greeted we went into the kitchen to say hello to her mom. When the boys and her parents had left she turned to me with a huge smile and said, "Come on Shelby! I have a whole list of things for us to do!" 

Wait, what? A list? What list? No one had said anything about a list.

She took me back into the kitchen and as promised, there was a list sitting on the counter. Still beaming, she read it aloud to me.

This is what it said:

1 Play outside

2 Play inside

3 Makeovers

4 Listen to the entire Nutcracker soundtrack ( What? Who does that?)

5 Play with the kitties

6 Dance and do ballet

7 Sing into her new mic that she got for Christmas

8 Eat a snack

9 Do crafts and art

10 Bake in her play kitchen and make cookies

11 Read a story

12 Watch her stuffed animals preform the Nutcracker

13 Watch a movie.

Can any of you guess what that movie was? Lets recap. Adorable 7 yr old girl. Loves My Little Pony. Loves the Disney princesses with all of her heart. Her favorite color is pink, and she loves doing makeup, hair, and nails. She is possibly the sweetest little girl in existence. Do you know what that movie was now?

You guessed it..........FROZEN!

So as we were half way through the movie I got a text from my Mom. I looked down at the screen and I see a picture of a ferret. Wait, what? Hold on, let me tell you what my little sister Andie got Christmas.

We come down the stairs Christmas morning, and we see a hug ferret cage in the middle of the living room. My Mom says to her, " We got you a ferret! He's not here yet, but her should be here by the second week of January." And here we are three days after Christmas and i'm getting pictures of him.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love Frozen! It was great the first 5 times I saw it. But I was pretty happy to have an excuse to ditch the singing snowman.

So, I text back and was like, "What's that?" My Mom proceeded to tell me how they had dropped by the pet shop and the ferret was there, ready to be brought home.

They got the rat, I mean the ferret, home and he decides that biting people was fun!

Me and the little girl headed over to my house to see how the ferret was doing. We got there and my Mom said, " Go on upstairs! He's already stealing shiny things."

We both ran up stairs and we saw the ferr- Wait. What was that smell? Something smelled bad. Like, REALLY bad. I walk over to the rat, ferret, whatever, and sniff him. Ack, ew, gross. It was him.

Apparently everyone knows that ferrets stink, and i'm the only one in the world that doesn't know that ferrets stink. Great. Now we had a stinking, biting ferret.

My brother and my friend came over that night.  Our friend claimed that the ferret was, "A glitch in the Matrix."

He was right. My sister named the ferret Frrt, ( Pronounced Fert ) after the stuffed ferret she has had for the past 3 years.

Frrt has stopped biting people now, and we are looking for ways to make him stink less. I had a great time babysitting, cant wait to do it again.

                                                                        Love ya'll,
                                                                            Shelby

PING!!!

About a six months ago I was looking out side, when I saw my little brother running down the driveway, with a box in his arms. What was he carrying? Hmmmm... He came inside and said, "Guess what we got?" I started to say I do not know, when I heard, "Cheep! Cheep! Cheep!"
 I grabbed his cheeping box, and opened it. Lo and behold  their was a duck. Two, actually. One was mine, and one was Cole's.  I have never had a duck before.

This is Ping.
He is one of my favorite pets I have ever had.  I love him. when he was little, he would follow me around the house, quacking, and waddling as fast as he could. Oh yes. I had a DUCK in our house.
You must be thinking, " Oh! He must ave pooped everywhere!" No, actually . I had a solution.

TADA!

My little sister had a baby doll diaper that was perfect for him. Now, he could follow me anywhere and I didn't have to worry about poop.  I am a genius. Duck Diaper. Perfect.  Once he reached 5 weeks old, i could give him baths. Oh yeah.

Look who is getting his first bath! He LOVED it. He swam, he splashed. he drank the water, he splashed some more, and he preformed the aquatic Olympics for us. Once we pulled him out of the sink, I wrapped him in a towel, and sat with him by the fire until he was dry.

All dry! Shortly after his bath, he fell asleep in my lap.

 Baths are exhausting. Now he is all grown up, but he still gets baths, 

and I still paint his nails. 

My little duckling is huge,  but I love him.

Love,

Shelby

Christmas Explosion!

I am an elf.

 I'm in total Christmas mode.

 In November we get out all of our Christmas decorations, and we have a LOT. This year, Mom and I did the inside of the house, while my brother Parker and the boys next door did the lights on the outside.
 They put lights on the bushes, on the doorway, along the gutter, turned the pillars into candy canes, and outlined the house. So now, we are a beacon of light, brightest house in Bedford.
 And they are not finished yet. They are going to Walmart to get more lights to do the other half of the house.
 Anyway, each year my Dad goes deer hunting at a camp with
 his friends, and stays for a few days. While he is gone, we turn into Santa's merry little elves, and explode Christmas all over the house.
While Mom, Parker and I are trying to make room for the Christmas decorations, packing them away into boxes and such, my younger siblings carry all the boxes of decorations they can hold into the kitchen.
 They unpack them, grab what they want, and horde it off into their rooms until the day after
 Christmas.
In the past, decorating the house has taken days, since Mom had been doing it on her own.
NOT THIS YEAR!!!
This year she had Parker, and, most of all ME. All in all, we finished in about three hours.
 Team work!

We put little Christmas trees all over the house, decorated with ribbons, bows, ornaments,
and lights. I think we have at least five spread throughout the living room, and kitchen.

One of the best parts of Christmas is probably the food.

What you see in this picture are some of the best cookies you will ever eat. My little sister Andie Kay made them, and may I just say she did a wonderful job. 

We make a pair of stackers every year since I can remember. My Mom was an art major in collage,
so crafts are kind of her thing. We also give them away as Christmas presents. This year, we are making home made candles made from our own, home grown, beef tallow. For these of you who don't know what beef tallow is, it's beef fat.

Our fireplace is the highlight of the house each year. We do lights, ribbons, stockings, wreathes,
ornaments, throw pillows, and more lights.
And, we have a real wood burning fireplace. That means chopping wood in the cold, snow, wind  and rain to get a fire. But that also means, burning the Christmas tree on Christmas day!
 It is a tradition we got from my Grandfather. My Mom says he burned the tree each Christmas morning.

This is the ADORABLE snowman my Uncle made for us! He was so excited about giving it to us, He couldn't stand it. He cut the wood, got the mittens, found the perfect sticks for the arms, and painted it himself. He was very proud of his snowman.




Love Ya'll!
Shelby