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

I Love My Pets

Since I live on a farm, I have a lot of pretty cool animals. When we first moved out to the farm, we had 

no animals. Two years later, we got chickens. My brother Parker was nominated Chicken Daddy, and 

 takes care of the chickens. 

Next came along our beloved Puff Ball. She is a little grey and white cat that we named Sophie when we first got her, bus is now, Schnitzel, Puff Ball, Potato, Chunky Monkey, Le Snitch, Hologram, Mrs. Claws, Pooh, Pooh-tat, Poof Ball, Big Mamma, or  Weenscr.

Here she is!

This is Ping!  He came from Tractor Supply, as a little week old duckling. My mom and little brother came home one day with a little box of chickens and- wait. Two of the chickens have bills, and are three times bigger than the rest. Can it be?! A DUCK!!! Me that one of them was for me. I made a noise that somewhat resembled, a squeak\ yell , scooped the duckling up out of his box, put a diaper on him, and named him Ping.

When I say I want a dog, this is what I think of. A fluffy, big, puffy, dog. 

A cute, active, let's go on a walk, dog. NOT-

.

This. This pathetic excuse for a dog, is Duke. 

He is my dog. No, he will not play with me. No, he will not fetch the stick. No, he will not sit, stay, jump, role over, play dead, etc. But he will sleep all day and night only moving to go outside every two hours. As my brother Parker says, "He has a PHD in sleeping."

These are two of my cows, Gwen and Rosie. Gwen is bigger now, but I couldn't find any recent pictures of her. Gwen Is the black one, and her mom, Rosie is the blond and white  one. Wright now, we have six cows, for at our house, and two stating at a friends farm.

You can go back to your nap now, Rosie.

Love,
Shelby

Beach!

No, I am not at the Beach, and I'm not going any time soon.Then why are you posting about the Beach? you may ask. Because I like the beach! DUH. Also, because I have a lot of cute pics from vacation.

This is all of us kids on my Uncle John's boat. He took us into the Gulf of Mexico!

 This is my sweet, adorable, little brother Cole.

 This is me, and as you can see, I had decided to LIVE in this bathing suit.

 This is Andie, my happy, bouncy, bundle of joy, little sister. She is looking for seashells.

 This is my big brother Parker,(were only a year apart, Parker!) after we got back from getting caught in a storm in the middle of the ocean. Hehe. Is some one wet?

This my awesome, funny, cool Mom, if she does say so herself.(witch she does) We all kind of decided to live our sunglasses that week. I don't have any pics of my Dad, sorry Dad, but he was there!

Enjoy the pics!

Love,

Shelby

Bury The Survivors

So, my brother Parker and I, decided that we should start a band. I play guitar and piano, and he plays guitar, and is starting to pick up bass. After it was official, that we were going to actually do this, we called our friend Nate. He is a drummer,(A really good one) and asked him if he would be interested in playing with us. He was very excited, and said yes. Yay! Now all we had to do was find a pianist. I couldn't do it since I could not play guitar and piano at the same time. So we called our friend Kevin, since he plays piano and asked if he would like to be in a band. He was pretty excited about it, and said yes, so VIOLA! We had a band!

This is a snapshot of Parker and Nate. Yes, I know it's a pretty bad pic, but it's the only one I have of them. I swear, it's like those two hide from cameras. Parker is the one in the red shirt. I don't have any pictures of Kevin, but that's just as well since he decided to play soccer instead of being in a band. So now we have my friends mom subbing until we find a piano player.

This is me and my sister Andie. Were on my Uncle John's boat.

This the guitar\bass player, the one and only, Parker!

The piano sub's daughter, Reagan, is singing with me till we have an official piano player. So I guess she's an honorary band member for now. Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you, I'm singing till we find a lead singer.

So, yeah. Now I have a band. We have already played at two parties, and both times it went great.Nerve racking, but great! It took us a while to come up with a good name, so long that my mom started to threaten us, saying she would name us "George And The Pigs." We all vetoed that name immediately, and finally decided on "Bury the Survivors". The name came from a riddle I told the boys. It goes like this:

"A plane takes off at New York. Then it crash-landed between Kentucky and New York. Where do you bury the survivors?"

If you haven't guessed, the answer to the riddle is that you DON"T bury the survivors! You bury the dead. Duh.

 Right now we are covering the songs; Its Time by Imagine Dragons, Wagon Wheel by Darius Rucker, I'm Yours by Jason Maraz, Pumped Up Kicks by Foster the People, and Brown Eyed Girl by Van Morrison.

 The guys want to write some music, so that may be in my future, but we'll see. The guys gave all of us nicknames.Oh yes they did. Nate is Grammy,(don't ask) Parker is Uncle Bob, And i'm Cookie. I got no choice in choosing my nickname, and it kinda stuck. So now I'm Cookie.

Hope you are as excited about this as I am!

Love,

Shelby