I always swore I would not spoil my child. I would know better. (All you moms, you can start laughing now). I certainly wasn't going to buy a lot of useless toys. This weekend Carter managed to talk me (yes, I realize she's 2.5 years old, but she's very persuasive...really) into a little Disney kid camera. It's so cute. She had a ball with it for about 2 days and now I think it's already lost. I'm only slightly mortified that I spent so much on a toy that didn't last any longer than it did. Notice her great big purse. Her other new toy that we managed to snap up from Gramma who was cleaning out her closets. She loves filling it up with all sorts of treasures and hauling it all over the place. You can find a brush, a puzzle piece, several pieces of gum, 2 necklaces, a couple random toys, several scrap pieces of paper, a couple horse cakes and a boot spur she hasn't grown into yet. That's when it's not full...
We called our vet, Doc Haaland, up about spaying several barn cats. He was like sure, bring in, no problem, having a slow week, yada yada. So then I clarified, we're catching this cats with live traps, you can't exactly pick them up. He was a bit hesitant, then laughed, sure--just let me know when your bringing them. My brother had managed to talk him into fixing a load of barn cats for him a few years ago and we were counting on Doc taking these. It was either that, or they were headed to the Happy Hunting Grounds. When we first moved into this place almost a year ago, the guy who originally owned it was feeding almost a PALLET!! of cat food a month to all these wild barn cats. We counted over 40 dang cats and I found at least 3 litters of kittens. The barn smelled like the worlds largest cat box and you almost couldn't stand to be in it on a hot day. Robert thinned out the cats and I hand raised almost 20 kittens to tame down and then gave away. I don't know if you've ever hand raised kittens but it's a lot of work! Baby kitten formula costs almost as much as baby human formula. They need to be feed every 3 or 4 hours and if they are small enough, you have to wipe them with warm wet washcloths to help them urinate. It was a lot of fun though. Carter LOVED all the babies in the house and we even managed to keep her from mauling them in all her excitement. Anyway this winter we were down to about 5 or 6 wild cats that were coming in to be fed. There were several other toms that showed up but mostly I was worried about the females. I didn't need any more kittens to raise and certainly didn't want anymore cats running around. So Robert managed to trap most of the females and hauled them into the vet. He called today to to let us know we could pick them up, but one had managed to escape in the building and he still hasn't found her. I don't know why, but it struck me as kinda funny. He's had a live trap set out for a couple days with no luck. He had already spayed her but was nice enough not to charge us for it unless he catches her. I love our vet.
This is the first year since we got married that we have had our taxes filed on time. I'm so excited I can't hardly stand it. Robert was terrible with paper work. When I met him, he was behind a couple years already on filing. I nagged and whined until he finally got them all caught up again, just to fall behind again. I swore I would never do his book work, because it was part of his job, his company. He is self employed so there is a huge amount of paper work involved in filing taxes, especially if you haven't been real faithful about keeping things recorded and up to date. IN all fairness, he doesn't exactly spend a lot of time around the house when he isn't busy doing something and finding time to keep up with the paper work was difficult for him (especially when it's the last thing you want to do...) Last year, I finally had enough and took over his bookkeeping. Talk about trial by fire. I have a tendency to be a wee bit of a research fiend, so I had to learn how to do it correctly! I had never done any sort of bookkeeping and knew nothing about QuickBooks. The first couple months were rather rough as I tried to learn how to do everything Robert wanted and get Robert to give me all the information I needed. It took us awhile to find a system that worked for us both and kept us from trying wring each other's necks. But what a relief to have them done, in the mail and even have some money coming back this year rather than trying to catch up on back taxes.
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