Chicken Wrangler

Robert finally started turning the chickens out during the day and then locking them back up at night. Carter really seemed to enjoy the chasing the chickens back part. (I can't believe how fast they get big--chickens and kids!)
The chicken wrangler! Looks pretty darn serious doesn't she?

I also had to throw in a quick picture of my irises. The picture doesn't do them justice, they look so pretty this year. Last year, a last frost the beginning of June was really hard on them and only a couple bloomed. This year there is going to be lots! I'm really excited to see my dark yellow iris bloom again. I'm hoping there is more than one, but I haven't seen any yet.

Sheep Riding

Last weekend Carter rode down to Colorado with Robert and Ciara to pick up some needed job materials. While they were in Coloraod, they hit the Sundance Bull Riding Series going on in Fort Collins and Carter got to ride her first sheep. She LOVED it.

The kids are supposed to be at least 4 years old, but since everyone knew Robert, they were able to fudge her birthday just a bit.

Dad helping her get all situated on the boys and giving her pointers.

How many guys do you suppose it takes to get one little girl on her her sheep?

Cole, one of the bull fighters and Carters new best friend, spotted her across the arena. She looks like she pretty clamped down on that sheep!

Victorious! She looks pretty darn proud of herself. She jumped off her sheep at the end of the arena and waved to the crowd just like her dad told her too. She was very sure she had won the sheep riding and wanted her prize. Robert and Kevin Bivens convinced her that they judges would be mailing it to her, so we've got to come up with something right here directly and get it in the mail. Definetly will have to do it again. When they were taking all the sheep back to Kevin's, she wanted to ride all the sheep off the horse trailer. A big thank you to Seneca Bivens who took these pictures and was wonderful enough to email them to me.

First Wranglers

Naturally had to get a picture of Chase in his first pair of Wranglers. These wranglers have been lots of little kids first pair including Carters. They are almost worn out and unlike most little kid Wranglers, are pretty soft. I thought they looked pretty darn cute!

Chase is at the stage where he can figure out how to stand up on stuff, but not how to get down!

Just one more picture, getting ready to head down to Gramma's to help set up the branding meal (although I don't know how much help we were...). He seems to have picked up cousin Keenan's love of "Autos".

Sprinklers at Gramma's

On Friday, while we were waiting for the branding crew to show up for dinner, mom turned on the sprinklers for Cade and Avery to run through. It was almost 90 degrees on the porch, and it was sounding like a better idea all the time. Cade sure does make it look like fun!
Carter went up to the branding with her dad, so she missed on on the sprinkler fun. She had been in a big panic to ride and was NOT getting left behind. Robert was late leaving town, so Rance helped me get horses caught and saddled with Carter anxiously watching to make sure we got her horse Titan ready to go. Then she happily hopped in the pickup with Rance and off they went. Robert met up with them down at the ranch. Carter spent most of the branding riding around with Blake in tow having a great time. She darn near wore her pony out!

I even managed to catch a smile from Avery, but I don't think she noticed I was taking pictures...she was just looking at her mom. She not too sure about Aunty yet, but this coming up week I'm watching her and Cade while Landa is on vacation. We should get in plenty of bonding time and hopefully both of us will survive it!

My little goofball

Carter is all about extremes. When she's good, she's wonderful, when she's bad, she can really be a terror. And she is so funny right now. She has a little jump/dance that she does on occasion that she calls her 'hippity hop'. It cracks me up.

She informed me the other day that "I'm just little, Mom. I'm supposed to spill things, make messes and not share my toys. That's what we do." Oh really? I've got my work cut out for me!She likes to help me water the flowers which mostly consists of watering the porch, the dog, me the cats, that one rock over there, or anything else that catches her attention. The flowers don't really get watered, but she sure has a lot of fun with the hose.

It's so seldom that she will pose nice for the camera that I had to quick snap all the pictures I could get. Naturally it needs to be her idea to take her picture, then she's all about it. My little Miss Independent. My mom laughs when I tell her things like that...it seems I might have been a wee bit independent myself as a kid, or still...

In one of the boxes from Gramma Howell, Carter found a pair of sunglasses that she loves to wear. Notice the shoes on the wrong feet as usual. I've been trying to learn how to fix her hair and mostly end up with a little puff on the top of her head that makes her look a bit like a Who from Whoville. She also loves crazy socks. The more flamboyant, the better. And anything pink and girly looking.

Carter doing a little dance for mom. I need to get a video of the Hippity Hop, it's even better. I sure do love this crazy little girl.

Baby Foxes

A fox family moved in along Milam Road just about a mile from our house. In the late afternoons if you are lucky you can catch the baby foxes out playing, and if you are even luckier and can keep the kids quiet, they will keep playing after you show up. We've caught them out and about a couple times and I finally had my camera with me. Carter loves watching them. These babies weren't more than 10-15 feet away from my car as we sat and watched them check us out. We thought we saw a least 4 kits.

I'm sure they are thinking "hmmm...it's the family with all the chickens!" They haven't gotten any yet, but I'm sure they'll get a couple. I like foxes better than I like chickens, so fine by me. ( It would be even better if they ate cats since we have WAY too many of them.)

Shoes are Required

Robert and I both insist that if Carter wants to be around the horses, she has to wear her boots (thanks to a good lecture by Aunty Linda--no crocs either!). Last thing we need is for our little girl to be short a couple toes. Carter and Cade wanted to go in the corral to pet Bandit, but since they didn't have any shoes on they couldn't. They were disappointed but settled for checking out the ponies for the other side of the fence. As for pants....well, who needs pants?

Playing in the Water part 1

My sister came over for our weekly play date and Carter and Cade decided they wanted to get wet! Not sure what the fascination kids have with water is, but they sure had fun. It seemed a bit cold for my taste, but it didn't slow those two down.

Filling up the pink buckets and climbing in to splash around.

Giving me their best smiles just like I asked!

Christy, Avery and Chase watching the water show.

Playing in the Water Part 2

I didn't think it was particularly warm at only 70 some degrees but apparently it was enough for Carter! After playing all morning in the water with Cade, she was apparently ready for more. Sterling came over in the afternoon and it didn't take long for them to find the hydrant. It looked like a lot of fun, but still way to chilly for me!

Carter loves when Stirling comes over to play and so do I! He can't hardly stand being cooped up in the house and they spend most of the time playing outside which is great as far as I'm concerned. Carter likes to play outside but doesn't like to be outside very long by herself and it's hard for me to play with her for very long packing Chase around. I try to keep Chase's grass, dirt, rocks, and insect consumption levels down, although I'm sure he gets more than I think he does.

Kids May Update

Some random pictures of the kids from May. It's been a busy month and I didn't make time to blog like I had hoped, so I'm trying to get everything caught up now. Plus I've been working on getting the blog book put together from all the blog entries from last year. (Very slowly, the weather is too nice to be inside for very long!)

Carter helping Robert landscape and plant flowers...planting picked weeds in the wheel barrow dirt. (Then naturally being cross when he tried to use the dirt...) Robert got a lot of landscaping done this month and the yard is starting to look much better. Our lawn is green, but I wouldn't exactly call it grass just yet. It's mostly weeds, but that will be a project for next year. This year we're trying to get some of the flowers started, more trees planted, etc. Robert still has big remodeling plans for the house so it's hard to do much around the house or lawn when that's just going to be a construction site later this year. I also got my garden mostly planted, and even have kept up on the weeding so far this year. Last year I wasn't very diligent and I can see I'm going to pay for it this year as the weeds seedlings are coming in fast and furious this spring. I'm hoping to plant a second string of beans, corn and lettuce the first week of June so that things will ripen later and extend the season, but we'll see. Best laid plans and all that.
Chase is now crawling. He started out with an army crawl around 7 months that was pretty cute. It looked kinda like paddling...he'd use one arm to pull himself forward then the other arm. I got a couple videos, but nothing really great. By the end of May, he'd figured out regular crawling and has since mostly quit the army crawl. He is also now pulling himself up on stuff and then you will hear him yelling as he gets frustrated since he hasn't figured out yet how to get himself down!

Not sure what color his eyes are going to end up. Carter's stayed a blue color for a long time too, but not this long I think. Depending on the light, they sometimes look pretty brown, but in this picture, they are still rather blue or maybe grey?

Carter and her bubble beard!

Learning to stack and climb to get into stuff...

Chase now has 5 teeth. The top two were a rather miserable 3 or 4 days until they finally came through, the next one was much easier. Number 6 is on it's way. Chase is also quite the talker. He makes more noise! He is especially vocal when he sees an animal that he would really like to maul. He has this funny noise that he makes when he sees the cats almost like he's trying to lure them in so he can get a handful of hair. (The cats, having been trained well by Carter, are very suspicious of all little persons and are fairly diligent about keeping their distance)

A short video of him crawling although I was actually trying to get a video of him yelling and talking.

All the little cousins

Mom made sure that we all got together at least once to get a picture of all the little cousins while Jessi was home on vacation from Kiev. It was fairly amazing that we got all the rambunctious tykes to sit still long enough for us to get a couple of pictures.

Carter 3.5 yrs, Chase 8 months, Avery 15 months, Everett 10 months, Keenan 22 months, Cade 2.5 yrs. Hopefully I've got all the ages about right. Quite the line up of cute kids!

Riding All By Herself!

Robert had taken Carter on a ride during one of the small brandings and had tied her horse to him using a lead rope so that the horse couldn't run away. Carter didn't like this AT ALL, and wanted to ride ALL BY HERSELF, thank you very much. So on Saturday, they took Carter and her horse Titan over to Aunty Linda's for some lessons. Aunty is wonderful at teaching kids to ride and, even better, loves doing it. Plus they have a very nice arena and round pen that are great places for a little kid to get started. Her Uncle Tricky got in the round pen and rode around with her while Aunty gave instructions in a loud authoritative manner. Carter was really starting to get the hang of it by the end, turning and stopping Titan all by herself.

This was one happy little girl riding around in the round pen on her horse. The quirt helped get Titans attention since kicking is a bit hard when your legs are nearly straight out and don't hang down very far!

This was one of my favorite mother's day presents to date, getting to watch my little girl learning to be a cowgirl. She certainly does love horses and loves to ride. Thanks to Kevin Bivens for taking these pictures and sending them to me. Now we just need Aunty's ankle to recover so that we can come over for more lessons!

Bottle Calves

We some how ended up with 4 bottle calves this year. Carter loves helping feed them (at least for the first couple weeks when it was still novel) and it actually pretty good help. It's now part of her daily chores and she gets to help every day morning and night. Mostly she does a good job and doesn't whine much. Never too early to start teaching them to work I guess! She helps me get the bottles ready in the morning and feed the calves. Robert really seems to love having all the critters around this place, and we're getting closer every day to becoming a real live petting zoo.

Helping Dad with the bottles

Making sure he's doing it right! Robert's just starting to get them bucket trained since it's so much faster to bucket feed this many calves although carrying four buckets might get tricky!

Mom taking too many pictures again...

Bill and Milly. Milly is the one is with the white tag.

Lucky and Boo...yep, reused names from last year, keeps it simpler and Carter seems to like those names.