The Grand Parlor Reveal

The Parlor is now finished and we are so pleased with how it turned out! To see all of our work from the very beginning, please click HERE to see past parlor posts.

 

Without further ado, here is THE PARLOR, beginning where we left off.

 

First of all, Handy Husband built my bookcases along one wall, just exactly as I'd always dreamed of having for all my books. They turned out so nicely!

 

 

Revealing part of the old chimney was an added bonus for me. I think it's become a beautiful focal point of the room and Handy Husband did a great job of trimming it.

The crown molding was pretty tricky at first, but after watching an instructional youtube video, I think we did a good job on it.

 

Here are the final pictures:

 

 

 

  



The View

RIP Sweet Old Bear

Bear was born in 1998, to our beautiful German Shepherd Chica. He was the shy, timid puppy that won our hearts.

The View

Wordless Wednesday

Summer Hay

The dry weather has set in and the grass is getting dry and brown. The goats have eaten their pasture down pretty badly, so I've been feeding them the leftover round bales from last summer. They love it when I put a new bale in their pasture and immediately one or two of them jump up on top.

Sharing the Watering Hole

Two of our free range momma hens and their chicks have to share a water pan, and I always wondered how well they get along in doing so. I was lucky enough to capture this series of pictures showing just how well they share.

Baby W is 7 Months Old!

Baby W turned seven months old yesterday. He is changing so fast! He's trying to crawl, can roll proficiently from front to back, and can occasionally sit up from a back-laying position. He still has only two teeth, and weighs about 22.5 pounds. He eats twice a day, and so far has sampled: avocado, apples, peaches, pumpkin, and rice cereal.

Grasshoppers=Destruction

Knowing the grasshoppers would, at any moment, consume everything in my garden, I picked as many green beans as I could find (about 2 gallons). And I'm so thankful that I did, because NOW, there is virtually nothing left of the plants.

They have stripped all the leaves off the green beans, potatoes, and radishes. They're now working on the corn and cucumbers. I'm praying they'll leave the tomatoes alone, but I doubt it. It is absolutely devastating.

The View

Making Baby Food

You would think, with Baby W being my fifth child, that I would have attempted this before now, but I have not. I've always just blindly bought jars of processed baby food, without giving it a second thought.

But as our commercially prepared foods seem to be getting further away from "real" food, and nutritionally below-par, we've begun to really focus our attention on the things we put into our bodies.

So I've decided to make all of our precious baby's foods myself. Afterall, he has come into this world in a perfect, unpolluted little body. Why give him anything less than the most natural, healthiest foods I can possibly give him?

It's been fun and really pretty easy so far. Some foods need to be cooked, and others don't, so I do have to do a little research ahead of time. But basically, I puree the foods in my food processor, spoon it into ice cube trays, and freeze. Now I have individual servings I can thaw out just before a meal. And I know exactly what he's eating!

Rabbit Pen Remodeling

I mentioned a while back about expanding our rabbit portion of our little farm, and I finally finished building their new pens. They're not huge, at about 5x3, but plenty big for now.

So now Isabel, Annaliese, and Seraphina just need to find their Prince Charming.

Tender Young'uns

We're starting to see a few baby green beans and little green tomatoes!