The Good Sheperd’s Farm « A Time To Keep

St George, Shakespeare and Springtime!

Yesterday, just like last year on this beloved feast of St George, the little boys busied themselves drawing pictures on one of their favorite theme; knights and dragons!

Felix

Matthias

Dominique

Laurence

Lydia and Laurence made some shortbread dragon cookies with the cookie cutter Sara gave us for Christmas.

What fun it was to decorate them!

But also to eat them at teatime with some Harrods English tea.

Since it was also Shakespeare’s birthday we watched part two of In Search of Shakespeare a very well done PBS documentary. Was Shakespeare Catholic? Michael Wood gives good evidence that he was.

You might have notice Laurence’s dirty fingernails as he is sipping his tea. Well, the weather was so gorgeous, it just beckoned us to go outside and explore the wonders of springtime.

Look who was out in the pasture basking itself in the sun along with the cows and goats.

Just then Dominique spotted a hawk in the sky. As Laurence turned to see, I snapped this picture. It almost looks like he is trying to imitate the turtle.

We followed the box turtle into the woods where Dominique had a chance to see it face to face.

How amazing that sweet Mother Dove stood still to let me take this closeup picture. I was less than a foot away!

A look inside one of our bluebird birdhouse revealed these roundish little ones.

Matthias found these abandoned wren’s eggs near where the chicken lay their eggs. I guess the chicken scared Mother Wren away.

Poor wrens, they seem to have a habit of choosing precarious places to nest. Last year they build a nest in Sebastien’s shorts hanging on the clothesline. I tried not to disturb the little mother, but one weekend we kept our son’s dog and sadly he had other ideas. I’m sorry to say that he more than unsettled the little nest.

The first sunflowers in the sunflower maze are sprouting.

Of course spring and kids simply go together like bread and butter. Here are Matthias and Mattimeo.

Yesterday was such a windy day!

April 17, 2007 at 11:04 pm | In The Good Sheperd's Farm | 1 Comment

Thankfully I wasn’t hanging clothes when this happened.

When Michel came home that night he got ready to cut the fallen tree into logs. But then he realized that he was out of oil for his chainsaw. So with the help of Laurence (the other boys were gone to their scout meeting) he picked up the small pieces and added them to our huge bonfire heap. The children were glad he hadn’t touch the trunk, because they had planned to use it for the garden. They like to border the beds with logs to keep them tidy.

Everyone is so enthusiast about the garden. While I was out of town Saturday, they worked all day mulching, . They are brimming with ideas gathered from the books Roots, Shoots, Buckets & Boots and Sunflower Houses. Starting our Beatrice Potter unit was a big motivator.

But a fallen tree wasn’t the only unexpected event yesterday. We certainly had made no plan to plucked geese on such a blustering day, but we had to. Our neighbor Ken, ran over two of our geese while driving down our dirt path. I didn’t have the heart to take pictures, because although geese do not have the best disposition they are truly beautiful. While butchering them Lydia suggested that we play The Swan Lake, it would have match our mood perfectly. We had an improvised goose anatomy lesson (Mother Goose was particularly interesting), and manage to save enough down (what didn’t blow away with the wind) for a pillow.

Oh, what a busy day!

March 9, 2007 at 11:49 pm | In The Good Sheperd's Farm | 6 Comments

Today, Sebastien helped us to bring Cleopatra the cow to a friend’s farm to be bred (I wonder if he has a bull named Julius Ceasar!). Poor Sebastien has been kept quite busy since the beginning of his spring break. At the beginning of the week he butchered two pigs with the help of his older brother Xavier, then helped process all the meat, and for the rest of the week he has been working for a fellow parishoner remolding a spare room (trading work for a car), in adition to working evening shift at Western Sizzling.

It took a lot of enticements to get Cleopatra in the trailer. One of the kids suggested that we roll her up in a carpet (we’ve been reading Cleopatra by Diane Stanley).

While Sebastien and the two younger boys were gone, Isabel decided to have her babies.

Felix, tenderly overlooking the birth of the kids, suggested that we name them (both males) Basil and Mattimeo. He is a big fan of Brian Jacques’ Redwall series.

Sebastien came home with two new steers.

These two will be called Eric the Red and Leif. Although Dominique said the the white faced one reminds him of the Phantom of the Opera. Our last three cows were Alexander, Charlemagne and Napoleon, and the last three pigs Plato, Aristotle, and Socrate, I am sure you can see the pattern.