What a month October was! It was a BEAUTIFUL month with an endless Indian summer and just a week or so of chilly weather. We spent a lot of time laying low and resting up for some MAJOR events, so all of my photos from the month are either absolutely nothing happening around the house, or some big weekend that I took approximately 950 pictures of! Haha. Mostly, this month can be summed up with kittens, a wedding, and a family get-together.
- We have been raising and bottle feeding/butt wiping a litter of four kittens for about five weeks now. Friends…adopting an abandoned cat family is SO MUCH work. It was a good learning experience, but next time I might drive them directly to a shelter. Bottle feeding every 2-3 hours, and wiping their rear ends to stimulate peeing and pooping is fun for approximately 2.5 hours. The EXCESSIVE amount of laundry they create and how badly they stink…none of that is captured in these pictures. Thankfully, October was the month of transformation for these kitties, because by the end they were eating on their own, and pottying on their own, had learned how to lick/clean themselves and were finally living out in the barn instead of my spare bathroom! They get cuter by the day and are so much fun to play with! Two of them went to a new home and we are deciding to keep two of them. They are supposed to be barn cats, but I find them inside my house more and more often…hmmmmm.
2. Patience and Peace and the rest of the animals are getting along just fine around the homestead.
3. It has been so fun to see harvest in action right outside our front window! Well, that is until they day that they spread manure on the 1000 acre field across from our house. When I say that was probably the worst thing I have ever smelled, I mean that was one of the worst things I have ever smelled. Immediate dry-heaving if I walked outside for 2-3 days straight. Thankfully they tilled it all up (which made it smell even worse) and then we got a rain and the smell is now gone. I am thankful for these hard working farmers (they were often working late into the night with the big lights on their rigs) and I’m thankful that manure makes crops grow. But in the future I *might* plan to be out of the town the weekend they start spreading the manure!
4. I seriously injured my toe by accidentally dropping my laptop on it. Of course, I was at work teaching my class at the time. There was a lot of bleeding and took hours to get the bleeding to stop! I had to sit at my desk and teach with my foot propped up- thankfully I had an aid in my classroom and she ended up doing most of the work that day! Thankfully it healed up nicely and one month later I’m still waiting to see if my toenail is going to completely fall off or if it will cling on for dear life.
5. I wrote a whole recap blog post, but Dan + Corinne’s wedding weekend was a highlight of our year!
6. It was during the craziness of wedding weekend, but Kiah also turned 6 this month! We had a pretty laid back party and his guests were a bunch of random people (in town for the wedding) that he didn’t know at all. They were all such good sports celebrating my boy even though they didn’t know him either 🙂
7. I hit the halfway point in my pregnancy and we found out that baby #4 is a BOY!
8. We tried to squeeze in as many hikes and as much outside time as we possibly could! This month didn’t feel as leisurely as some falls we have had in the past, so we only got 1-2 family hikes, but the little hiking that we did was gorgeous! We also went for a 6 mile bike ride with my Mom, me, and the kids. It was the most GLORIOUS fall day!
9. Teaching has been a challenge this year, but it has also provided so many opportunities to look for the goodness of God and the “helpers” that are all around me. One challenge we are facing is not just teacher staffing shortages, but support staff shortages too. Once the weather gets cold, we have to have lunch inside our classrooms and then once a month for a week we also have recess duty. That means that the week I’m on recess duty I have ZERO break from 7:30am to 3:00pm. It is a lot! I’m working really hard to mentally prevent burnout in teaching, but especially while already being run down from pregnancy, it is a lot. I am thankful that somewhere around October, I usually find that me + my class hit our stride, and that is always a nice place to be as a teacher.
10. We have EGGS! Wooohooo! Mid October our chickens started laying eggs. We got one a day for about a week, and then it started dramatically increasing each day. We are now up to getting 10-12 eggs a day.
11. Family Weekend – the last weekend of October was packed full with family visiting from out of town! We had a great time and the weather was perfection.
And that is a wrap on October! I love the fall and how it is full of all kinds of great things, but I am also ready for the next few months of laying low and being cozy. I know a lot of people say that the holidays are super busy, but for our family, December is pretty calm and January and February have nothing. Then in March it will be baby month!