Shutterfly Christmas Cards and A GIVEAWAY!!

Christmas....

Say What?!?!

Seriously Janet Halloween isn't even here yet, not to mention Thanksgiving.

I know, I know, but If you are like me and like doing the Photo cards then you need to be thinking about that now, cause before you know it Christmas will be here and if your not on top of things you won't have your Christmas cards and all your friends and family will be sad that didn't get one from you. :(

So, years ago my sister told me about Shutterfly and our family has been using it ever since! I have ordered Photos, Photo Books, Christmas Cards, a Canvas Print, and even Stinkers Birth Announcements, which I will share with you when I share his birth story...which is almost done, I promise!

So this year Shutterfly has some wonderful templates for Christmas Cards and here are just a few of them...

Seriously how do you choose?!?!

I'm not sure how I will pick one for our card this year, cause I had a hard enough time picking the ones to share with you on here! Needless to say there is one for everybody out there, so check them out!

Now  I got to get into gear and get a picture of Caleb, Chester and I together for our card, then all I will have to do is pick a design...

And to make things even better, if you remember my title had the word GIVEAWAY in it...

Well Shutterfly has given me three sets of 25 cards to giveaway to three of my wonderful readers!

Wahoo!!!

So here's what ya got to do...

Leave me a comment telling me what your favorite holiday food is.

Mine is homemade noodles...yummy!!

One entry per person

*You can earn a second entry by blogging about my giveaway and then leaving a second comment with a link to you post.

* You can also earn an entry by sharing a link for this giveaway on Twitter and Facebook just leave a comment for each that you choose to do.

Entries will close at midnight on Thursday, November 3rd at midnight and the winners will hopefully be announced the following Day.

Good Luck,

Janet

Stinker Has Arrived!!!

Well last Monday I shared with you our big belly baby pictures and told you that our baby was due anytime and...

A week ago today we welcomed into this world a healthy baby.....
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What do you think it is.....
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BOY

Chester Caleb was born on October 5th at 4:16 pm.

He weighed 10 lbs....yes I said 10 lbs and he was 22 1/4 inches long.

Thanks to my friend Carrie over at Life in the Slow Lane for these cute onesies and 12 months of stickers so we can document our first year of life. We love it! You can get them or many other cute Monthly Onsie Sticker at the Apple Eye Baby Shop on Etsy.

In a day or so I will share some more pictures of Chester as well as the story of his birth.

Hope everyone is doing well.

Lots of Love

Janet

Where Are you Baby?!?!?!

As of today we are 40 weeks along, but I am sad to say there is no sign of Baby Phillips....grrrr

I know it's been forever since I wrote last and I am sorry. I am also very sorry that I haven't been keeping up on reading everyone elses blog. 

I have had baby on the brain as well as different family events and Church responsibilities, so I would rather sit on the couch with some Oreos and Milk than at the desk working on the computer.

So I am SORRY!

Since today is my due date and well it doesn't look like I will be getting any pictures of Stinker today, I thought I would share with you our Maternity Pics.

I stole Caleb away from working ground one morning and made him take some pics with me.

On the Day these were taken I was 38 weeks and 4 days along.

Me, Caleb, my tripod and wireless remote went out to one of the farms where we have some of our cattle and went to town shooting pictures.

Fact: This farm is also the same farm where Caleb proposed to me 3 1/2 years ago.

I wished the cows would have stayed around a little longer, but oh well it was fun to have them there for a few pictures!

Caleb wasn't a fan of all the ones I chose. He said there were too many "smooching" pictures. Personally I like those pics, but also in all those pics I didn't think my face looked so poofy...

And since it's my camera, and I took the pictures and did the editing and it's my blog and I am the one that is pregnant, well I get the last say of which pictures I show to people!!! LOL

An of course, it wouldn't be us if there wasn't at least one silly picture.

I am hoping we will soon get to meet our little one and find out if it's a Girl or a Boy and then take oodles and oodles of pictures of him or her.

Any guesses on what we are gonna be having and what day he/she will be here??

Lots of Love,

Janet

Rat Attack - What To Do and What Not To Do

I know it's been a while since I last wrote a post or even since I got a chance to read anyone else's blog post, and I am very sorry!

Even though Corn Harvest wasn't to good this year, it was still a very busy time, taking meals to the field, running after parts and a dozen other things.

On top of the crazy corn harvest, I am a full time incubator and that sometimes wears me down. Along with that we have been having some wonderful baby showers, but once I get home from them, I have to figure out where to put everything...not an easy task. To be honest most of my time spent on the computer here lately has been spent looking up baby stuff...I guess you could say I have baby on the brain...

Stinker is due to come in less than 4 weeks! Kinda crazy!!!

Anyways I tell you all that to say I am sorry for not posting for ever!

Ok, lets get to the title of this baby...

So we got through all our baby showers and just finished Corn Harvest, and then the very next morning we wake up and look out at our good truck and see this...

Jasper sniffin' around and acting all crazy. My thought is maybe he scared a little mouse up there and is tryin' to get it...

No big deal, I can handle a mouse.

Then I go out to the truck and lift the hood to look in and well it wasn't mouse poop that I saw...

Sure enough it was rat poo, which means we have a rat that has taken up residences in our truck...

grrrr!!!

Well Caleb heads out there to see if it's done any damage...

 And sure enough the nasty little beast has chewed on a bunch of wires. 

Well now we have to figure out how to get the beast out of our truck...

AKA: How to kill the rat.

Caleb's Uncle has told us how he has killed rats before...

Well Uncle Ben's "secret" ingredient is...

BEER!!

Critters love this stuff!!

So Ben said to add some beer to rat poison and the rat would eat it instead of carry it off...

He also heard that rats can't burp so if it drank some beer it would just bloat up and die from the gas in it's stomach, so I filled this cap up with beer and sat it in there too.

We didn't have a rat trap, so we also set a mouse trap hoping it might do the job.

But...

The next morning we wake up to find the rat poison all gone...

Good, Right?

Well all the rat did was carry it off and stuff it around the engine, I guess it just liked the smell of it an wanted to use it as an air freshener.

The cap that had the beer in it was empty and...

The trap had been tripped and the beast ate the cheese and then carried it off an stuffed in by the engine.

So what did we find out from this...

Well first was that we didn't have just a ordinary rat, but a pack rat instead and they are a huge pain to kill!

Second that pack rats can burp and they love beer!

So after this we went and bought a rat trap and bolted it down in there so the beast couldn't run off with it, and then we baited it...

Well one of the nights that we had this trap set I got up to go to the bathroom...

I do that a lot right now, any women who have ever been pregnant know what I mean!

Anyways I heard the dogs barking at something so I thought I had better go and see what's going on. I thought they were getting a possum or something, like normal but...

I get outside and see them sniffin' around the truck. At this point I am thinking the trap went off and they heard it and that's why the are barking.

So I pop the hood and look in at the trap and see that it's still set. Darn!

It's then that I look down and 6-12 inches in front of me is the nasty little beast...

Well I am still half asleep and had I been thinking I could have just whacked the beast out of the truck, but I don't and it gets away...grrr!!!

Well the rat trap doesn't work at all, the rat would some how trip it every night and just eat whatever we had on there.

In the processes of this I asked all my facebook friends for help and it was there one of my friends reminded me of something my folks use to kill raccoons in their sweet corn...

Fly Bate...ya know those blue crystals that you set out to kill flies, well it also works to kill rodents too.

By this time we were sick of messing with this beast so we took maybe a teaspoon of the fly bate pellets and put them in an old cat food can and since we didn't want this guy to just haul the pellets off and we knew how much it loved beer we added that to the fly bate and...

It worked!!!

As you can see it wasn't a small rat either! I was just glad Caleb was able to find the dead beast in our truck cause this was when we still had some of those 100+ days and it wouldn't take it long to be stinky!!

So Caleb took the rat and a shovel and got rid of it. We didn't want to take the chance of our pets getting a hold of it and eating it and dying. Don't know if that would happen, but we didn't want to take the chance.

So...

Fly Bate + Beer = A Dead Rat!!!!

FYI: If you use this make sure no pets can get to it cause it will kill dogs a cats too! So be careful!!

So I forgot to tell you this earlier...it's called "mommy brain"...Neither Caleb or I are drinkers so we didn't have any beer on hand, so I had to go the the convenient store to pick some up and the 24 ounce Natty Light was the cheapest. I got a few strange looks as I walked out with it! Also we really didn't use that much trying to get rid of the rat so we currently have that can still sitting in the the fridge mostly full...lol...we are stocked up for life for killing rats, but I hope I don't have to do it again!!

I will be working on getting a Post up about this year's Corn Harvest so stay tuned!

Lots of Love

Janet

Shootin' Cattle

This morning we needed to give a sick calf a shot. Usually this involves Caleb getting on the back of the truck with a rope and me driving around chasing the calf...

usually until the calf gets tired enough we can chase it down on foot or Caleb is lucky enough to get the rope around it's neck.

Yes I said "lucky enough" cause he's not much of a roper and well neither am I. But if you don't believe me check this story out about what happened last winter.

Anways, I really don't like doing it this way cause all the chasing and running really stresses the already sick calf.

So once we catch the wore out little guy we pull out the syringe and needle and give it a shot.

Well yesterday morning we tried this way and well it ended up in a fight and us not catching the little guy...

I didn't want to chase the little guy cause it still had a lot of energy and we were just gonna make him worse, and I knew we had access to an easier and less stressful way...

We'll just shoot the beast...

and yes with a gun.

WHAT!?!?

Don't worry, we might be using a gun, but the calf wont get hit with a bullet...

It will get hit with a syringe and needle full of meds.

The great thing about this method is the animal really doesn't have a clue whats going one till they get hit with the needle and well all it feels like is getting a normal shot.

The gun we are using is Caleb's dad's gun he bought earlier this year...

Umm it's amazing!!

So when you get to the field you have your gun out the window and ready.

Then once you have a clear aim at your target...

Pull your gun up and fire.

And since the gun is a 22 there really isn't much noise, so you don't freak out all the rest of the cattle.

There you can see the needle stuck in the little guys rump. Once it hits the calf it delivers all the meds and then will eventually fall out.

As you can see this little guy just walks away like nothing happened. No stress...

I love it!!

JP

It's a 22 caliber rifle that is set up to shoot a medicine filled syringe out and not a bullet...

Tractors

Every Farm has it's favorite / most used tractor and our farm is no different. Around here it's Pop's loader tractor...

It's used for hauling hay...

Feeding hay...

Feeding silage...

Doing dirt work...

Just about anything you can think to use a loader for and then some we do with this tractor.

Caleb has often made the comment that if this tractor goes down we are in trouble cause we really don't have a good back up.

Now there is another loader tractor on the farm, but it's not as big and doesn't have a cab and really isn't all that handy to use except for on the small projects.

We had this little beast down at our house last winter to help with the cattle chores and clearing snow last winter...

and it wasn't long after this picture was taken that Caleb thought we should be looking for another loader tractor with a cab!

Well finally about three weeks ago he found one in our price range and with the amount of hours he wanted on it and in the condition we wanted it to be in...

and it was only a couple hours away.

So Caleb, Pop and I make the drive over there with the truck an trailer to check it out.

After driving it around and checking it over Caleb gives the owner a call to haggle on the price a little and when they finally come to an agreement...

The guys write their checks and...

Load it up and head back home.

It took us about three hours to make it home and had to change one flat tire on the way, but all in all we were pretty happy with our new toy. 

JP