3/30/12

Painting Horses

This is art. 
In Their Stride by Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey
www.nancycawdrey.com
This is a horse.
Little Miss 

Art...
by Laurel Burch
www.laurelburch.com

...a horse. 
Cloud with Maggie and Bear. 
This is art. 
Wild One by Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey
www.nancycawdrey.com 
And this is a horse.
checking out his art. 
And while you're at it, be sure and do the toes! 

Nice! 






3/26/12

My Mr. Neko

My fat cat has sharp claws! He's lazy and doesn't want to jump so if his claws are long, he figures he can just pull himself up. But when he pulls himself up onto your lap.... Well, that's just not fun.

He used to be a good mouser. When he was young. In his prime. But now he would rather sleep. Besides, if he had a choice over a mouse and some other animal, he would choose the other animal. Can you blame him. His favorite treat is rabbit. And we have, well, probably hundreds, according to legend, of rabbits living under our house. This is why he is an indoor cat now. Adventure Man didn't want him leaving decapitated cotton tails lying around the playground for the guests to see. That has probably made him not want to hunt even more. You know, out of spite. But what is really maddening is that he will hunt in the garage, but it seems he doesn't believe mice exist in the house. I have actually seen a mouse run 'long the base board of the living room, right into the trap, while the bang cat slept on the couch. I'm starting to understand why this is the first cat to ever come live on this ranch. d-CON would work much better!

3/24/12

Super Sitters

I love driving past the cattle fields during calving season. All the little calves racing around together are so cute. You can see them playing just as our own kids would play. They seem to make friends and linger in small groups around their mothers.


But this is one of the things that cracks me up most. There always seems to be one or two cows over to the side with a bunch of new little calfs with them. In this case, two cows were in charge of 8 calves. It's the daycare center!

Because even Mama Cows need a break!


...I need a break!

xo

3/18/12

The B&B ~ We Slept in an Old Cooler

The Bed & Breakfast 
Just months after we were married we took a job managing a bed and breakfast. The owners had never worked with hotels before. They were a cute couple who had the dream of running a B&B. He was a fireman. She was a house wife who's kids had all grown and married. They bought an old building and within just a few months they had flipped it upside down and shook out all the dust, added jetted tubs to all the bedrooms and a bathroom or water closet as well. They hired us to live in the basement, where all the dust landed when they shook, and run the place at night. They cooked the breakfast and cleaned. That was good because I was working full time at a floral shop and Adventure man was going to school full time; getting his degree in Adventure Management, I might add!

We would greet and check the guests in. Once everyone was in for the night we would retire to our little apartment down stairs and call it good.

Our room while we waited for the apartment 
But there was the fact that the building had been rushed to get opened so when we moved in the apartment was not completed, or even started, so we stayed in one of the guest rooms. Our stuff in storage.

My husband pieced the makeshift apartment together himself, converting what had once been a restraint's kitchen into a living room. The wall where a large stove had once stood was dripping from fry grease. The bedroom was in the old cooler. Very sound proof. The bathroom had to be built up on a platform to accommodate the plumbing. The only window in the whole apartment was at the top of the stairs so we were able to sleep really well, and late if we weren't careful!

apartment put together by chewing gum and rubber bands! 
Now, one of the things that was really neat about this supper old building was the fact that when the wind blew it had some old broken pains in the basement from windows that had been covered by older, no younger fondations. I don't really know. But as I was saying, when the wind blew it sounded like a woman screaming at the top of her loungs. And in a sound proof bedroom, that would really bring us out of sleep fast!

The other thing that everyone really needs to know about old buildings is that the walls are thin. The doors are thin. The pipes are thin! If you are staying in a really cool old building, know that when the builders built it, they only had old news paper to line the walls with so we can hear you! Even in those most amazing, earth shattering, "OMG" kind of moments. 'Nough said.

But we slept in a cooler....

wall to wall bed, but sound proof.   

3/17/12

He Came In Though The Kitchen Window ~ Lucky Charms Are For Kids!

I bought Lucky Charms Cereal for my kids as a surprise  breakfast today, St. Patricks Day. We don't really let them have sugar cereal most of the time. And they get up so early in the mornings on school days that we usually give them a very big breakfast that will last them until lunch. So for us, a box of Lucky Charms is a big deal.











Well, evidently it's a big deal to someone else too! When we woke up this morning there were green footprints from the kitchen windowsill to the table where he ripped a whole in the bag of the box and scattered cereal all over!




He did leave the kids some gold dollars luckily. That was at least nice. But then he went for a little walk! He seams to have hopped off the table, and walked around the corner into the bathroom where he Used the toilet! and I must say, he wasn't very tidy about it! My daughter said, "did you see the drips in between his footprints!" (bahaha) And yes, I did! He even left footprints on the bathroom rug and where he seemed to have braced himself hopping to the bathroom window!

What a surprise we all had this morning.







































Happy St. Patties Day!

3/11/12

The Stranger At My Door - Did I Forget to Mention This is a Resort?

It was last fall. It was hunting season. Most dude ranches are open for hunting season. They get lots of buisness from the folks wanting to do outfitting. The guests get to go hunting and ride horses and come back to the ranch for a hot meal and a warm bed. But this place is different. We don't stay open. We close up shop the end of September. We are run by a non-profit organization that is geared torwed education and conservation. This makes hunting a bit of a taboo around here. That's fine, we don't hunt. I know, I call my dear hubby Adventure Man and he doesn't hunt! You're shocked! But that's not the adventure he goes for. He's more into mountain biking and rock climbing, backpacking and river rafting. Strangely we found that the folks on the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains were the hunting/fishing kind of men, where as the folks on the western side of the Rocks were more like I described Darling Adventure Man (D.A.M.) But I digress.

It was last fall. The nights had gotten cold and dark. Dinner was over and I was the only one left in the kitchen. I wasn't cleaning up, but just feeding the baby in her highchair. That was when from the darkness out the kitchen window we all heard a loud knock. We were all shocked. There was a man's face at the window. DAM came running. I didn't move. I heard the conversation from my chair. He was a hunter. He came home early because his horse had been injured. He wanted to use the phone.

Ours is the first cabin you would come to, where someone actually lives, if you were to walk out of the mountains heading for any kind of civilization.

He used our phone and went on his way. A few moments later my husband and I looked at each other. What on earth were we thinking??? We just let him head up the road in the dark with a horse who needed a rest! We have a barnyard! We have a truck! Boy did we feel like the least hospitable innkeepers in the world. I'm still kick'n myself!



So who ever you were, I'm sorry I didn't have you in to have some homemade bread and Montana honey while my D.A.M. took your mare out to the barn to be fed! We're sorry we didn't drive you to your truck and trailer instead of making your Dad come and get you off the road. We're just plain sorry!

It's not like we haven't been doing this for a while. I guess we just were so surprised to see anyone out this far that we were taken back.

3/7/12

A Hair Cut From A 3 Year Old

No, it's not that bad!! But I was struggling with our slow internet. With our slow computer. Trying to hurry and get the pictures of the party on the blog.


It has inspired some Haiku's:




Internet is slow
The mountain’s too far away
The phone man said so

I was really focused on getting it done. I was tuning him out and telling him that he couldn't have anymore fruit snacks. Why do they call them fruit snacks? We call them fruit candy. 

The boy got angry
She wouldn’t even look up
The boy cut her hair

Mama’s frustrated
Mama wasn’t listening
Mama didn’t see

The boy wants to cut
He wanted to cut paper
Mama didn’t hear

So I finally came to, it was the sound of the scissors that brought me out of my mind scream at the computer and it served me right. The picture looks much worst than it is. Luckily I was blessed with the think curly hair of my Father, of his Father. And it always surprises me when I see pictures of it, just how red it really is! 

Well, I can't tell. Can you? 


And look! He is still the little stinker who stole my heart! 





3/4/12

Fairy Wings and Lovely Things

We had Bean's birthday party yesterday. Something about a little girls party that makes me go nuts-o. But before you know it, she'll be trading fairy wings for ipods. She'll not want to spend 2 hours drawing a flying unicorn for "pin-the-horn-on-the-unicorn," and would rather spend the time texting her friends and wondering which boys would even come to a party for her (My guess would be ALL of them!). No, the little girl moments are fleeting and I wanted them to be full of memories for both her and her friends.
Can you say, "Mini-Me?" 

For how far away from town we are, we had almost all ten girls who were invited come. And they all played so well together. My 11 year old ran the whole thing, instructing and coaching the crafts, starting the games keeping the peace, most of the time. The only one who gave her any problem was her brother. But he's three. So what can you do?

Here are some of the highlights that I'm rather proud of. Enjoy!





The girls love making paper outfits with the Klutz books. They have all 3 Paper Fashion books, including the Fantasy book. They set to work for the past week making fairies to hang all over. I dug out my floral shop extras and made some arrangements to hang around. We also made fairy flower lights by cutting up a milk carton into flower shaped cups and sticking them onto christmas lights. I got this idea from pinterest.com. Although, Nil's flowers looked much better than mine! You can see her's and how to make them here.








Bean's Unicorn with one horn.


Bean's Unicorn dressed as a proccipine. 


I love how this shot turned out, with all the little girls with their wings and the sun coming through the window. Very fairy like. 



 More Fairies 




Baby Bunny enjoying her cake and ice cream! A lot! 

Our party favors were also a pinterest find. Form one of my favorite bloggers. Instead of your usual gift bag full of dollar store brakables. I made a "bug jar" for each girl and I spent the night before the party catching fairies in the wood beside the house. For as cold as it was, there were quite a few!





All in all, it was a lot of fun and a sucsses. Now if just blogging about it could have been! My 3 year old just cut a big chunk on my hair off!!!! AAAHHH!!! But now I have a great idea for my next blog!