What I saw this morning...

My ducks eating their breakfast.  Ducks are rude and loud and obnoxious, then they shut up as soon as their beaks are full....hmmm, sounds like a few people I know.

Wildpuss, pretending to be a tiger.  He's not a fastidious cat and doesn't mind the dew.

Emma saying good morning to Wildpuss and Wildpuss not looking so amused.  Don't worry, WP, I don't like the wet nose either!

Them's thar turkeys on thar hills!

I love this one.  She looks like she's saying, "We are not amused," in her best posh voice.  As in, we are not amused that you are taking pictures BEFORE you feed us.

Such an enthusiastic, dopey dawg.  Being a labrador, trained as a gun dog, Emma feels she has to carry something in her mouth at all times.  Today she's found a bit of wood.  Usually it's a rock, which is bad.  Check out her blunted tooth.  She will drop them when we tell her too, but as soon as our back is turned...

And another pretty sunrise.  Can't help myself, I've a million shots of pretty sunrises.

Being a lady of 'leisure' has it's advantages. I get to paint my toenails, eat bonbons and watch daytime televsion.......not.

The turkeys are getting big enough for some outside time. Every morning I catch them and put them in a run outside, this involves lots of squawking and flapping (mostly from them). Every evening I catch them again and put them back in their brooder box inside, even more squawking and flapping. I feed them and change their water, and I feed and change the chicks water while I'm at it.

I'm still milk feeding the calves twice a day. But I'm cutting down their morning milk as I'm planning to wean them soon. Instead, I lug big buckets of calf meal to them. Gloria has lost her famine-victim look and is developing a fetching black tinge to her muzzle.

I have started a garden! And on my days without the kidlets, I get to spend about and hour and a half in here before it gets too hot for digging. It's rained once in the last two months, so I lug the washing machine water, the sink water and the bath water out here to give the seedlings a fighting chance.

And in between housework, kidwrangling, quilting and blogging, I've finally baked my Christmas Cake.

Now, where did I put that last bonbon?

Soon to be hatching.

This coming Saturday is the due date. (If only human's due dates were so certain, lol!). I was meant to be working my last morning shift that day and managed to swap it so I could supervise (be nosy really, I've never seen chicks hatch in an incubator yet).

I'm getting a little nervous - have I kept the temperature right? Have I kept the humidity right? What if I've stuffed it all up? I candled them on day 7 and on day 9 and ended up throwing away four that I was certain were infertile. I cracked them open gingerly to confirm and I had got it right for all four. That makes me a little (just a little) more confident. So much easier with a broody chook, you can blame it all on her if it goes wrong!

Speaking of broody's, I have two hens sitting on clutches now. The neighbour's hen (her one and only surviving) and Fidget, my lavender Araucana. We wait with bated breath.

I have two little turkey poults in my brooder box. My hubby whipped a large one up out of plywood the other day in preperation for the chicks, but it's getting a trial by turkey first. I had trouble getting these guys to eat at first (they were wild poults) but give them a moving target and they're on to it! That's a slater going down the hatch I think.

And it pays not to get too engrossed in other people's blogs. All was quiet, too quiet. No more sticky labels left. "Stripey!" She said.