Day Before Thanksgiving

I've been away from this space for a little while and bam! It's the day before Thanksgiving! I'm tired, but thankful for a variety of things. So here we go...

Let's start with having Tom home from the hospital! Way back on October 25 he was feeling not so great and visited Urgent Care who in turn said - You've got appedicitis, you need to go the hospital. Oh okay - simple appendectomy. Not so much. After two and half weeks and a second surgery he was discharged and came home on the 12th. Yay!

Having Tom was in the hospital meant it was up to me to keep the outdoor feathered creatures and the indoor furry creature alive...okay that worked out. Yay!

A week after Tom was admitted I came home from work to this sight:

The coop lost it's lid during a wind storm. 

After I took this photo I pretty much lost it. It felt overwhelmed and didn't need to see this upon my arrival at home. The good thing was that we didn't lose any chickens due to this minor catastrophe. My dinner plan for that evening was to spend it with friends at their house, but after seeing this - that wasn't going to happen. So I sent a short text and the photo to my friend Dani and said that I needed help getting this put back together. It wasn't that the top was heavy, it's just too big for me to handle. Good Friend Dani came right over and then her husband Dan shortly after and we were able to get the roof back on the coop and then I weighted it down (as it should have been) and called it good. Tom will need to do the repair - again.  Yay!

We had planned to get the chickens moved to a new spot the weekend after Tom happened to be admitted to the hospital. So I had to go to plan B which was to wait and see when he would be coming home. Once I realized that he would not be anytime soon, I then asked for our small group peeps to help with some chores that needed to get done and were put on hold. A couple of hours during the morning of November 10 and the chicken fence was relocated and the front yard garden was cleaned up. Yay!

This was taken after I rolled the coop to the new space.

Later the same day after visiting Tom and then running some errands I arrived home to find that the chickens were not in their temporary area. Dopey me didn't secure the fence before heading out for the afternoon. Perfect. Actually it WAS perfect - the coop is pretty heavy when all of the birds are in it! Jersey Giants are BIG and a little hefty! So wheeling around an empty coop is AMAZING! Yay!

Of course, now I have to get the girls and Thor into the new space. After trying to herd them in - which is like herding cats...I had to think about it for a minute. I then realized that if I wheeled out their food bin they would probably follow. So I did and they followed! Yay!

The new space where the chickies promptly started working on Mary's garden boxes.

The only other thing that REALLY needed to be done I need to transplant some plants into the Fall Garden space. I could have had someone stay and help with that task, but I felt that they did enough and I didn't want to ask for more. I suppose all is not lost...I'll have a chance to do that this coming weekend. It will be late, but it can't be  helped. It will be an experiment - like most things are in our gardens.

After all of the fun things that happened at our house, Tom finally got to come home!! Yeah, it was an appendectomy, but it wasn't so routine. I am thankful that it wasn't even MORE serious than it was, and as it turns out, it was pretty serious. In this I got a taste of what life would be like if he were not around. I'm not so sure that I could do this working full time and trying to maintain a mini-farm.

I'm incredibly thankful for our friends who said they would help and they did - providing meals for me, helping on our property and visiting Tom in the hospital as well as being awesome prayer warriors! Once again I am reminded that we are not meant to live life alone. We were created for relationships whether the times are good or otherwise, we need other people in our lives.

Here's to the 2017 Holiday season which seemed to come so fast this year!