Summer vacay with girls, chickens and a donkey

I am love Love LOVING spending these early summer days up at my sister's. There are so many reasons to be estatically happy. The most important reason is that my sister is my BESTY. Like, love-her-to-death-walk-a-million-miles-barefoot-over-thistles besty.

Another reason is that I get to spend all day and night with my daughters and neices....it's so totally lacking in testosterone around here. It's just all girly and stuff. In fact, we are in such a dry spell of testosterone that we did something really crazy. Before I tell you the craziness we commenced in, I should give you some front-loading information: we raise our own chickens for eating. We raise them so that we don't have to eat large factory commercial chickens. We eat happy chickens.

We decided to not gather up all our chickens and bring them to the processing plant. This usually involves me being covered head to toe in chicken doo doo because the birds are too big to get my hands around and I have to hold them like a football. This year instead of bringing the chickens to the processing, we brought the processing to us.

We put the word out about this cool humane chicken processing operation, and wouldn't you know the men came gathering around. Who knew it would bring out the men? But oh, it did. It wasn't long before the men had lined up lawn chairs to watch. Seriously, I'm surprised there wasn't popcorn.

Making Chicken: a Spectator Sport.

I could snort over how totally testostoney it was, except that the four girls and I also were sitting in lawn chairs. The blondie next to me? It's my daughter Bails. She's not covering her eyes. She's sighing because it's taking too long to get the show on the show.

It made us all a little hungry.
Like I said, we like to eat happy chickens.

Speaking of testosterone, we also had the challenge of getting Cash, Mr. Miniature Studly Donkey, into the barn so that his hooves could be done. We love manicures, but Cash not so much. Isn't he just sweet looking? Here is my niece Ally calling him and tempting him with treats.

Did I also mention that it's beautiful here? Reason #3 that I'm ecstatic to be where I am...

We tempted him all the way to the barnyard before he bolted away with a belly full of treats. Naughty Cash. Did you know that donkeys are very, very smart? Sheds a new light on the word Jack Ass.

So what do four girls do when they are on summer break with their teacher mommy/auntie? Decoupage!! We spent mucho dinero on paper, modge podge, brushes and polyeurathane.

The only problem with crafty-making is that you have to actually finish the crafty. I'll post pics of the finished products if  when we get them done.