The Bad, The Ugly and The Good

 If you've read my blog posts very much at all, you will sense that I love to capture the delightful, funny, sweet and wonderful. I feel that over the years this has helped me to see the magic and beauty that is in my life.  I had something happen this morning that reminded me that sometimes this has had to be a choice.  

It was early, early morning when I heard a cat yeowling.  "Great," I thought.  "Our cat that just had babies is in heat already!  We need to get her fixed." And then I drifted off back to sleep on the couch by my sleeping baby.

What seemed like moments later, there was a loud cat screech followed by what sounded like animals tumbling across our front porch.  There were subsequent screeches and tumblings that moved progressively away from the house and into the neighboring woods.   Both Quinn and I were up and alert and went out (courtesy of Hyrum's powerful flashlight) to see what we could see.  But all that we could see (...but all that we could see...thanks, "Bear Went Over the Mountain" refrain!) was nothing.  And we heard nothing.

As we walked back to the house, checking on various animals to see any possible impact, I remembered our first cat that we adopted.  Xavia.  Perhaps she's gone feral? I wondered, which spurred further thoughts.

What do you do with a feral cat? Maybe I could get the kids to go out an hunt and shoot her.

Perhaps she is the one that killed our rooster and taken away the missing chicken and not our dogs?

Anyway, life is not always as perfect as it seems, I guess :D.

We are down three chickens and one guinea fowl from a month ago.

My three year old has just recently started wetting the bed. We gave her back her binki (that we recently weaned her of') but she still awoke wet this morning.  Now I have two bed wetters.  Fun.

I purchased a bed-wetting kit a few months ago but decided I couldn't get up for a baby at night and for the beeping of a bedwetter.

The aforementioned baby is still not sleeping more than two to three hours at a time until after 4 or 5 am...and sometimes even less.

The garden on our slope is slowly eroding away but hopefully will stay there at least until harvest.  My spontaneously engineered plan apparently should have taken into account our heavy rainfall, lol.

Our dogs were caught "red-handed" riling up our chickens two days ago after being caught with our dead, wingless rooster two days before that.  We're not sure if something else killed the rooster and they were just playing with the carcass or if it was them.  Time for a trail cam?  Just another thing and another expense.  For now, they just take turns roaming free with our chickens, which our hound dog definitely doesn't like.  Kujo feels he should be everywhere with everyone and I get a little tired of the barking.  Trained?  As much as I'm going to do.  For now, at least they sometimes respond to bacon.

Quinn spent 12 hours over three days driving Kel and Réka to the airport three separate times to get them on their way back to Hungary. For various reasons--all including ineptness, lack of training and general culpability on the part of United Airlines--they weren't able to fly out the first two times and Quinn had to head back to pick them up from the airport after almost making it home after the 1 1/2 hour one way drive to the airport.  Incorrectly entered numbers on the boarding pass, falsely saying the COVID test had to be within 3 days and then actually having a 48 hour policy (which only happened because of the first incompetence), and finally not reissuing tickets for all of them the third time caused such grief and delays. And it was over poor Réka's birthday, no less! 

And now our air-conditioning is out.

And our house in Medina still hasn't sold.

But enough of grousing!  There are so many blessings!

We got to have Kel and Réka here with my little grandson for over two weeks thanks to that incompetence and we got to celebrate her birthday together and give the little tyke his first hair trim.

The other chickens are all healthy and hale, running excitedly up to greet me whenever I go out, the little dears.  Our guinea fowl are getting uglier and noisier right on schedule and Drew and Hyrum have taken them on as their responsibility without complaint.

Quinn is now here full-time with no more weekly trips to Medina!  He has also been able to use his expertise to help my parents move into the house next door to us, which has been so wonderful.

Lily and Hyrum had a few weeks off of Wendy's and just started back today. Because of their time there, they have priority in the scheduling, which is wonderful.

Hyrum, Piper, Havala, Maia and I are all performing in "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" which is being presented this weekend in Pomeroy OH with a little theater company named Wolfe Mountain Entertainment.  Maia is a wood nymphy and leopard, Havala the Unicorn, Piper the White Witch and Hyrum is Peter. (Yes, that means Piper and Hyrum get to battle each other and they love it.) Oh, and I'm Father Christmas. I'm the only adult in a children's play.  Tried to beg out of that one but he said he wanted to keep me in because they were running short on parts.  It has been great to be there with them and be involved in a play that I am not in charge of too :D.

The way I got Liesl to stop using the binki was to snuggle her to sleep at night.  Sooooo sweet. 

So while there are definitely things to look at to complain about, I find it doesn't do much good in the long run...and is a lot less fun to write about. My kids love reading this, too, and come away happier, I believe, also being led to see the good that outweighs the bad most of the time.  And only if we really choose to look at it that way.