week 51: merry christmas from the farm!

this week on the little dream farm

Merry Christmas Eve from the farm, friends!

Ten minutes before I sat down to write this week’s Farm Note, Chris and I had just wrapped up a whirlwind of farm chores. Let’s recap!

We accidentally left the barn door open after feeding, scooping, and watering the donkeys in the late afternoon…so I came out to the barn to find Molly-Max standing in a pile of hay bales eating himself silly and a bunch of boxes and buckets knocked over and Dominic nowhere in sight. I fired off an SOS text to Chris and went looking for Dominic.

Thankfully, he was standing just up in the hay field munching away on grass, and he came running to us as soon as I called his name. Chris was by my side at this point, so we lured him back through the barn with some treats and back into the corral and had ourselves a good laugh at how sweet he was running to us when he heard his name—this donkey’s got it way too good to want to run away! So, phew. Crisis averted.

Directly following that we stood outside and called to Black Kitty for a good while…who usually is with me for evening farm chores and if she’s not she’s nearby the house because she knows it’s dinnertime. This time, however, it took us a while to see or hear her, and she came running down from the corral and into the house and we immediately noticed a big patch of fur missing on her upper back! No blood, no cuts, no bumps, no other issues, and she wasn’t acting weird in the least. She gobbled up her dinner while we inspected her pink bare skin and it remains a mystery what the heck she got into or who/what she tussled up with. Thankfully she’s just fine but we’d be lying if we said we don’t worry all the time about her being outside on the farm.

Up next was taking two hens—Posey and Ruby—back to the coop after spending 23 days in the milk house trying to resolve impacted crop turned to sour crop turned back to impacted crop turned to sour crop again and then us finally resolving it (knock on wood!). We’ve sure had our fair share of chicken crop issues these past few months but we’ve had enough runs at this now where we feel like we have a solid handle on how to diagnose and treat the issue and any hangups that come up along the way in treatment. We’re glad these two did so well throughout the whole process—their cases were both a lot like Opal’s so we feel like we had a good playbook to go by and a lot of good lessons from this time around, too.

A few hours before all this hubbub with the animals, we’d finally paused to set up our Christmas tree. We do the faux tree and no ornaments route because of the kittens and already they seem a lot less interested in it than they were last year…we’ll see how it goes! So, we came inside, took a bunch of deep breaths, had a really good laugh at the wackiness of it all—there’s never a dull day on the farm!—and stood in front of the lit-up tree for a moment to really pause and take in the gift of the season.

We’ve been go-go-going all week trying to finish out projects at work for both of us. We also spent the week doing a mega house clean-out and donated a ton of stuff we’d been wanting to sort through and get rid of. Chris ran a marathon of farm errands for us on Friday while I was wrapping up calls with coaching clients. And we spent our Saturday running around doing some last-minute gifts, errands, and grabbing a few things for our Christmas Day meal. This year we’re making prime rib, roasted carrots, Parmesan-crusted baby potatoes, and some scratch-made eggnog for dessert.

We’re taking it easy this year here on the farm—we went low-key on decorations, low-key on planning an elaborate meal, and low-key on our expectations of what we’ll do while we have time off from work to relax and enjoy the final days of 2023 together.

It’s hard to believe this is our third Christmas here on the farm. It’s even harder to believe we’ve jam packed so much living into 26 months (or 112 weeks, since we’ve been counting this Farm Note by the week) on the Little Dream Farm. We’re nothing if not grateful for this beautiful little life we’re building here on this precious farm.

From Chris and myself, and all our fuzzy and feathered munchkins here on the farm, we’re wishing you a very Merry Christmas and hoping that you get to spend this holiday soaking in all that is good in your life. May many blessings be upon you and yours!

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