cow pedicure

This contraption was at the farm yesterday.. after we let Kit out, we hung around and watched. The cow gets herded in and then they close it up, the whole thing tilts up so the hooves can get trimmed.. it was a bazaar thing to watch.

Sarah's blog is updated! (finally!)

Sarah wants me to tell everyone to check out her blog. She updated it tonight by herself! Also-She wants me to ask you to feed her fish at the bottom of her page, they may be hungry. :)
www.asilearnasigrow.blogspot.com

VBS

Christian made it to three nights of VBS.. he had two baseball games and tonight was the last one.. (thank goodness!) they sure are far away from home. Here he is with his "Sally-Gally"

Elizabeth (Sarah's church choir director) sure had their attention!

"He's got the whole world in his hands!"

Sarah and Rachel. Rachel is our neighbors granddaughter who visits from Florida every year. She enjoyed VBS this week too!

activities

pretty Sarah

Sarah cantering on "pie" at riding lessons Monday afternoon. Way to go Sarah!

Sarah's riding instructor has some gorgeous flowers behind her house. We thought we'd snap a picture after lessons were over.



Christian up to bat at the game Sunday afternoon.

Christian has been attending an "inventor's camp" this week at his school. He brought home a wind powered turbine that he made today. Here he is demonstrating. (Sally is interested too.) He attached a pencil to the ribbon and when he turned the fan on the breeze wound up the ribbon and lifted the pencil all the way up to the top.

pretty neat buddy!

VINS

We visited VINS last week. Our library has tickets to take out like books for some neat places within our area and we wanted to take advantage of going here. We saw lots of different kinds of raptors and went on a hike (before it started to rain..)
Here is the bald headed eagle! Isn't he fantastic??

A pretty snowy owl. Some of these guys were hit by cars etc and all of them were injured so they could no longer fly and fend for themselves.

We attended the live bird show. This girl (I can't remember which kind of raptor she was..) loved to get sprayed with a water bottle.

Our favorite during the live bird show was this little raptor. He's called an American Kestrel. (falcon family)This little guy was so noisy. He was chirping like crazy for food! We learned that someone found him as a little fledgling and then was placed in a cage and kept as a pet, so he never learned to hunt for himself (and never will at this point)and he begs like crazy when people are around. We all thought he was cute though!

A"barred" owl (for it's markings). The man was saying that their eyes are huge for it's body in order to find it's prey. The eyes and ears are essential for hunting. He had us make our hands into fists and said that if we were owls, our eyes would be that big.

We hiked on a trail around the property at VINS. We came across this tee pee

(which may be a class project or something, we weren't sure. It was pretty neat though!)Eric and the kids were running around inside of it.

Taking a break

Charlie Ray

A new baby "Charlie Ray" was born while we were in NY. (it's so funny he was named that.. my Dad has a buddy he was in the army with named Charlie Ray. I'll have to send him a picture!!) Isn't he cute? Feeding him is now Sarah's job on nights that we help at the barn. I have more pictures of an outing we took a couple of days ago, but I will sign off for now to be safe. There is a big thunderstorm coming our way at the moment!

I like Milk....

ponies

Sarah's friend Shannon has a close family member who has a few ponies. She gets to ride the brown one pretty often and she had Sarah over today to ride too. Sarah had a blast! These two white ones are Mommy and baby ("baby" is 8 though!)

Shannie on princey

Sarah trotting bareback. She was so proud of herself!