Sarah’s Homestead Blog

Who’s ready for a chicken update? I bet Gaile is

The first eggs have landed! From the young girls, that is….Slow Tilda to be precise. It seems she is not so slow after all. In fact, she’s been seeming a touch more clever lately too, which has lead me to believe that maybe her brain development was off-schedule due to putting so much energy into growing those booties and huge fluffy beard early on.

All in all the four youngsters are doing very well, and I’m itching to see my first Welsummer egg from the Wonder Twins. Trixie and Calamity Jane are never apart, constantly running around the orchard bug hunting….but they have yet to show any interest in the nest boxes. Gypsy is a complete lunatic and has taken to slipping through the fence to the goat yard for adventure. Here she is looking not the least bit sorry after being captured.

In other youngster news, our rooster (previously known as Viola) has found a happy new home. He was a lovely bird, but our older girls were just too set in their ways to accept a rooster and his manly charms. There was constant stress, fighting, squawking, and mayhem. Not to mention a drop-off in egg production. He tried wooing them with treats, but they were just not having it and Queen Velma would not give up her reign.

Amazingly, we found a lovely gal who has a small farm and a lot of animals and some young hens who needed a roo to watch over them. We’ve heard back from her and he’s settled in just perfectly and is taking care of his very own much happier flock who are appreciating his attentions. And our ladies are happy as clams roaming their orchard without the constant threat of roo-love hanging over them.

Meet Claudius. He may not be a gimpy Roman emperor with a stutter, but he IS an absolutely adorable kitty.

Now, you may be thinking to yourself, “Why on earth would they need more animals?!” Well, allow me to rationalize

I’ve been wanting to get a kitty friend for Rorschach for ages. It’s not that he leads a sad life…by any measure he is spoiled rotten, but he doesn’t quite know how to play with the dogs, and ahem, I believe we’ve discussed his fattitude before here on the blog. And we’ve got the time, love, and space to give another cat a home, so why not?

I spent AGES at the shelter visiting all the cats. They take very good care of them, but it’s an unbearably sad place, that’s just the nature of shelters. This time of year is especially bad because pregnant moms and kittens are just pouring in. A lot of them don’t even make it to the adoptable stage because there just isn’t room at the facility.

I cuddled more kitties of every color and personality than you could imagine. There were a few contenders….if we lived in a mansion I would have just scooped them all up and brought them home. But Claudius (aptly nicknamed “Romeo” at the shelter) won me over. I said hello, and he jogged right over, meowed in greeting, then stood up and wrapped his front legs around my neck in a huge hug and smooshed his little face up against mine, purring all the while.

How could I say no to such a smooth operator?

Today he had his checkup at the vet, and all is well. He’s got a touch of a sneeze and a case of the eye-goobers, but we’ve got eye-drops and vitamins, and the vet is hoping that now that he’s out of the shelter the sneeze will clear up without a course of heavy antibiotics.

Sadly, this means the kitty introduction process is going to take even longer than it normally would because we need to make sure Claudius is all better so Rorschach isn’t exposed to his germs. That means he literally cannot come out of the guest bedroom to explore even a little bit, because he sneezes on stuff, and we can’t do any trading back and forth of stuff so they get used to one another’s scent.

BUT, he is adorable, and more than worth the trouble, and once he’s out of purgatory he’ll be one of the two most spoiled rotten kitties in the Universe

Now don’t you want to go visit your local shelter and adopt one of your own?