I keep starting to write and ending up stopping as it doesn't want to form itself into any sort of coherant, interesting little anecdotes.

In between getting totally drenched (I must be the only person in Australia who wishes the rain would go away for awhile...) we've been just going about the business of daily life.

Laurent is continuing to grow into an alternatingly adorable little person who makes me crack up, melt and occasionally make me want to tear my hair out. The things that pop out his mouth continue to surprise me as he pulls new developments out of thin air instead of gradually easing into them. At the moment, we're starting to see a lot of consideration to others feelings, interesting to see in that previously he's been as subtle as a freight train and tactful as a red leather mini-skirt. If I'm hurt, he'll ask if I'm okay and if I want a "ai band" (bandaid) or "tiss-oo" and it's almost always followed by, "mum you need a cuddle?" and a kiss or thirty. He wants to know how to do everything and is absorbed by explanations of how things work, the mechanics of various items, helping to grow things in the garden, watering them, picking them, helping to cook (usually by mashing, mixing, adding handfuls of prechopped foods or offering his opinion on if the dish needs more of something), set the table, put things away. "Why" is the favorite word and is applied to absolutely everything he wants to know about... which, fortunately or not seems to be absolutely everything.

The fencing is slowly getting done. It's had primer and the first coat of paint. We're still waiting on the roofing contractor and electrician to be able to agree upon a new date as the previous one (which took about a month to line up) was rained out.

The birds are maturing nicely and I'm considering how to go about adding to the Wyandotte bloodline I have which isn't easy as I found out tonight the person I'd hoped to be able to aquire further bloodstock from in the upcoming season hasn't got them any longer. I was however able to secure a pair of Brown Chinese from Hammish Russell's bloodlines which I am VERY pleased about, as they were his personal breeding stock from his flock dispersal as he's retiring from geese. They represent the result of decades of work. I also added two adorable little Aylesbury ducklings to my little flock, which have quickly bonded and think I'm mum now. LOL Miss Cami got to visit all her BYP friends as well, who met her last month as she came also.

The dogs are about to start bouncing off the walls from spending so much time indoors - they don't mind the wet and cold but I certainly DO and apparently it's not half as fun to run around like mad if the humans aren't joining in!

Cami is growing like a weed and her quiet-sleepy days are firmly over! I hope Rogue is up for a rowdy good time, because I have a feeling little missy will be willing to provide it! LOL She is a funny little soul, very easy going in many ways when you're dealing with her and for about 90% of everything you ask of her just a cruisey little pup... the other 10% of the time though that stuborn streak is a mile wide! With the girls, she's starting to want to assert herself and is going through the stage where her puppy-liscence is expiring and the girls are repeatedly putting her in her place and teaching her doggy etiquette. Several times a day, puppy sass overides good manners and a quick glance reveals she's latched onto someones jowls or ruff and is dangling muttering little puppy cuss words. To be fair, even Hope, who is a soft natured girl went through this bratty phase at about the same age before I make her sound too naughty! It's actually pretty funny to watch because she thinks she is just tough as they come and the girls flatly don't believe a bit of it... if they were people they'd be exchanging glances in bemused exasperation and rolling their eyes at the little kid in a superhero costume attempting to flex muscles that haven't yet developed. LOL

I've also been planting and propagating and snipping and dipping up a storm the other day. I was very kindly given a whole bunch of cuttings, seeds and plants by a fellow member of BYP who is a garden lover as well and now have them all tucked in, watered and in the little greenhouse thingie. Will get pics up tomorrow. I hope I did everything right - I'm far from good at propagation and have very little experience with anything that would be considered even remotely difficult to propagate and my information is cobbled together from two books - one of which is in French and required a bit of dictionary checking to ensure I understood some of the mroe technical words - and google trawling. LOL

It's been a busy few days. We had a nice get together at Sif's when she was hosting a party and got to catch up with everyone! It's been ages! (And yes, Cami came with... and snuggled on my lap all day.)

This weekend, Saturday was the Victorian Waterfowl Associations show and it turned out to be a nice show and of course lovely to catch up with friends old and new. Some others had very lovely birds... I totally fell in love with this adorable little call duck of BB's... very unusual colour and they're so TINY... about 1 lb I think. I told him to clone her so I cna buy some! LOL

Today was an poultry auction at Euroa. I ended up getting 3 lavender pekins and a trio of OEG bantams. Foggy morning up through the mountains... and after a great day buying and catching up (some of you may have sussed out gabbing is my favorite passtime) we wandered back doing the tourist bit in my favorite spots at Strathbogie, Alexandra, Cathedral Ranges State Park and the mountains coming up towards Healesville on the Maroondah Hwy. Now of course I do have a widdle-bitty puppy who needs meals 3x day and I could hardly leave her kenneled all day. So what to do? Well... to be honest, she was carried around all day, both days and took it all in stride. Really, I think she must be one of those little chihuahuas you see rich people carry in their purses! Put her down and she'll play or follow you but pick her up and she's happy as a clam there for as long as you like. And when I needed both hands...

Yes, she snuggled down in Laurent's sling. LOLOL She was comfy as could be and alternated between watching and snoozing. Lots of compliments to pass on to Kate on what a well behaved and clever pup she is. (She knows sit and potty on cue, this is amazing to many people who aren't used to clicker training!)

And a couple from our return trip near sunset...

It's been a busy few days since Miss Verity arrived... quite a few things she's been more cruisey than I expected, though I'm not dismissing there is a work to do with socializing when we start asking more of her. At the moment we'd been taking things pretty easy and not pushing into her comfort zone much, other than reinforcing the fact that all good things for little blue dogs come from toddlers and that if she's unsure of something, rather than dealing with it herself she should come to me. Have been not online as much the past few days due to a lovely tummy bug!

It's been a lot of fun discovering her... she is a lot like Hope in some ways, you can tell they're sisters!

On the other hand, there are plenty of differences as well. She is more of a one-person dog - that person being me. She's fine with Nic and is figuring out that Laurent while small, crazy and fond of moving about in a noisy and erratic manner is a veritable yummy-treat producing machine... but she's definitely 'my' girl and given the choice prefers to stick with me. She'll crawl in my lap, flop over for belly scratches, jump up for kisses and cuddles etc. and more often than not spends all her time not playing with the dogs curled at my feet.

Sierra, being the good natured goofball she is, has taken everything in stride. Another dog to wrestle with, another dog to chase about. Yup, life is good and all is right in Sierra's world! Hope has defered a lot to Verity as I expected she'd do but also as expected has the things she considers important enough to refuse to give up as well (her pink binky ball) and will be interesting to see how that changes as Hope gets older and more mature. Right now she seems to have slipped neatly into the role of a hero-worshiping pesty little sister quite neatly! The three Aussie's seem to have taken a lot of joy in the fact that they're now a small mob of like-minded playmates (the harder the better) and spend a lot of their time hooning around, wrestling, slobbering on each other and generally mucking about. Play is *definitely* a contact sport here!

Hope, attempting to take Sierra out, at full tilt. Black blips in the background are cows believe it or not, remarkably unfussed by the zooming, growly, wrestling nutbags.

'Round about the dam we go... then round about some more!

Great galloping hairy hordes of thundering Aussie paws!

Full tilt, full out... how do all three manage despite it all to never wear out?????

Poor Sierra... I managed to snap Hope ganging up on her again, though they all take turns in being the one everyone piles on pretty evenly!

In other doggy news, today was Verity's first day out to town. She got to ride in the car in the passanger seat which at first she wasn't so sure she liked. Fortunately like most Aussie's she's firmly lead by her tummy, so the discussion went like this:
Verity: Uh uh, no way! I'm not going to jump in that car!
Me: Verity, that seat produces liver cookies.
Verity: Nope, not gonna! No way, no how! Wait... did you say... liver?
Me: Yup! See - there's a piece right there on the edge of the seat.
Verity: Okay, well the -edge- isn't so bad. I guess I can do that. *chomp chomp*
Me: There's another piece there, you must have missed it.
Verity: Hm. *chomp* Well I guess it's not that much further in. *chomp chomp* You know, this liver stuff is pretty good! *burp*
Me: Well since you like it so much there's more there, go take a look.
Verity (front paws on the seat): Oh *chomp slurp chomp* YUM!
Me: Betchya if you jump up you get even more!
Verity: Well, okay, if there's liver involved...

After we got in she was a bit uncertain on the ride but by the time we got back in to come home hopped in and laid down like a pro. So much for "Uh uh, no way!" LOL

While we were in town, we walked around a bit to gauge her reaction to strangers. She was definitely a bit uncertain but not horribly so. I'd honestly expected a stronger reaction out of her, more like what I'd seen when we went to visit her the first few times but not a pull-back, not a bark, not a muttering. The worst of it was she looked mildly anxious around her lips and was trying to watch everything at once, coming back to touch my hand for reassurance a few times. We took a slow stroll around the shops, liver magically appearing under her nose every time a stranger walked by and halting when they'd passed, only to magically appear under her nose again with the next stranger. After awhile we sat outside the grocery store a few feet from the door in a position that she could see all the people coming by but they wouldn't be able to ambush her for pats without asking me first. Same thing as before - every time a person walked by lots of tiny little liver treats appeared, only to disappear when the strangers had passed. People with trollys, walking frames, two wheel-chairs, a worker dragging in a bunch of cars, kids of all ages, guy with big funky dreadlocks, lady with a baby in a sling, bikers, a skateboarder etc. So quite pleased with her reactions... by the end she was fairly calm about it all, more relaxed and had taken to nudging my hand for the treat she knew was coming when a person walked by! Cheeky little thing this one!


Okay, now this is my darling child in one of his more recent escapades. He got into my purse, nabbed my lipgloss and dobbed it all over himself while in the carseat before chirping, "Mum! WOOK! I peeettttyyy!!!" I need to get some nice pictures of him since I haven't gotten any in a little while and he's growing and changing so much recently! This week he's come out with literally heaps and heaps of little sentences and words we didn't even know he knew just out of the blue. He'd been talking before and adding words here and there but it seems like this week he's come out with a few months worth of new words and strung them together in bigger sentences!

Now... my ducks. Aren't they just the picture of happy, ducky contentment? Ahhh... a nice stretch!

And a snooze on the lush green grass! Okay but here's the thing - they're ON THE LUSH GREEN GRASS - which means they're not in their pen. Why, you ask? Because the silly things got it into their head while walking too and from the paddocks to dodge under the house. This, they discovered, is a place the dog will not follow them and the human cannot follow them. So for the past week they have been free-range ducks, escaping every attempt to round them up! They're perfectly safe mind you, we're well back from the road and fenced in anyhow with nothing but cows on all sides and plenty of pasture to graze, bugs to gobble and a dam full of water. I'd been putting out water and food for them anyhow to lure them out but they'd just gobble it and then hide the second I came out to get them. I shot this from Laurent's bedroom with my zoom lense out as far as it could go. However, the cheeky little boogers were caught today... fine and fat as butter from their munching... and returned to their pen!

And then yesterday, when I headed off to the showgrounds to check out the Wyandotte's which are a breed of chicken I've been after. While there, we got to meet up with some of our online aquaintences from BYP as well, including Jacquie who was down from WA! Trick is, I'm after a sort of chicken that is really hard to find... full sized partridge pencilled Wyandottes. The colour is rather rare in the full sized birds and since this is one of the largest get togethers of the breed, it was probably my best chance to get in contact with someone who bred them. Lo and behold there were two entered - a hen and a pullet. (Mind you entries were along the lines of 300 birds for the rest, so you can see how uncommon they are!) I was quite chuffed and Jacquie being braver than I am, sussed out their owners name, found someone who could tell us where he was and then went up to enquire as she was also after some bantam-sized partridges and standard columbians. She ended up getting a pair of pullets as she already has a CB line and had a PB line cockrel and we also managed to talk to gentleman into parting with the two PB standard sized ones for me! So I'm the proud new owner of a standard PB partridge hen and pullet! Now I just need to find a PB partridge cockrel so they can make lots of cute babies! LOL I may have to search long and hard for that though, as the gentleman who sold me these two told me that unfortunately he couldn't help me as he had only one and it'd taken him ages to find and knew of no one at all breeding CB lines! So here's the new girls, no names yet but geeze aren't they pretty marked??? The roosters are even more beautiful yet.

This is the hen

and another of the hen (left) and pullet (right) with Blossom, my partridge colour silkie, waving her fluffy bum behind the hen.