Camera Critters 60, Evie is growing up

April 10, two days old. First time out and staying very close to mommy.

May 12, growing up fast.

And when you are part of the Brinkbeest-household, you get to meet all sorts of critters.

Meeting Holle, one of our labradors, for the first time.

No, this is not one of the other labradors. This is Nufnuf, one of our pigs.

Our other horse Willem, having a little talk with Tumtum, our other pig. Willem used to be REALLY scared of the pigs. He wouldn't even come near us if we had just touched a pig. The smell made him tremble. But Tumtum is a patient and very friendly pig who likes horses. So now Willem is pigproof.

Camera Critters is a fun meme, hosted by Misty Dawn. Check out the other entries here!

Dots and a very special award................

I've just noticed that I like my...........dots. I used to like my exclamation marks too. Until Jewels told us all to stop using them so much please!!!!! So now I am using all my self constraint to keep my fingers from the shift 1 keys.

Please let me know if the dots irritate you. Perhaps I will refrain from using them so much. Or perhaps not. Life With Dogs, blogspot of Nigel, Sola & Co., honoured me with a very special award. The Gold Hydrant Award.

As I am a great admirer of the weird and wonderful Life With Dogs blog, I am extremely proud to be one of the first awardees of a blogaward that has no strings attached. Although the reason for giving me this award left me feeling a bit blue: ' for proving that she has a firm pair of...legs! Holy crap look at those bruises, not a broken bone. Someone has been taking their calcium!'

So I left this comment: 'Gosh, I'm not sure if the reason why I'm chosen is the one I would like to be chosen for, but I ám proud of my calciumfilled legs ;-) Who would have thought those photos would lead to an award. Thanks!I will certainly and proudly display this award. Wonderful initiative!' Which resulted in me receiving this email: 'Oh my I hope I did not offend, I just knew that would draw a lot of attention to your blog.' To which I replied: 'Oh no, rest assured. I'm not that easily offended ;-) It made me smile big time. I just hope that ONCE I will get an award for being utterly entertaining. One can have dreams.....*sigh* Thanks again. I will post it tomorrow. Hope you all have a very nice weekend. Hugs to you my friend ;-)' This was the answer: 'Oh thank heavens - I love you and your blog and was spooked for a minute - but your legs are now the 8th wonder of the world - I don't know how you did not break them!! Have a great weekend and give your new baby a scratch from us, I have loved watching it grow from afar.' Which gave me a brilliant idea, so I replied: 'Maybe my legs need a blog of their own? Hubs just thought of the name: 'hot legs'. Must check if that's still free ;-)' And finally I received: 'Even if it just sat there forever with the pic and the story you'd get a ton of hits. Mind blowing, and what a topic of discussion!' So I checked if 'hotlegs.blogspot' is available. It isn't. And on second thoughts my legs will probably get very stuck-up and hard to handle if they get too much attention. Most probably the wrong attention. Because whoever is searching for 'hot legs' will probably be very disappointed to see my bruised but very strong legs. They were probably hoping for a totally different search result, don't you think? So I will not give my legs their own blog (even bluelegs.blogspot isn't available). I have trouble enough keeping up with this blog and all my lovely blogfriends. I enjoyed the little email conversation however. Have I told you that I loooooove all the wonderful warm and funny and creative people I have sort of met through blogging? Yes, you! Hugs to you all, enjoy your weekend. I'm off to scratch Evie and perhaps make some photos of her poledancing. Fingers crossed she will perform this afternoon ;-)

Poledancing foal............................What?

When I was looking for a suitable spermdonor, just over a year ago, (don't look so shocked, it wasn't for me, it was for Naloma, tssss), there were hundreds of good looking stallions willing to do the job. At least, that was what all the stud farms told us by means of advertisements and luxury brochures. Finally I narrowed it down to two possible options. Both from the same stud farm. More or less coincidentally we sort of knew the owner of the stud farm, so I called him to ask him if he wanted to meet Naloma and help me to decide which of the gorgeous guys would be the best one to 'father Naloma's child'. Since he would be in the neighbourhood anyway, he was more than willing to pay us a visit. Let me explain how things work when you want to get a horse pregnant. There are lots of options. If your mare is in season, which is about every three or four weeks and it lasts for about 3 - 7 days, the last two days she will be at her most fertile. Then you either take your mare to a stallion, which is the most exciting thing to do for all parties concerned, but full of all sorts of risks, including STD's. Yep, even horses get them. You can bring your mare to the stud farm for a period of time and they will check her every day to see if she is at her most fertile and then inseminate her. You can also call the stud farm and they will send you some sperm with which you, if you know how, or your vet can inseminate your mare. Or one of the employees of the stud farm visits you and brings a syringe filled with the sperm of 'the chosen one', with a long straw attached to it, and a very long plastic glove, and then his or her arm with syringe and straw and glove disappears into the rear end of your mare, where the arm impersonates a stallion's penis and voilá, your mare is pregnant. Or not. Apparently instant pregnancy seldom occurs and whatever method you've chosen for your mare will have to be repeated when she is in season again until she is finally pregnant. Or not, as the case may be. It doesn't always work. (This last option was the one we chose and miraculously we only needed one visit to do the job.) So....why was the owner of the stud farm in our neighbourhood anyway? In spring and early summer he is almost permanently 'en route' with his suitcase full of sperm (imagine when he gets pulled over by the police and they open the trunk and find a suitcase full of...syringes and straws and.... hehehe) to visit the breeders who have chosen one of his stallions and the 'housecall method'. He looked at Naloma, agreed with both of the choices I had made, but since Whitesnake was the stallion who was most likely to give a larger foal and had the easiest temperament, he was the one we finally opted for. Now...I firmly believe that Naloma has a good sense of humour. No really. For instance: I like to wear a cap when I'm grooming the horses, and she likes to pluck it off my head. I find that funny and so does she. I hear her snickering when she does it. And once I was talking to a friend of us, who I'd just handed a big mug of tea, and we were standing next to the paddock. Naloma likes people and loves to join in a good conversation, so she was standing right next to us, dipped her nose into the mug and drank half of the tea without my friend even noticing it, hehehe. So I asked the owner of the stud farm: "Does Whitesnake have a sense of humour?", which he thought was a very strange question. I mean, a sense of humour is an important quality to have, is it not? Well, I can officially say that Evie has it. You saw the pictures of Evie pulling faces and doing strange poses, so we already knew she is a funny foal. But yesterday evening she proved there is no doubt about it. She's hilarious. The field where they are now, is surrounded by shallow ditches they can drink from and in case they stumble into a ditch, they can easily climb out again. But because two of the ditches are quite overgrown with irises and grass, our friend and the farmer who owns the fields decided to put up something to prevent the horses from walking into that. The farmer promised to clear out the ditches as soon as possible. The 'fence' they put up until that clearing out happens, consists of small metal poles, about 70 centimeters high and read/white caution line. Thinking the horses would be sufficiently scared of that to keep away from the overgrown ditches. Not Evie though. We had already noticed that the line stretched out, because every day we had to move the poles to pull it tight again. We blamed the stiff breeze, playing havoc with the line. Now we know there is another culprit. The horses have acres of field with kneehigh grass, but, as we all know, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Yesterday evening we saw Evie leaning into the line to graze on the other side. Thén she lifted the line with her head and walked to the other side of it. Now standing on the small strip of the formerly so delicious grass, suddenly the grass on the óther side, the side she had just come from, appeared to be greener and far tastier, so she leaned over again to eat from that, hehehe. Silly foal. Now...Evie likes her musculi glutaei to be rubbed. We have touched and rubbed her all over her body almost from birth to let her get used to that, and we've noticed that she really enjoys it if we firmly rub her behind. She likes that so much that she will turn her backside towards you indicating that she likes you to rub it. Which is quite sweet while she still is small, but if she is a big horse and she turns her backside towards people it can easily be misunderstood. Normally, if a horse turns it's backside towards you, it means: 'touch my buttocks and you're dead!' So we have to break that habit and stop rubbing. One day. Yesterday Evie pushed her buttocks against the line, slowly moved backwards until the line was tightly pressed around her backside and slowly wiggled her hips from left to right, her eyes half shut, a smile on her lips, totally happy with the buttrubcontraption the farmer and our friend have provided her with. Then she moved slowly sideways, her butt still firmly pressed against the line (stretching it more and more) until she reached the small metal pole at the end. She slowly turned around the pole and......did sort of a poledance. It was an embarassing sight. She was wiggling her hips, pressing against the pole, clearly enjoying it. If we put some funky music to her poledancing act, we can make some good money! It cracked me up! (no pun intended) Whitesnake must have a sense of humour too! Have you ever seen a poledancing greyhound? Pop over to Life With Dogs to see the 'evidence'.

ABC Wednesday - S is for........lotS of thingS

First things first. I would like to thank you all for your kind wishes and SYMPATHY concerning my colourful bruises. And most of all I would like to thank you for your SHOCKED reactions. For some weird reason your SHOCKEDNESS (that is probably not a real word) made me feel much better. Why is that? The legs are doing good! I'm walking in a reasonably normal way again. In the beginning of the week I couldn't even get in or out of the car without moaning and groaning. So....Elvis and the healing vibes some of you are sending me are doing a good job. I'm very grateful!!!!!!!!!!! And....have you met SIMON'S CAT? I know some of you can't get YouTube, So I'm Sorry that I'm posting another YouTube one, but the rest of you, especially if you like cats, will hopefully enjoy these little cartoons. We have our own SIMON'S CAT. She's called Bengeltje. She's SILLY and the reason why we don't keep a baseball bat under our bed. Bengeltje prefers tweezers to wake you up with anyway ;-)

SEE?

ABC Wednesday is hosted by Mrs. Nesbitt, over here. Please visit her for more ABC entries or to join in the fun.

I'm feeling blue.......

....and purple and yellow and a tiny bit green....

A week after the lucky escape. Pretty, non? And I promise to clean up the paving of the terrace/patio in the near future. Maybe even today ;-)

Camera Critters 59, pastures new

Last week on sunday we moved the horses to a field where our friend keeps his mare & foal and also a one year old horse. So Evie has some other horses to play with. And they have lots and lots of grass to eat. Moving our horses involved a couple of borrowed horse trailers, 4 friends and a lot of stress. Willem is used to traveling, Naloma hadn't seen a horse box or trailer for years, and with Evie.....well...thát and the idea of them not being at home for the coming 8 weeks or so....it made me quite upset. But it's so good for Evie to have some little friends to play with and our fields need a rest to allow the grass to grow. Willem went into the horse box without any hesitation. We removed the body-divider from the trailer we were going to put Evie and Naloma in, to allow Evie to stand next to her mother. But this meant that we couldn't put the bar behind Naloma to prevent her from walking backwards and out of the trailer again. Which was exactly what she did of course, just as we wanted to close the trailer ramp. (I'm sorry, I don't know the terms you use for all those things we call 'klep', 'tussenschot' and 'stang'. Please bear with me ;-)) Anyway....so, just as we were closing the ramp, Naloma decided she wanted to leave the trailer again. And I am not quite sure how it all happened, but the ramp with 600 kilogrammes horse on it somehow landed on my upper legs. Miraculously it only left me with badly bruised legs. I never knew so many different shades of blue, purple, red and yellow existed. But actually, considering what could have happened, it isn't all that bad. The cats are not allowed on my lap for the coming weeks, but I can walk so I'm happy, even if the cats are not. And after this happened Naloma went into the trailer again, where Evie was patiently waiting for her mother, and stayed there. So we drove to the nearby town (these fields are on the outskirts of a town, very close to where our friends' house is, so they can keep an eye on them) to let them loose on pastures new. Well, new to them anyway. We miss them terribly, so every morning I'm off to the horses to check if everything is alright and to give them a hug. And every evening hubs and I are there to check. And our friends are there twice a day too. And the farmer who owns the field is keeping a eye on them. So they get enough attention. It's sort of a large patch of green, with all sorts of birds and rabbits and hares and cows and lots of other horses and even storks living there, surrounded by houses and schools. I can't wait for them to come home again. In about 8 weeks. I will, however, let someone else close the trailer. You can click on the pictures to enlarge them ;-) They are not the best pictures I've ever made, hehe.

Camera Critters is hosted by the lovely Misty Dawn. Check here to see more entries.

Hi hi,

don't worry, I'm still alive, just no time for blogging. This weekend I'll have time to write a longer post. Love you all, miss you all, will visit you all soon ;-) Hugs, Carolina

Camera Critters 58, Funny Foal

Evie is now 5 weeks old and definitely has a sense of humour:

You can enlarge the pictures by clicking on them.

Camera Critters is hosted by the lovely Misty Dawn.

On a happier note....

Following yesterday's doom and gloom, I thought you could use a laugh. Actually, at one point I added this more or less appropriate Billy Connolly video to yesterday's post, but on second thoughts I deleted it again. That is both the pro ánd the con of having the time and opportunity to change what you've written. As opposed to an actual live conversation. Sometimes you say things........ On the other hand, spontaneity disappears with the use of the delete- or backspacebutton. Back to Billy:

Not funny.

The day before yesterday I was happily sitting in the garden, reading the paper, waiting for my aunt, who wanted to visit Evie, to arrive, when I heard sirens getting louder and louder. We regularly hear sirens of police cars, ambulances and what have you, passing our house. I don't know why. Well, obviously something went wrong somewhere. But I don't know why we hear them passing our house about once a week, when the first few years we lived here, we never heard them. Never. And then all of that changed. So, either for some reason suddenly things go wrong somewhere up the road, or the services provided with sirens and blue flashing lights have decided to take the scenic route to wherever they are needed. So I was sitting there, enjoying the sunshine, hearing these sirens coming closer and expecting them to pass by and fade away again, when they suddenly stopped somewhere very nearby. I went inside to go to the front of our house where I could look up and down the road if I could see anything. Honestly, I am not someone who runs to see what's happening somewhere, but this could be something serious happening to one of our neighbours. But when I went inside I could see a police car with blue flashing lights racing down the very small private road that runs along the side of our house and only leads to our garden, to the neighbour's house and to the back of a couple of other neighbouring properties. This small road, road even is too big a name for it, it's more of a track, is about 200 meters long and at the end of it someone has placed a couple of railway sleepers over a dry ditch to get onto the golfcourse that runs behind all our houses. The police car raced to the end of the track. Now, this was strange. Whatever could be going on? I went outside to our garden gates where I could see one of our neighbours standing on the main road waving her arms and I could hear other sirens coming closer. Suddenly an ambulance raced past our garden gate, closely followed by another ambulance. Our neighbour came running down the road again. She slowed down when she saw me standing there, with no doubt an astonished look on my face. 'Some...one ..is ....having ..a ....heart.. attack..', she said out of breath from all the running. 'On.. the... golf..course.... Son.. saw.. him.. ly.. ing... there.' Okay, I know I just told you that I am not someone who goes running towards every exciting thing just out of curiosity, but this proved too much of a curious happening, even for me, so I walked a couple of meters towards the ambulances where I could just see someone lying on the grass of the golfcourse and someone resuscitating him. Oh dear. That didn't look good. A couple of years ago I took a First Aid course and I remember the laughs we had trying to resuscitate a doll. But the real thing wasn't funny at all. And I also remembered we were told that resuscitation often does not have the desired effect. I went back to the house again and shortly after that the doorbell rang. My aunt. I let her in and directed her to the little seating area near the meadow. Then I went back to the house to make coffee and cut some pieces of the home made apple pie my aunt had brought with her. The ambulances were still standing at the end of the road. We enjoyed our coffee, the apple pie and looking at the horses and then I went back to the house to make us a second cup of coffee. I just saw them closing the ambulance doors, shaking some hands, talking to the police officers who were taking notes. Not in a rush at all. I guess the poor guy did not make it. And there we were, going on with our little lives, having apple pie and coffee, and at the same time someone's life had come to an abrupt ending. It left me feeling a little bit strange. Not funny at all.

ABC Wednesday, Q is for reQuest

Since I didn't participate for a couple of weeks, due to Other things Occupying my Mind, I'm sneaking in a couple of Missed letters, like the N for Nutini and the P for Paolo. And thére you have the Q for Quality,

Paolo Nutini. No Question about his Quality. I can listen to this song all day long.

It's called 'last reQuest'.

Enjoy. (for more ABC Wednesday posts, visit our lovely host Mrs. Nesbitt here)

Catpatrol

Referring to the post before this one, Bruce mentioned that 'that barn needs a cat too'. We are one step ahead of you Bruce ;-) Meet Mozes. Although he is under strict instructions not to catch any birds, I'm not sure he understood the instructions.

Camera Critters 57, Evie and her neighbours

Evie, her mother Naloma and 'uncle' Willem in the field our neighbours very kindly offered to us, so that we have more meadow for our horses. It doesn't look very green, but three weeks ago it looked even worse. You can see the rest of their field, that has not been mowed, in the background and on the right. Kind of a wilderness that has not been touched for more than 10 years.

But our horses are very happy that they are allowed to graze there. And so are we because it means that our own meadow can get some rest.

Our neighbour's house is in the background there. Behind Evie's big butt ;-) We live on the other side of the trees. Part of the field that is nearer to the house has much better grass, because they mowed that last year. Evie also has some flying neighbours. They live in the stables. If winter comes they fly off to warmer climates, but in spring they return to their old nest.

They are 'boerenzwaluwen', or european swallows (Hirundo rustica). Superfast and agile flyers.

You can click on the pictures to enlarge them if you want.

For more Camera Critters, visit our host Misty Dawn over here.

DIY, does it ring a bell with you?

I grew up in Amsterdam, in an apartment with neighbours on four sides: above, below, left and right. We shared a frontdoor in a porch with the above and below neighbours. We all had our own doorbell next to that frontdoor and we could open that door magically from our apartments above. When opening the frontdoor you came into a narrow hallway leading to stairs. If you went up the stairs, you ended up on a landing where the frontdoor of the apartment below us was. On the other end of the landing there were stairs again, leading to our landing with our own frontdoor and on the other end of our landing there were stairs leading to the apartment above ours. If you went up there, there were stairs on the other end of the landing too. They lead to the attick rooms. Every apartment had an attick room under the eaves. Videophonesystems had not yet been invented, so if someone rang your doorbell, you either had to lean out of the window and yell to the person standing in the porch to take a step back and show themselves to you so you could decide if you'd open the door or not, or you could open the groundfloor frontdoor to let the person(s) in and then open your own frontdoor and yell down the stairs to ask who was there. Or you could go downstairs, see who was there and open the door. Or not. We were not allowed the first option. My parents thought it was very vulgar to scream out of the window. The second option was quite risky, first opening the door and thén waiting who was coming up the stairs....Although you could always close your own frontdoor if it turned out to be a herd of criminals and let the unsuspecting neighbours fend for themselves. The third option was the best one according to my parents, who used to send us children down to see who wanted to be let in. It kept us fit. Although I can't count the times I've tumbled down those stairs and landed at the bottom with again a twisted ankle. I am not the most agile of people. Anyhoo, the family above us opted for the first possibility. My parents held their breaths in disgust, every time 'her from upstairs' screamed 'WHO'S THERE?' out of their window. In the seventies tongue-and-groove cladding was 'the in thing', so my mother decided she wanted a wall in the entrance hall of our apartment cladded with wood. My father went to work. Lots of drilling, screwing, hammering and swearing later, the wall was cladded with the very hip tongue-and-groove wood. At which point we noticed that, with regular intervals, 'her from upstairs' was yelling: 'YES! WHO IS THERE?' from her window. Each time a bit louder and more agitated. My parents sighed and frowned and shook their heads in disapproval. Then someone knocked on the frontdoor of our apartment. My father went to open it. It was 'her from upstairs', quite red in the face and out of breath from all the screaming. 'Does your doorbell keep ringing too? Every 5 minutes our doorbell rings and nobody's there! I guess there are a couple of children playing ding-dong-ditch.' 'Well', my father said, 'not with our bell'. And he closed the door again. So 'she' went upstairs again to continue with the voice-exercises, much to everyone's frustration. Until my father had a brilliant idea. Since the bell-ringing intervals were so regular, could it perhaps be that there was something wrong with the electrics? And could it perhaps be that he had by accident hit a wire while screwing the tongue-and-groove to the wall? So, he grabbed his toolbox again and began unscrewing the tongue-and-groove. And then all went quiet. 'Her from upstairs' could rest her voice. No more 'ding-dong-ditching'. All members of our family had a good chuckle. The next day my father put up the tongue-and-groove again, making sure he didn't hit any wires. And when my mother stumbled upon 'her from above' on the landing later that week, the strange bell-ringing happening was discussed. My mother shook her head in disbelief. 'Can you believe those rotten children?', she said. 'Ding-dong-ditching all afternoon! We were just lucky they did not do it to us.'

Bumblebee-misery

This morning a big fat crow grabbed the bumblebee-nest from the hayloft and landed on the grass holding the nest in its beak. Then he/she ripped it apart and ate the little bumblebeebabies. The poor little bumblebees are now flying around where their nest used to be with big questionmarks above their heads. Fortunately we still have the photos.

Some unexpected wildlife in the hayloft and I am not a nice daughter.

When I went up to the hayloft this morning I found something very interesting:

The bumblebees gathered all the straw into a little heap to make their nest. I had never seen a bumblebee nest before. This is a rather unusual place to build it I think.

If you want to know more about bumblebees and their nests check this in Wikipedia.

I am not a nice daughter

My mother is a tough one. But you've guessed that already if you've read the post before this. She'd rather hold a potential bomb in her hands, or to be precise: let her granddaughter hold it in hér hands, than keep it in a bag so it could mess up some clothes. Uhuh

So, she is a tough one, 78 years young and very active: yoga, Nordic walking (she calls it Nordy Wokky), normal walking (she calls that 'wandelen' or 'lopen', but those are the Dutch words for walking so that is not funny) and she rides literally more than a thousand kilometres a year on her bike. She never complains about the aches and pains she must have sometimes. I mean, we all suffer from something sometimes don't we? Or from something all the time. But never all the time from nothing. Please correct me if I'm wrong and you are superhuman. So when she started mentioning the pain in her knee, we knew that her knee was really painful. She even went to her GP. I called her to ask what the GP had said. 'I have an appointment in hospital for photos', she said. 'And he gave me painkillers. I could choose between normal Paracetamol (acetaminophen) or Paracetamol with cocaine, which is stronger, so I chose that.' My mother is now taking her daily dose of cocaine.

She isn't really taking cocaine of course. In actual fact it's either Paracetamol with coffeine (also spelled as: cofeine or cafeine or caffeine; pick the one you like) or, Jinksy came up with another possibility, it could also be Paracetamol with Codeine which is more likely, however, I'm quite sure it isn't cocaine, but hey, wé are not going to tell her. Wé are having far too much fun. And the photos showed osteoarthritis. So she needs a new knee. Thát is an operation that will be postponed forever I think. She'd rather take the cocaine tablets for the rest of her life.

Bombs away!

I know, one should never post more than once in one day, but you can never have enough of a good thing (ahum). So, since I will not be able to post tomorrow I thought I would make your day and post this now. Jinksy's post opened a drawer in my mind that contained this mad story. We have plumtrees in our garden. They are not of a cultivated variety I'm guessing. They bear tiny yellow or red plums. Quite nice to eat. The dogs love them. Can you imagine what happens when they eat a lot of plums? With stones and all. Hmmm. Yes. It is a beautiful picture. But actually beside the point of the story. One year, my mother came up with a cunning plan. My niece, about 12 years old at the time, stayed with them during her holidays. She lives in Amsterdam and arrived by train, her mother not being able to join her because of work commitments and her father, my brother, could only join her in spirit, because he is one. He died a couple of years before this story took place. My mother's cunning plan was to enlist the help of my little niece and gather lots of plums from our trees to make jam. And so they disappeared, armed with buckets and stepladders and closely followed by very interested dogs, into our plumtreewood. Four buckets full of plums later they reappeared, happy dogs, still licking their mouths, in close pursuit. Because you never know if someone drops a bucket. At the end of the day my mother, father and niece drove back to my parents' home to make the jam. Two days later my mother called, chuckling. She had made the jam, about 20 jars or so, only..... she mistakingly added sort of a secret ingredient. She had been wondering why the jam foamed so much while she was cooking it. She had meant to add vanilla sugar. Unfortunately the vanilla sugar packages look remarkably like baking powder packages. Realising she made an exciting mistake she ladled off most of the foam and added the vanilla sugar. The jam tasted really good, a bit like apricot jam strangely enough, but the jamfilled jars had quite a large layer of foam on top. 'Ah well, not to worry', I said jokingly, 'if you hear a big bang in the cellar, you know that the jamjars have exploded.' Would we like some jars, she asked. 'Sure! We are not that easily scared mom!' A couple of days after that, my niece went back to Amsterdam. All alone, by train. We like to live life on the edge in our family. My mother gave her a jar filled with plumjam and foam to give to her mother, who would collect her from the station. 'Best not keep it in your bag in case it explodes. Keep it in your hands', my mother wisely advised her. 'And don't tell your mother that I put baking powder in it.' When my sister-in-law called my parents later that day to say that their granddaughter had safely arrived, she told them that the poor child had been holding the jam jar firmly in her hands and had held her arms stretched to keep the jar as far away as possible for the duration of the journey. About two hours. She had been terrified that it would actually explode. Anyway, it looks to be a good plumyear this year. We will keep the baking powder well away from the vanilla sugar.

Yes, well, uhm, gosh, what would be an appropriate title...

Since I promised to post more regularly than I did during the past three weeks (which isn't difficult, since I didn't post anything during that time), and heaving just read an inspiring post over at 'the definitive dogblog' (if you don't know the Life With Dogs blog, I suggest that you click on the link, but you can do that after you've read this post of course), I thought I would bore you with another little post. Nigel, Sola & Co., over at the Life With Dogs blog that I referred to above, are regular visitors of their veterinarians. Which got me thinking that their vets must drive very big cars and live in very big houses. We are regular visitors of our vet too. And he is a regular visitor of us. I mean: of our animals. Not long after we moved here we were already on a first-name basis with him and after about a year he started to renovate his house. After nine years of being his loyal customers he moved to a farmhouse with acres of land. He is renovating that farmhouse now. I like to think (and I quite often mention it to him too) that we have played a big part in making that all possible for him. At which point he always says that he is quite grateful to us and our pets for being such regular customers and that he needs a new kitchen (or car or horse) so he hopes we will keep visiting. Fortunately he is not the only one with a sense of humour. A couple of days after he visited our newly born Evie, he visited the horse of one of our friends. She later told me that when she asked him if he had already been to see Evie and what he thought of our foal, he said that we were the best people to have such a beautiful and healthy foal, that we really deserved it, because we EVEN CAME TO HIM WITH A SICK CHICKEN! Which reminds me; Suldog gave me an award a couple of weeks ago (I only found that out the day before yesterday of course) and this seems like the right place to post it:

These are the rules attached: The blogger who receives this award believes in the Tao of the zombie chicken - excellence, grace and persistence in all situations, even in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. These amazing bloggers regularly produce content so remarkable that their readers would brave a raving pack of zombie chickens just to be able to read their inspiring words. As a recipient of this world-renowned award, you now have the task of passing it on to at least 5 other worthy bloggers. Do not risk the wrath of the zombie chickens by choosing unwisely or not choosing at all!

I AM TRULY HONOURED! Thank you Suldog! I would brave a raving pack of zombie chickens any day, just to be able to read your inspiring words! Actually, if I would not strongly object to my picture being taken, there could have been some photographic evidence of me, strolling through our garden, followed by a pack of zombie chickens, three dogs and two pigs. Really. It happens.

5 other Zombie Chicken Awardworthy bloggers are: Mel from Our Journey Continues for her truly inspiring posts, her good sense of humour and for being my BBFF (I've learned yesterday that BFF stands for Best Friends Forever; the other B = for Blog), Jewels from Life, The Universe, and Everything for being sort of funnily disturbed in a good way and for being awesome and if I ever go to Canada, I would so like to have a cup of coffee with her, preferably from a drive-through with a trainee behind the counter, Nigel, Sola & Co. from Life With Dogs for sponsoring their vets, for having sort of a surreal sense of humour and for keeping me up to date with the texting abbreviations used by people decades younger than me.

I think I have to be brave and defy the wrath of the Zombie Chickens. Not that I don't think any of you other bloggers deserve an award, and if I ever get another award you will be the first one I will virtually hand it out to. Or not. Don't get too excited now.... Odds are that we all will be awarded with something some day and I actually think that it is nice to show our appreciation to other bloggers in this crazy awardgiving way. Only, I have just made up a rule for myself to give any award to a maximum of three other bloggers, whatever rules are attached to that award. Chances are however that I have forgotten that rule by the time I receive another award, if ever. Exciting, isn't it? By the way, if you like zombies and have a weird sense of humour (like I have) you will probably enjoy the British movie 'Shaun of the Dead'. Or maybe not.

She's back and doing fine!

(Crittervisitors have to scroll down for the critterpictures that are relevant to the story, but I can imagine you don't want to read all that, since you have to visit so many other Camera Critters.) HELLO YOU LOVELY, SWEET AND CARING BLOGGERFRIENDS. I'm so sorry for the disappearance act I've done for the last three weeks. Honestly, today is the first time in three weeks that I've opened my laptop (59 emails waiting for me, lots of virusscanning and -downloading going on). You see, the thing is...I just did not have the energy to try and write something in English for the first week of my disappearance because of huge busyness during the days and then feeling quite drained in the evenings. And thén....monday two weeks ago one of our young cats, Lapje, got hit by a car and died and that made me too sad to blog (I've cried all of that night and the following day). And after those two weeks had passed I needed a week to pluck up my courage to 'face' you all, feeling so so soooooo guilty that I did not even let you know that I'm still alive and kicking. But I am! And I hope you are all doing fine too and I'm looking forward to reading all of your posts and THANK YOU FOR ALL YOUR LOVE AND CONCERN. (Really, if you are feeling a bit low, stop blogging and all your sweet blogfriends will let you know that they care about you. Makes you feel so much better!) Would you like to know why I've been busy? Probably not, but I'm going to tell you anyway. First of all, we have a newborn baby called Evie (or Eavie). You knew that of course, but did you know that having a foal and being all on your own during the day gives you lots of unforeseen problems? I did not know that. I know now! Compare it with having a human baby. Your first. I cannot speak out of personal experience here, but I can imagine (ánd I have lots of friends with babies, who tell me that I'm not wrong) that when you hold your child in your arms for the first time, you are over the moon. And then reality kicks in. What do you dó with a baby. And hów do you do that? But then help arrives in the form of a 'kraamhulp'. That is the Dutch word for the person that is send to you by the medical services to assist you in you first week with your newborn. I don't know if other countries do the same for you, but in the Netherlands every new mom gets a 'kraamhulp' or maternity help and she (or occasionally: he) helps you take care of your baby, does some light cleaning work in the house and gives tea and coffee to your friends and family who visit you. I believe they even cook for you. Anyhow. You don't get that when you have a newborn foal. Well, you don't get one maternity help, you get ten! And everyone of them has different advice. 'You have to do this so and so!', the first helpful expert tells you. 'Who told you to do that so and so?', the second one cries out in despair. 'Never do that! Do it like this!' Then the third one arrives (and since I'm all alone during the days I myself have to provide everyone with the desired beverages and the traditional 'beschuit met muisjes', so you can imagine me running up and down from stables or the meadow to the house and back again with trays full of goodies) and this third expert tells you all sorts of things that can go wrong with foal and mare (as if I had not thought of all those things and MORE myself) and I have to keep smiling and saying thank you, because everyone means well and I am truly gratefull but at the same time it drives me MAD! For instance. I thought that when you bring mare and foal to the meadow for the first time (the day after the birth I kept them in the stable because the vet came to visit to say 'Ooohh, lovely foal, best foal I've seen in years' or something like that, and give her her first shot of antibiotics and vitamins and minerals (and then an expert came and said it must have been a wrong shot, because it wasn't yellow or at least I did not know if it was yellow or not and now the foal was sure to die, or that is how I remember it, so that made me panic and call the vet who assured me it was the right shot)) the foal would follow the mother, no problem. But NO, two of the experts told me (separately from each other, so I was quite confident that they were right, and it turns out they were) that the foal would not leave the stable to follow mom and then mom would panic and that could get quite dangerous. Someone should help the foal over the threshold of the stable into the great big scary outside world. Oh, and I should never do that on my own. NEVER! And the foal would have to wear a head-collar and I should lead it on a rope. Well. If I could not bring them outside on my own, they would never go outside. I just had to do it on my own. And since Evie would have to get used to a head-collar and walking on a leadrope anyway, best start with that as soon as possible. So you have to picture this: me trying to put a head-collar on a foal that has never seen such a thing before and doesn't want to have it on her head, with a concerned mommy turning around us to see what the HELL I am doing to her precious baby and me trying to keep calm and have lots of patience and still being firm because the foal should learn that I AM THE BOSS! So, I have finally mastered to put the head-collar on the foal, mommy is wearing one, I have them both on a leadrope and now we have to leave the stables. I let Naloma go out first, holding on to her rope whilst keeping the foal in a warm embrace, one arm around her breast and one arm around her backside, gently persuading it to step over the threshold and Naloma in two minds about going to the meadow (yippee!) but not wanting to leave Evie, so she's pacing up and down in front of the stable calling Evie, me still holding on to her rope and Willem in the stable next door getting all worked up about the strange things going on. With Evie finally out of the stables and hesitantly following her mother into the great unknown we went on our way to the meadow. The first couple of days this went reasonably well. Because Naloma kept both eyes on Evie and did not leave her side. But after a day or two or three, Naloma's attention moved to the other important thing in her life. Food. So.....she only keeps one eye on Evie now and the other is firmly focused on the green green grass of the meadow. But Evie wants to see every little leaf and ant and butterfly that crosses her path, so I'm sort of hanging between two ropes now. Both arms stretched and on the end of one rope a sort of Hummer-like mare, pulling because we are not going fast enough to her food, and on the end of the other rope a happily dancing Evie with her eyes on everything that is happening around her, pulling because we are going far to fast. (I'm sorry for switching tenses all the time, please forgive me, I'm not in English-mode yet and I'm trying very hard to knit a coherent story *big smile*) AND we have been very busy making a piece of land, kindly offered to us by our neighbours, habitable for our horses. Land that for the largest part had not been touched for 10 years or more. So it had to be mowed, we have collected about 30 golfballs (our other neighbour is a very chic golfcourse), we had to put up a fence to keep our horses from that golfcourse (I keep having images in my mind of our horses galloping from hole to hole with mad golfers and greenkeepers in pursuit, I so hope that image stays in my mind only) and we had to make a path from our land to theirs which involved felling some trees and hacking my way through brambles and so on. Busybusybusy. Enough for today, the internetconnection is having hiccups, probably stressed about so much action after a three-week-holiday, I will leave you with some fotos of Evie and Naloma, taken yesterday in the new meadow. Lots of love and I will blog more frequently from now on. A very BIG virtual HUG from me to you all!

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