Serial baker

Remember I told you about my friend who is expecting two babies and that I was supposed to take photos of her big belly and of hér big bellied friend? If not, you can read about it here.
Well, the bun shooting was scheduled for Thursday before last, but when the day came, friend of friend decided to have her baby that afternoon. And I had cleaned the house, washed the windows, painted some walls, all for the occasion, but then they didn’t arrive because just before they were coming my way, the baby announced that it wanted to leave the oven. Exciting stuff. (It’s a healthy boy.)
Friend and I rescheduled the shooting of the remaining bun to yesterday.
And yesterday afternoon, the belly entered my reasonably clean and freshly painted house. Really. First the belly entered and somewhere behind that my friend followed. She’s a serial baker. She already has two cute little girls and now she’s carrying two little… boys.

(Do you like the new colour of the wall? It makes a change from white. We love it and so does everyone who’s seen it. Or they just were being polite.)

Yep. I only have beautiful friends. They must pass the gorgeousness test, otherwise they are not allowed into ‘the inner circle’.
And yes, we do also have a black wall. In fact it is a huge blackboard that divides the kitchen from the dining area. On the kitchen side of it we write down recipes and other important stuff. The dining room side we reserve for drawings by visiting children of serial baking friends and the occasional scribble of our own hand.

Crazy friend (she is very crazy in a fun way) tucked the cute sheep in her ‘bellywarmer’. Why not.

Very entertaining…

Somewhere underneath this funky hairdo…

…you’ll find a little pony called Jimmy.

He belongs to our very dear friends and their two little girls who were willing to demonstrate their pony handling and riding skills to us last Sunday. The lady in pink, yes, the one wearing the helmet, was supposed to show us how incredibly well she can ride Jimmy so she got all dressed up for the occasion. But she kindly offered to let her little sister go first. She actually said: “can my little sister go first mommy?”, which I though was very sweet. (If it had been me, my little sister probably wouldn’t have been allowed to even look at MY pony without me screaming and punching my little sister on the nose! But then again I could only dream of having my own pony and I don’t have a little sister. I’m slightly jealous of little people with little ponies.)

And then she showed us how to ride up and down steps…

…and her mom showed that she can ‘run like the wind’ while preventing daughter from bouncing off her little pony. Very entertaining.

Meanwhile, in the sky directly above us…

… an ultralight airplane was doing some stunts.
Also very entertaining. At first we thought something wasn’t quite right when we saw the black smoke coming out, but we heard the pilot shout ‘WHOOHOOOOO’ and it didn’t sound like a terrified scream.

And on Saturday we had a visit from the vet again. This time because Naloma managed to get a very big hole in her bottom lip. How? I don’t know. But it needed stitching. Not so much entertaining in the fun sense, but it certainly kept us busy for a while. Fortunately it wasn’t a hole through her lip, but it certainly was a gaping wound. And the top bit had a couple of smaller wounds and was really swollen. I put clay on it, the whitish stuff, because it disinfects and cools.

See how swollen it was? I took these photos on Sunday. It looks much more normal now. In about a week or two the stitches can come out. It will heal nicely the vet said (while probably mentally working out what kind of new car he’s going to buy).

Who shot the bun in the oven?

 

OK, I admit. It was me. Or actually, I just shot the oven. Not the bun. I don’t have the equipment for bun-shooting.

Let me clear this up for you. You see, I have a couple of friends who are heavily pregnant. One is expecting twins and one is expecting just one baby. The one who is carrying the twins around until they are done and ready to come out of the cosy round oven, already has two little girls. She suggested that it would be nice for the other friend, the one who is carrying her first baby, to have photos of her big round belly to show her offspring where it came from. When the little child is past the cabbage or stork stage, these photos will act as proof.

So I offered to do a photo shoot of the oven with the bun in it.

Last Monday I went over to friend’s beautiful house to try and make some decent photos. Fortunately friend is gorgeous and always looks good on photos, so that helped. We carried all kinds of lamps around for the best light and had great fun.

I’ll show you a couple of shots. There are lots more. What do you think? Beautiful mama to be or not?

 

I was so happy with the way these photos came out that I’ve phoned the other friend (the one expecting the twins) and asked her if she’d like me to take photos of her big belly too. “Oh yes please”, she said, “but my very best friend is also pregnant and I’d like her to be in the photos too. Do you mind?” I don’t know her very best friend, but I didn’t mind, so next week another photo shoot is planned. This time at my house. Oh sweet mother of Elvis! I need to clean my house. Especially the windows. And paint two walls that once were white, but the dogs love sitting against them and now they are white with brown/grey stains up to human knee level. And those are the best walls to use as a background for the photos. I’m going to paint one wall a very different colour. Hopefully it will be the right choice. Exciting stuff. We’ll see.

Evies collection of funny faces

 

I’ve published these photos of Evie, doing her camel-impressions when she was just a couple of months old, before. But I think they are cute and I have some new friends who probably haven’t seen them. And since a lot of you enjoyed Naloma’s funny faces in the previous post, I thought you might enjoy to see these ones of her daughter (again).

 

Hard to believe that the ugly duckling above turned out into this pretty 1 1/2 year old filly.
Well I think she’s pretty anyway. But I’m biased

I’m probably going to bother you with more reruns of funny Evie photos this week, I have lots, unless something happens that is interesting enough to blog about. Who knows?

Boost

 

Leaving Blogworld unannounced for a couple of weeks is really very good for your self-esteem. I can highly recommend it. All your beloved Blogfriends tell you how much they miss you. It’s good to know that you mean something to them. Whatever it is.
(Just between you and me, that’s why I disappear now and again. I need a confidence-boost from time to time. But don’t tell anyone. They might just stop caring.)

(Actually, that’s a lie. What I told you yesterday is the truth. Honest!)

So, what’s been happening while I was neither here nor there. I mean, I was here but not hére. And from my point of view I’m never there. Not even always here. Are you still following? Good for you! I’ve lost the plot totally. Where was I? Oh yes, I wasn’t here, nor there, but here. And what happened here? Not much.

Main event: Evie had a colic. God knows why. She’s alright now, but I can’t for the life of me think of a reason why she suddenly was constipated. We are always careful about what we feed the horses (their intestines are very sensitive to variations in their diet). As soon as I noticed something was wrong I gave her a dose of Colosan (sadly not known in other parts of the world as a medicine for horses with a tummy ache), which usually does the trick within 10 minutes or so but this time it didn’t work. So the vet came and gave her an injection to ease the pain and get her system working again. Vet even tried to do an internal examination, but poor Evie was highly surprised someone tried to push an arm into her… erm… arse. She didn’t agree with such impertinent behaviour and made that very clear to vet and me. She didn’t kick, but jumped around a lot and tried to stand on her hind legs, which you can imagine isn’t funny if you have your arm somewhere up there. (Well, it is funny to watch if you are an innocent bystander perhaps.) So vet abandoned the idea and said: “I’ll just give her the injection then…”, and that worked. Non-horsey-people probably don’t understand why you’re doing a happy dance when you see a pile of your horse’s poo.

We also did some obstacle training when I wasn’t in Blogworld. Horses sometimes consider the most normal things to be horribly scary, so it’s important to show them that not everything is as frightening as it may seem. An umbrella for instance makes Naloma snort like a pig. She does that when she doesn’t trust something. I know. It’s weird. She’s weird. I’ve done ‘umbrella-training’ before and it took Willem about 2 minutes to destroy the umbrella I dropped in the paddock. He isn’t scared of anything. He picked it up, shook it, dropped it and stood on it. Dead umbrella. Naloma however… totally different story. Her first reaction is WHAAAAAAAA SNORT. Her second reaction is SNORT and keeping a safe distance from the weird object. I did some work with her and eventually she dared to touch the umbrella, but she still wasn’t convinced the thing didn’t want to attack her.

So I thought I’d introduce an umbrella to Evie. She had much the same reaction as Willem, but the umbrella survived this time.

Then we introduced a sheet of plastic and tried to make them walk over it.
Willem didn’t care. He didn’t even raise an eyebrow. So no problem there.

Evie thought it was an exciting thing, but she’s very curious so she couldn’t keep her distance for long. She walked over it in no time and when we let her do her own thing….

…she tried to eat it. Not a good idea. We saved the plastic (and Evie) and…

…then we introduced the plastic to Naloma. She snorted a lot…

…but about half a bucket of treats later…

…she accidentally put one foot on it, which she regretted soon afterwards…

Don’t you just love her?

Eventually she walked over the plastic a couple of times, after I took over from hubs, but there is no photographic proof, because I’m silly and rather not have my photo taken. 

So my lovelies… that’s about it for today. I’m off to rake up the leaves. I love Autumn for its light and beautiful colours, but all those dropping leaves… Can do without that!