New Additions to our Family

I just had to include this photo cuz he's so cute!

 We have recently had quite a few new additions to our family. I have never really been a pet person, but for some reason this July I had decided that we should really get the kids a puppy. I really wanted a Maremma like our farm dog, this is not an easy breed to find! When I looked on Kijiji there just happened to be a Maremma Shepard cross posted that afternoon, we went the next day and picked out our adorable little pup that looked more like a bear cub then a puppy at that time. She was so sweet! Normally a Maremma is a pure white dog, but the Shepard cross in her made her a black puppy. The girls wanted to take here home that day but we had to wait a few weeks until she was ready to come with us. In the middle of August we brought our beautiful little girl home. We also added three new kittens to the place, I am definitely not a cat person, but, we have a mouse problem and so they have become a necessary evil around here. Hopefully these ones will last a little longer having the dog around and won't make any trips to school in the undercarriage of our van! Chickens have been our final addition and we have enjoyed having farm fresh eggs at our house on a regular basis, we go through a lot of eggs!

 This was a few days after we got home from camping, hence the crazy Barbie and the rockers hair from the 80's. The girls had so much fun playing with the Munroe's dog as well as with some other campground dogs that we decided to start the puppy search as soon as we got home. We stumbled upon their puppies for sale post and we were sold!

 This is what she looked like when we first went to visit her, doesn't she look like a little bear cub! She was the second largest puppy of the bunch, only a little boy pup was slightly bigger.

This is her with her litter mates. They were sold so fast! The owners had people from Princeton and Vancouver coming up to get puppies as soon as they posted on Kijiji!

 Here she is the day we brought her home, isn't she adorable! Her name is Aurora. Emmersen wanted to name her Sleeping Beauty and Cheyanne said it would be better to call her by sleeping Beauty's actual name, and so she became Aurora.

 Mason and Bella are not really her biggest fan, she is a little to hyper for them and so she jumps all over them and it scares them. Cheyanne is doing wonderful with her though.

 We took her for a car ride to Salmon Arm and she did great, no puking, peeing or pooing in the car! We had intended to take the kids to Fletcher park and then realized that no dogs were allowed there so we took her and the kids for a walk around McGuire lake and then through the McDonald's drive through (Aurora didn't get anything though, just us and the kids,lol)

 These are the baby robins that lived in outside our back door this summer. Every year the robin comes and makes her nest in there and then has her babies, they are so cute! The swallows also had babies at our back yard door this year, they are far less welcome though, they make a huge mess all over everything! Next year the swallows will not be permitted to build, we're putting up a robins only sign, haha.

These are the kittens. They have the most wonderful names: Prince John, Shrek, and Spiderman. For outdoor barn cats they are doing exceptionally well with the kids. They get packed around and played with a lot, and so far only a few minor scratches have occurred.

 Emmersen seems to think of the kittens as real live Barbies or something. When she is in the little pen playing with them she is always acting out signs and moving them around like they are dolls. I am always having to remind her to be more careful or that they aren't dolls and that you can't flip them around and make them jump all over  the place. 

And the Chickens. This is my favourite photo of the bunch! I love how you can see everyone's expression when it comes to the broken egg. Can you guess who dropped it? LOL, it was Bella. 

 Cheyanne playing with the broken egg.

 Cheyanne and the chickens, she is the one somewhat responsible for collecting eggs and feeding the veggie scraps to the birds, although daddy seems to be doing it a lot instead. Her plan is to use the extra eggs to sell and buy Christmas gifts for kids in children's hospital. I don't think she is going to have very many to sell though because we go through so many eggs in a week. It takes at least a dozen eggs every time we have eggs for breakfast, which has become a more frequent occurrence now that Michael is working earlier in the mornings.