I Got A Sonogram.....

Here are some of the pictures.

The cute little baby toes. The sonogram man was actually able to count all the toes. It was so amazing! (Yes, the baby has five on each feet.)

The cute little baby profile.

I was proudly showing the pictures off to Daniel and he patiently said, "Hmmm, that's, um, great, Mama." He obviously wasn't reveling in the moment.

Well, I have purposely left out the sex of the baby in hopes that we can up our traffic for a few days by teasing our readers with that famous tagline...

TUNE IN NEXT WEEK!!! OR MAYBE SOONER!!!

Warning -- Disgusting Post!!

Hello, y'all! Today, I thought I'd share with my (3) readers another exciting adventure with the Millers.

We have chickens...lots of chickens. Chickens attract wildlife...lots of wildlife.

We like our chickens and feel a deep burden to protect them from the evil world that lurks beyond the safe haven of their chicken yard.

We have wildlife...lots of wildlife. Wildlife with long rat-like noses, almost-human feet and sickeningly-scaly prehensile tails. Have I described well enough the nasty, grotesque creature that is the object of my disgust?

Yes, it is the Opossum, or 'possum if you're dialectically inclined. (I am.)

I hate possums. They disgust me, if you hadn't noticed from earlier in the post. The funny(?) thing about this possum aversion is that my nickname as a child, which I remember with great fondness, was of all things...possum. Patty Possum to be exact.

Anyway, back to the "Great Adventure". Benny and Andrew went down to milk the cow this morning and Andrew came running back yelling at the top of his lungs, "Matthew, there's a possum in the feed bin." Matthew, with his hands ever itching for the feel of cold, hard, steel, grabbed a gun and ran down to "remove the wildlife from the premises".

(If he was reading this, Matthew would be loudly proclaiming that it wasn't just A gun, it was a 30 something, double aught, 22 gauge so-and-so. But I digress.)

Well, the wildlife was removed, and Benny and Andrew proudly showed me their bounty. Blech. Andrew actually had the audacity to ask if he could eat the revolting creature.

Anyway, we went back to normal life, finished the rest of the morning chores (don't I sound like Ma Ingalls!) and started school. Andrew and Joey then went to check one of Andrew's traps, and this time Joey came running back with the very urgent message that...you guessed it, Andrew caught yet another possum in his trap. (It must be an unspoken rule that the younger child is required to do all the message running.)

Matthew again grabbed a some-sort-or-other gun and became a bonifide Wildlife Removal Specialist. Of course, all the children, including my sweet Rachel, had to go watch the "removal". Again, the proud hunters brought back their disgusting quarry, but this time with a bonus??!!

See below to find out what the "bonus" was.

Did you guess "the rat-like, hairless, squirming, undeveloped possum young"??

If you did , you're a winner! The boys discovered that their were babies living in the possum's pouch. Andrew and Benny actually had the audacity to ask if they could "keep them". When I asked them what they would feed them, they said, "their mother's milk". Sadly, I had to inform them the the mother wasn't going to keep producing milk because THE MOTHER WAS DEAD.

You know, I normally have a great deal of compassion for baby animals. But I can truthfully say that I felt NO compassion, and maybe even a bit of glee, when I saw those pitiful, pink, wriggling babies and realized they weren't long for this world. I guess that makes me a possum Sadist.

So, here are a few slightly bloody pictures of the boys with their possums and Matthew with his dearly beloved...I mean his "Wildlife Removal Tool".

Well, if this post didn't disgust you, then you've got a stronger stomach than me! I'd better go now, I've got two possums waiting for a skinnin and a cookin! Ha ha!

(That's really not very funny, and I think typing that made my morning sickness recur.)

Mama

Please Vote For Us!

We've decided to run for the "Most Boring Blog On The Web", and we desperately need your vote! We have no cute wallpaper, no cute baby-ticker, no interesting, pithy sayings on the sidebar (if that is even the correct term), no blog roll, no nuthin. We are boring, boring borrrrrrring.

I absolutely love to decorate houses, but I won't even commit to decorating my house unless I'm ready to jump in with both feet and get it done. I guess I'm the same with the blog. It may be a very bad case of perfectionism creeping into my blog-world. I refused to decorate the house in Alturas for 2 years because I wasn't sure how long we were going to live there. You'd think the two-year mark would have been a hint that it was time to hang a few pictures! Anyway, I do plan on having the blog for a good while, but I still sometimes think of it as R.G.'s leftover blog that I am just using, thus I haven't quite committed to make it all mine.

I think I shall attempt to take complete ownership of said blog and begin to decorate it. Maybe a sidebar here, a blogroll there. I don't know, I may even hang a complicated wallpaper that makes the text somewhat difficult to read (that's a hint to some of the other blog decorators out there!). I might even start posting photos again!

Anyway, thanks to all our (3) readers for still taking the time to read the blog, even when it is visually unpalatable!

Katie

Life is Wonderful!

Life is wonderful on a regular basis here, but it got a little bit more wonderful several weeks ago when we found out that we are expecting another baby!

My due date is sometime in early August, and I'm planning on seeing the midwife this coming week.

I have had some not-so-fun morning sickness. To be more accurate, I've had quite a bit of miserable all-day sickness, but it's slowly getting better, and I'm thankful for the chance to have morning sickness again!

Well, that's about all I can think of to say about the situation without waxing poetic and having lullaby music playing in the background. Not that I don't like waxing poetic with lullaby music playing in the background, but I'm afraid I'm just not mentally up to the challenge and I would end up writing some twaddle that would bring me much literary humiliation in the future.

Anyway, we are rejoicing in our soon-to-be 9th child!

English as a Something Language

Well, we're still without a camera, but I thought I'd at least attempt to keep our (3) loyal followers up-to-date with all of our exotic, excruciatingly interesting, amazingly exciting adventures!

I must be in an adjectivial mode. BTW: I think I just made that word up, but that's just the type of crazy, seat-of-the-pants excitement you get around here!!!!!!

Enough, enough of the English grammar.

You know that no one EVER uses English grammar after they're out of school... or so goes the rumor among English grammar-burdened farmboys in north-central Arkansas.
I envision those poor, weary farmboys hunched over with stacks of dependent clauses piled on their backs, their knees creaking under the weight of those lazy, useless clauses that can't take care of themselves. Nonetheless, the Arkansas farmboys try so desperately to teach them how to stand alone like the well-behaved, independent clauses grazing peacefully in the pasture.
Being a farmboy or -- the macho, older brother term -- ranch hand is taxing enough without the never-ending burden of your mother shoveling heaping loads of adverbs, adjectives and conjunctions into your wheelbarrow, while those pesky active and passive voices are constantly yelling at you. No wonder the desire for English grammar falls so quickly to the manure pile. It's not really necessary. It's far more effective to just grunt and point, right!

(Did anyone catch my split infinitive? I bet those grammar-hating farmboys didn't!)

By and large, my children speak the southern version of English language properly, probably from hearing it spoken properly by most of their relatives. Interestingly enough, they have somehow developed a Pavlovian flinch associated with them daring to use the word "ain't". I can't figure where that came from.

I guess by now y'all might have picked up the idea that they aren't very fond of studying grammar, English or otherwise. I, on the other hand, adore it. I come by it honestly, from my dear Mother, the queen of English Grammar. She and I -- and probably both of my sisters -- thoroughly enjoyed James Kilpatrick's newspaper column entitled "The Writer's Art". The column took sloppy writers to task in an extremely humorous way, but alas, only those who paid attention to their grammar lessons were able to delight in Mr. Kilpatrick's sly, grammatical wit.

(If you didn't pay attention when learning punctuation, you didn't remember that you need to put quotation marks around the title of a newspaper article, didya?)

The English language is a wonderful creation. I'm not so naive to think that everyone is going to love English grammar or that they'll even need to use it as an integral part of their lives. However, if you can't understand rudimentary sentence structure, you're going to have a really hard time deciphering complicated sentence structure in the Word of God. If there was ever a reason to take grammar seriously, this would be it. My grammatically proper mother taught me this eye-opening truth, and I'm so thankful I caught hold of it. God does all things well, even the things we might not like or do well, and He has a reason for everything he created... mosquitos, cockroaches, rats, English grammar, etc.

Those Arkansas farmboys are still plowing through their seemingly endless rows of prepositional phrases needing to be set off with parentheses and making sure the subjects and verbs are in agreement, all the while carrying those lazy dependent clauses around.

Now if we could just keep those active and passive voices quiet!

Katie the English Grammar Lady

Grammar Discaimer: I know for a fact that there are sentences ending with prepositions, possibly dangling participles and probably many more grammatical no-no's in this post. However, I chose to write this so it would be pleasantly readable to all who managed to make it to the ever-lovin' end. Please forgive me, and please don't tell Mr. Kilpatrick!

Our Merciful God

To those of you who hadn't heard, we were in a pretty serious car accident. The amazing thing is that none of us - Benny, Andrew, Joey and I - were seriously hurt. We know that it was truly the hand of our very merciful God that kept us safe that drizzly morning. The Excursion was totalled, but it was a small price to pay for the lives and health of my boys and me.

Well, alot of people have asked me to post pictures of our totalled Excursion. So, I am.

Please enjoy this interactive post entitled: "What It's Like To Be In A Car Crash"

This lovely view is from the driver's seat. Imagine your vehicle sliding backwards across both lanes, but remember that you aren't actually controlling the vehicle, because it's doing whatever it full well pleases!! I honestly felt like I was on a really bad amusement park ride.

Put your imagination glasses back on, kids, and flip this image upside-down so you can exerience climbing out of a vehicle through the rear window while the vehicle is upside down. Better yet, just flip your monitor over! I have no idea why I chose to go all the way to the rear window, when my window was already conveniently busted out for me. My much more rational sons calmly exited through their conveniently-busted-out window!

Here she lies, may she rest in peace.

Just to beat the issue completely to death, here's one more view.

BTW: We are thoroughly impressed with the safety and reliability of the FORD EXCURSION. So, just in case there are any FORD executives reading this post who need a big, big family to test drive a big reliable vehicle for them, they'll know that we think FORD EXCURSIONS are the best vehicle ever.

(This is eerily reminiscent of my high school cheerleading memories!)

Enough of my foolishness. We are truly thankful to the Lord for his miraculous provision and can't say that enough.

THANK YOU, LORD!!!

We're Alive!

To all (3) of our adoring fans...yes, we are alive! Alive and quite well, actually. I just haven't taken the time to download the oh-so-blurry pictures from my phone to my computer. Yup, I've resorted to taking pictures with my cheesy phone, thus the tres fromage picture quality you are now beholding.

Note to all French speakers: I'm quite sure that tres fromage is not an accurate translation for very cheesy, but it's late, and I'm too lazy to pull up an actual translator online, so it'll have to do. To use a very bad pun...pardon my French.

Well, we got another order of...can you guess....I'm sure it will be a huge surprise...could it be....

CHICKS!!!!

I'm only putting the text in bold and adding exclamation points for my sweet husband's sake. He's ALWAYS excited to get chicks. I was rather disconsolate at the idea of raising out yet another batch of broilers* when Robert so thoughtfully tried to cheer me up with the pronouncement that I really would be happy about this when the freezer was full of chicken. I responded rather sulkily that it was 10 long weeks until that happened. Nonetheless, we are actively taking care of our newest little brood and all is going quite well, despite my earlier whinyness.

*Broilers are chickens grown for meat-as opposed to layers grown for eggs. We purchase Cornish-Rock crosses that grow astonishingly quickly, have fewer feathers for easier plucking, and are dumb as rocks. Have you ever seen the movie Chicken Run? These chickens are hypnotically drawn to feed just like the birds in the movie. Some people have lovingly nicknamed them Frankenstein birds... I guess you just have to see them waddle, I mean walk, to get the comparison.

The cutest little chicken handler in all of Arkansas! We can only hope and pray that the little chickie survived.

Oh no! Sam has intense competition for cutest chicken handler! It's hard to believe that cute little chick will soon be one of the Frankenstein birds...it looks so normal.


We surely won't insult Andrew with the dreaded "c" word used above. I'm just happy I got him smiling this time instead of the my-puppy-just-got-ran-over look he had on his face last time!



If you feel the need to compare the two pictures, click here:http://crackercountry.blogspot.com/2009/07/baby-chicksrandom-pics.html


Benny has decided that at the ripe old age of 11, he needs to smile very discreetly.

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O.K., on to the next project. As part of our desire to be self sufficient, Robert wants us to start learning to cook on an open fire. He was a very good example and made the first meal for us. We enjoyed delicious chili without using electricity or propane, and the weather was perfect for an outdoor meal cooked over the fire. I made beef stew the next night, and it turned out very well. The biscuits didn't. I'm going to have to work on figuring out how hot a pan actually is before I try biscuits over the fire again! Well, a few days later, I woke up to my precious son, Daniel, cooking breakfast over the fire for his little brothers and sister.










Yummy eggs and grits.

He even had them set the table and everything! I was very impressed, and very appreciative.

Well, I wish I had more pictures to share, but I will be working on that!

Hope y'all enjoyed the post!

Mama