Cherry Picking

Here's Louie with a haircut, supervising the cherry picking preparation. He's completely shaved except for a mop of hair on his head and a fu manchu beard. Well, technically, a fu manchu is a mustache but I couldn't find out what the beard part is called.

We used to use rickety ladders but now we use the tractor.

We let the kids climb in the loader, then we lift them up and they pick their little hearts out. Rolf is getting in on the action. My husband says we should have named him Visa, because he's EVERYWHERE we want to be.

We have three cherry trees here. This year two were absolutely LOADED and the third had practically nothing on it. Same type, same location. We picked 6 pints our first picking and there will be lots more as they ripen over the next few days... as long as we get to them before the birds and chipmunks!

Kittens at Six Weeks

Meccie (MEK-ee) had kittens about six weeks ago. They're fluffy, cute and BUSY! This morning they were all together in a chair in the pantry. They were being extra cute, but a pantry does not make an attractive background so I've tried to edit out some of the noise in these pics.

We think we might call the black one Rorschach, Rory for short. The gray and dark multi-colored ones are both girls, but they haven't revealed their names to us yet. They are playing coy. That's Meccie with her back to me in the lefthand portion of the photo. She's playing coy, too.

Kittens!

Meccie (pronounced MEK-ee) had kittens yesterday! She was VERY agitated yesterday morning. She attacked the dog, stayed underfoot everywhere we went, and was generally acting very weird.

She sat in my lap or my husband's lap until about 2:00 p.m. Around 11:30 or 12:00 you could see she was having contractions. She panted a lot and her ears got really hot.


Her first kitten, the gray one in the bottom left corner, was born about 2:00 p.m. and the black (and orange and white?) one was born about 4:00 p.m. Here she is cleaning up the black (and orange and white?) one. You'll be able to see them better if you click to view a larger image - but even so it's not the greatest photo. Too much black, too much wiggling, too much busy Meccie to see the kittens very well.

By the time we went to bed she'd only had the two, but we could tell there was at least one more kitten in there.


This morning there were three kittens. The last one born looks like it's solid black, just like Meccie.


Here's the black one, less than 24 hours old.