A Surprise visitor and a Beautiful Day of Sunshine

Why do most of my mornings start out with one kid or the other running in the house screaming?  This time, I was relaxing in the bathtub yesterday when Reece barges in nearly hyperventilating.  He was so shaken, the only words he managed to get out were "huge", "fuzzy", "grey", and "in the nest box".  We raced outside after I put on my bathrobe and grabbed a baseball bat on the way out.

He showed me which nest box it was in, and I cautiously opened it, not really knowing what to expect.  I mean, what could be huge, grey, fuzzy and in the nest box?

This is what we saw:

 Wait a minute!  What are you doing in the nest box???!!!  And how'd you get in there????!!!

He didn't really like getting poked with the baseball bat.  Can you see the tiny, sharp razor like teeth?

I finally poked him enough with the bat to make him want to leave the box.

He then got on top of the nest boxes and just sat there.  I don't know if he was terrified or just stubborn.  We tried everything, from poking him some more to throwing balls at him.

I kept missing him, so my son says, "Move mom, I'M the baseball player."  We even rolled a basketball at him.  That just made him climb up the wall.

That's when we saw that he had a hurt foot.  I wondered if he tussled with my chickens?

He finally got down, but still wouldn't leave the coop.  I then had to call out the "big dogs", literally.  I really wish I could have taken pictures of what happened next, but everyone was too busy screaming.  I let our big dog Buddy into the coop to try and chase it out.  It worked.  Buddy even proudly had his jaws clamped around it for a moment until one kid started screaming, "NO BUDDY!!!".  He let go, thinking he'd done something wrong, and then our little dog Otto went over for a sniff.  That really got the kids to screaming.  I guess they thought the little guy was going to get eaten by the opossum or something.

After all the commotion, we successfully got the opossum out of the coop.  He ran straight under it, and that's where he stayed all day.  You can't ask for a more exciting day on the farm!

 
I've got to write about today also!  It was the most beautiful day we've had since moving out here.  Warm sunshine and a cool breeze, just perfect.  We stayed outside all day.  We even tried to go fishing.

The kids worked really hard.  They went all around the property finding all kinds of scrap metal to recycle.

 

My girl, always having to look cute, even when working.

Look at that pile of junk.  Daddy is not going to like where they put it!

This was right after she proudly said, "Look Mom!  I'm really dirty!"

I got to play with my girls.

We even ate lunch outside.  The cats wouldn't stop jumping on the table trying to steal our food, so we had to let the patrol dogs out.  The cats left us alone.

And that was our beautiful Springlike day on the farm.  It doesn't get much better than that, well the only thing that would have made it better is if Daddy was home too!