New Family Member, New Job, and Apples

New Family Member

We have a new addition to the family around my house. Everyone meet Sprinkles. She’s a mini rex mix and about seven weeks old. My son is over the moon ecstatic over having her. He’s grown up with rabbits, seeing as the last two rabbits I had were around before he was born. The elder of the two died about a year ago. So, this is the longest my son’s gone without having one around the house. This is a huge part of why he’s so excited to get Sprinkles. And being honest, I am too. I’ve missed having a furry pet to cuddle. Trying to cuddle several GloFish or a Russian Tortoise doesn’t work well. So, I’ve spent a good chunk of my day today setting up her cage, getting her food, water, toys, and all. Then we got her. My son was so cute. He wanted to carry the carrier out of the store, refused any help getting it to the car, and held the handle all the way home. He handled her so gently, no worries about hurting her. What will be most interesting is how he reacts when it comes time to help clean her litter box and cage. I said he had to help with that if we got a rabbit, and he agreed.

New Job

We have another major shift happening this week. My husband has been laid off since mid-May but starts a new job tomorrow. That means my son has to get up much earlier than he’s had to in quite some time. We’re working on getting his bedtime shifted up some to make up for getting up earlier, but let’s just leave that at it’s a work in progress. Daddy will spend some time on first shift, then move to third shift. The one bonus to the third shift position is that Daddy was on that shift for quite a while before they moved him to second shift. That move happened a few months before they laid him off. So, at least when he goes to third shift, that’ll be more of a return to what we were used to, anyway. Only, we’ll need to make a few modifications to the routines to account for the new schedules and such. I hope things settle down some now. There’s been way too much chaos for almost a year now. I’m ready for some peace.

Apples

We are trying something new this year. I think some of this was born out of my husband being laid off for a bit this spring. Anyway, the new thing we’re trying this year is spraying our apple tree several times throughout the summer to keep the bugs away. We’ve been able to get apples off the tree in previous years, but it can be icky to have to cut bugs out before doing anything with the apples. So, my husband wanted to try the bug spray stuff to see if we can at least cut down the number of bugs. And, wow, this is an excellent year to be experimenting like this. Our apple tree is just thick with apples. If this works, we will probably have apples coming out of our ears. Good thing I have a ton of canning jars and such to make a variety of apple based things.