It's Starting to Look Like.....

.....Christmas around The Acre. We've been pulling out the stops this week. Baking, wrapping, erecting trees (Giggity) and attending parades.
We start this weeks update with a good deed we did towards the end of the week. We have a neighbor who is almost 90 years old, and still uses wood to heat his home. He got a delivery of wood over the summer, but has had some medical issues that's kept him from being able to work his wood splitter. We decided since it was unseasonably warm this weekend that we would split his wood pile for him, and we did.
When he happened by he thanked us and we started shooting the poop like old people do. He told us a story about his first day of school when he was a chirrun. He said he was being mean and was trying to distract the teacher by making noise. The teacher did not pay any attention to him the first time he tried, so he tried again. He says the second go around he got the teachers attention, and she walked over and "knocked the fire out of him" causing a bit of blood and the force of her hitting him broke the desk he was sitting in.
He said the teacher felt bad because she thought she may have went too far by bringing blood, but he said he learned his lesson about being a disturbance in class and never repeated it. To end the story, he said the teacher had the older boys (the ones who brought their pocket knives to class) go outside and whittle him a toy to play with, and they whittled him a wooden gun.
Those boys went on to be the greatest generation, serving during WWII and Korea. They brought knives to school, whittled wooden guns and took personal responsibility for doing wrong.
We thought it was funny how today first graders can't even eat a Pop Tart into the shape of a gun without the FBI getting involved. No one is responsible and everyone is a victim of something. Funny how times change.
Starting off the picture part of our update this week, we have last weekend's parade. Jake represented Floyd Station 3.

Cupcake's favorite float, the Grinch in jail

Then we got the tree up and the presents under it.

And while Cupcake is wrapping presents, Lawman is always baking something. New this week was caramel pecan cookies. They rock.

And we baked the required by law sausage balls (crazy granny, eat your heart out)

The ever present during the holiday chocolate cake.

New this year, eggnog pie. It's made just like buttermilk pie, only with eggnog. If you like eggnog, you're gonna love this pie.

We had some turkey leftovers, so Lawman shredded up half of it to make turkey and dumplings one night for dinner.

There was predator drama this week. We suspect a hawk grabbed one of our girls, we've had no action on the trap line save a couple of opossums and the stray raccoon, and nothing we know carries a bird into a tree to eat it, so...

Hawks are protected, and with Lawman being a lawman and all, we're going to have to get creative on keeping birds of prey away.
We cleaned the coop deville, as we do the first of every month.

And a funny ha-ha that happened while we were busy doing weekend things, Jake went deer hunting. While he was out in the woods, we had three deer standing in the front yard.

We end the update with the good deed pictures.

A little left over from our last weekend start

Who doesn't enjoy a nice four way?

Saturday's work

Finished up on Sunday

In between us splitting the wood, the neighbor came by and we loaded up his truck for him a couple of times.
We ended the week with wings. And ibuprofen.
K&K