Tips and Advice on all things Homestead related

There is a type of bird in Brazil that is very pretty, and sings beautifully. They are called Palm Tanagers . One day my brother, who was probably 9 or so, was playing with his friends at one of the mission base houses. There was a palm tanager nest in the rafters of their porch. One little baby bird got scared and fell out of the nest. For some reason they didn't, or maybe couldn't, put it back in the nest and my brother John brought the baby home to me, since everyone at that time knew me as the animal person who would take in anything and care for it. We weren't quite sure what a baby palm tanager would eat but we figured that fruit was probably a good option so I began to feed the baby chunks of papaya and banana and other fruits.He loved the fruit. He would sit there doing a happy dance with his mouth open as I shoved small chunks of fruit down his throat. We named him Twitter Pitter.  Twitter Pitter grew his feathers and bonded greatly to me. He could be anywhere in...

When this story happened, I was a teenager and well known on the mission base as being the crazy animal lover kid. Actually, when we left the mission base and moved into the city, our old house became known as the Farm House, which really tickled my funny bone. My parents and almost all the other families on the mission base were full time missionaries. However, occasionally, other people would come on short term mission trips. Some would stay a year, some only a few weeks. We kids, always looked forward each summer to seeing if any new people would arrive and what they would be like. Some of them we really liked, like the short termer who would always fix my toy horse's broken legs, or the other one who would cook up some tasty homemade tortillas for the gang of kids. One summer, an older lady arrived and she went to one of the Indian villages to spend a few weeks. We kids never really got to meet her because she didn't spend much time on the base. When she arrived back to t...

Foxy was my beloved second horse, a chestnut fireball, full of energy, challenging, fun and I loved her maybe more than any other horse I've ever had. She is probably the horse who made me the rider I am today and taught me so much about communication between horse and rider. We had many adventures together. This particular one happened after probably a year or two of owning her when I was around 17 or 18. Every year in our town, before the annual state fair,  there would be a parade down main street. They would usually always start by the train station by the river. Our town was a river town, right on the banks of one of the larger tributaries of the Amazon river. It was called Rio Madeira, or Wood River (translated). Years before I was born they harvested rubber out of the jungles and there was a train that carried the rubber to wherever they took it. This was long before my time though and all that remained was a train station museum and some old tracks and a few really old tr...

Missionary kids are a very unique type of people. There are actually books and studies out about them, although I haven't read too many. Actually any kid who grows up in a country that isn't their parents' native country is called a third culture kid. Missionary kids understand each other. They have a special bond that only they have. We didn't fit in except amongst ourselves. We weren't Brazilian and we weren't American. We didn't have the new clothes, the boyfriends, the shopping malls, the cliques, the video games, the tv and the school clubs. We had experiences that nobody else had. We had depth of knowledge, character and maturity. We knew several languages from a young age. We had seen things and experienced things that most people never would. It was very hard as a kid trying to fit in and find my identity, purpose and destiny. (I finally did, I think)  Now I appreciate that childhood and everything that I experienced. Then, not quite so much. But t...

I was around 14 at the time this story takes place. I had my first horse, Nathaniel, at the time. Every day I would ride him. We went everywhere together. Sometimes I'd pretend I was Alex Ramsey from the Black Stallion and he was my firey Arabian stallion galloping along the beach. Sometimes I'd just sit on his back while he was grazing and read whatever book I currently was on, always a horse book. Usually we would discover trails in the jungle that nobody else knew of or I'd practice my equitation and dream of riding in the Olympics some day. He was a wonderful first horse and patient with all of my learning about horses. Our house was being remodeled and we were living in what the mission base referred to as the Children's Home.  It was called that because sometimes during the school year a missionary family would live there and take care of all the missionary kids so that the parents could spent time in the Indian villages. My brothers and I stayed there in that p...

Ok, maybe not quite an Indian but almost! But let me start from the beginning. My parents were missionaries to Brazil. They went there in 1974 (I think) and their objective was to work with native Brazilian Indian groups to translate the Bible into those languages. After working for several years with several hostile Indian groups (a story for another day), they were finally assigned to work with a very small group called the Banawa and my dad had gone on a few trips into the village without the rest of us to start making contact with the people. This Indian group was very excited to have us come live with them and they eagerly started building us a house and we started preparing for a long boat trip and a long stay with them. Now you have to put out of your mind any sort of modern luxury or convenience and think of America in the 1800's or something like that. There were no toilets, no stores, no doctors, no running water, nothing anyone of us today is used to. But my parents lo...

Crime was very prominent in our town, being the gold rush city that it was. Houses were close together. As in, close enough that you could hear your neighbor's argument, or see in their kitchen window to see what they were making for lunch and you'd better have curtains on your bedroom window. Everyone had tall brick walls (except our neighbors had a short wall) and most walls had shards of glass sticking out of the top of the wall to help prevent thieves. And everyone had a big, scary dog or two in their back yard. My choice in dog, since I was the only dog person in the family, was a Great Dane. I got my first one for a Christmas present when I was 14 years old, shortly after I got my first horse. Her name was Mandy. I guess my family thought that with all my daily rides on the horse, I needed some extra protection. And she was a very loyal protector, defending me from anything (or anyone) she thought was a threat. Actually, she was quite aggressive and my later Danes never...

I married a Brazilian rodeo cowboy. He was a bull rider.  Well, he tried to be at least. He wasn't very good at staying on the bulls for the whole 8 seconds. He was also a wheeler dealer and like to do trading and all sorts of deals. We won't go into some of the really frustrating deals he did, but one of them involved acquiring a herd of bucking bulls. He figured that if he couldn't be a champion bull rider like he dreamed, then he could be a stock contractor and put on rodeos. I liked that idea much better. However, he ended up going to ranches and bringing guys to try out the young bulls and see if they'd like to buck. They always made a day of it which included barbeque and plenty of beer. I guess they figured that if they drank enough it would make getting bucked off an unknown crazy bull a bit better. I definitely didn't approve of that part of it, but to be a supportive wife, I usually tagged along and gave my opinions on the bulls. The bulls that didn't ...

As a white girl in another country you get to experience lots of different sides of humanity. One of these was a pretty obvious nickname I happened to acquire in my dealings with the horse people of my town. By the time this story happened, I was already a young adult and getting my name out there as the knowledgeable horse person in town. Our town was very large with around 400 thousand people in it by this time. When I was a child it was a very small town of only around 40 thousand, so I've been told. They discovered gold in the river  beside the town and overnight it became a gold rush city, full of crime, greed, lust and all the sins of the flesh. We were quite protected in our mission base and worked mostly deep in the jungles with the native Indians. By the time teenage years arrived for me, my parents missionary work had led them to become more involved with the Brazilians themselves and we moved to town and got a ranch. But that's another story for another day. Ho...

I met my best friend when we were 6 years old and my mom told me there was a new missionary family who had moved onto the mission base with a girl my age and I should go meet her. I was shy but curious about a new potential friend so I went over there. Her mom had to wake her from a nap, but when she came out and we sat on the steps and have been best friends ever since. We both loved horses and every day was spent imagining up adventures with our toy horses and dreaming of real horses. One day when we were around 11 or so her dad decided to give her a donkey. We both were thrilled about having something almost like a horse. She named her Spunky and the little donkey definitely fit her name. We didn't have a saddle or bridle but I think we did have a halter and we would take turns riding Spunky. We had a little stick and we would tap the side of her neck to get her to turn one direction or the other. The halter worked only to stop. We decided that it would be nice to have some sti...

I grew up in a family who lived and breathed adventure. I mean, who packs up their life and travels to a foreign country without knowing the language and goes to live with a Brazilian family who also doesn't speak English? And then go to the middle of the deep Amazon jungle and try to make contact with hostile native Indians?  You have to have ADVENTURE as your middle name to do that, maybe even as your first name! Growing up like that me and my brothers were always into crazy things and doing things that most people never would attempt. More of those stories later though. This story is about one of our crazy, fun adventures we did for fun, not for life. My dad decided that it would be a good bonding thing to do a family fun adventure every year. Each year the adventure varied and was different but the goal was to create a memory and bond as a family. I'd say it definitely worked. This particular year we decided that we'd like to kayak down this river called Rio das Garca...

I was the typical horse crazy teenage girl, madly in love with everything horsey. After the passing of my first horse and spending a year on furlough in the USA, we were back in Brazil and I had money saved up again to buy another horse, my second horse. There was a place in town that was similar to what a fairgrounds would be here but they also boarded horses there and had a bar where all the local rich land and cattle owners would congregate. I enjoyed going there to walk through the barns and dream of having another horse. In that time I met a guy who spoke English and he was quite excited to be able to practice his English on me and he also had some horses and did some horse trading. He found out I was wanting to get another horse and he just so happened to have a feisty chestnut mare that might fit me perfectly. We drove over to his land and I tried the horse out, Her name was Foxy. I was in love at first ride and ended up buying her on the spot After the typical back and forth ho...

I have never participated in a blogging challenge but one of the Facebook groups I'm in put one up and I decided to try it out and see if even with my busy farm schedule I could maybe succeed in at least posting more that one or two a year! So this blog is the beginning of that challenge. As I have been thinking about the challenge many ideas have been coming to mind on how to actually succeed. (And if anyone has suggestions please comment and let me know) As you might know if you have read any of my previous posts, I grew up in the Amazon jungle. From a very young age I was an avid reader, mostly of horse books, but as I grew older my interest in other books grew also and although my busy farm life keeps me from reading as much as I'd like, I still manage to squeeze in a book every so often. One of my most treasured memories of life in the Amazon was when I was probably in 5th or 6th grade and we had a missionary teacher come and this teacher had us read a book and then figu...