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Goodbye Kansas!

The last day in Kansas…

The day started out in the fields with flocks of snow geese flying over. (You may have to click on the picture to make it bigger but you should be able to see them in the upper right corner.)  They were so low and brilliant as the bright sun reflected off them I had to stay and marvel awhile as Tyler walked off, unimpressed for too long by something un-shoot-able. Moments later he spooked “one of the biggest eight-pointers he’s ever seen in his life” and a doe out of the treeline and became suitable impressed by non-shoot-able wildlife.  Not too long after that Tyler had found a pheasant in a brush pile, and a covey of quail.  My Mom and I saw a lot of quail, got a lot of the “flutters” and left Kansas without getting one of our own, but we did see a barn owl that morning and that’s a trade I’m willing to make!

That was just the first hunt of the day. As Tyler said,”You just never know what you are going to find when you get out of the truck.”

Mom very nicely offered to pack up back at the campsite while we kept hunting and when we dropped her off we finally saw the prairie dogs of Prairie Dog State Park. I will admit, it’s entirely possible that I find prairie dogs far more amusing than I should. Remember the flock of blackbirds? They were a bad time waster, if I had prairie dogs out my window I’d be useless!

Tyler pulled me away from the prairie dogs back to the birds where we not so very nicely repaid my Mom’s kindness by shooting all the birds while she was gone.

Admittedly all the birds is an overstatement. There was a covey of quail that confused us, gave us the flutters, and made me drop the apple I was eating. I still didn’t managed to hit one. Tyler did, but he’s sort of disgusting like that.

I’m OK with him being a disgustingly good hunter though because I got one more pheasant the last day. Not just any pheasant,  it was a bird Tyler shot at first and missed! HA!

Mom joined back up with us in time to see me fall in two more gigantic holes, but missed all the good shooting.

Aside from getting a pheasant that Tyler didn’t, my other highlight of the day was when Buzz and I were off on our own hunting. We found a strip of grass between a bit of woods and a lake.  As we walked into it, about three million ducks and geese came off the water, three deer ran out of the woods and Buzz pointed a hen pheasant in the grass. (Ducks above Buzz on the left)

You truly just never know what you’re going to find when you get out of the truck!

We ended the day in a field recommended by the guide we met (looks like his website is still in the works, I’ll link to it when it’s up and running), and it was a good one!  Unfortunately our overtired dogs were wild and crazy as they ran nose into the wind and managed to bump most of the 100 or so pheasants that were in the field out of range or run them out the backside of the field! It didn’t put any more birds in our game vest but it sure was a fun field to end the trip on!

I’m going to continue to attempt to block the 13 1/2 hour all night drive back home, complete with getting pulled over by the cops from my memory, and then I’ll be ready to start planning the next trip!

The Dogs

We’ve got five dogs with us here in Kansas, four Brittney Spaniels and an English Setter. The dogs are what make the trip worthwhile so I thought they deserved a little limelight tonight, so here they are…

First we have Tyler’s dog Turkey:

Today Turk tried to make my legs as tired as his. He’d look a little “birdy,” trot off with his nose to the ground, then stop and look back at me as if to say, “Come on!”  Early this afternoon I followed along at a fast walk for ten minutes before he put up a hen pheasant. So of course later in the day I HAD to follow him just in case. Except this time he was just headed to a corn field for an easy run back to the truck. I think he did it on purpose, he’s that kind of a dog.

Then there are my parents dogs:

Rosie is the oldest of the dogs, but can still steadily trot along all day. She was the star dog who found my pheasant at the end of the day today, Rosie got extra treats from me tonight!

We have Birkie, whose escapades today involved jumping off the embankment next to the road into Tyler’s arms, and causing a  traffic jam on a log bridge on our way out the fields tonight. After being stuck on a wet slippery log for a very long time I managed to get her to turn and we both made it dry to the other side, but she had me worried for a while!

The English Setter is Misty, she spends the first few minuets of every hunt looking for my Dad, her main hunting partner, when she resigns herself to the fact that she’s stuck with us she’s wonderful to watch in action as she sneaks up to birds. Too busy hunting to be caught in a picture this is the best we’ve got of her this trip. Misty is the white dog starting at Tyler willing him to get up and keep hunting.

And then there is Buzz.

Buzz (on right) and Birkie sharing a drink.

The youngest of the dogs Buzz is just over a year old and is most commonly referred to as a “doofus”. Also known as a “block head” and on one memorable moment “Turk’s pale shadow that smells like shit.” He is overly fond of rolling in stinky stuff, requires a close eye in the field, and drinks more water then the rest of us combined. Despite all of that today Buzz was my lucky dog.

Yesterday morning Tyler shot a pheasant and carried it around with him the rest of the day. He called it his lucky pheasant and we figured it might have been true because Mom and I shot nothing while Tyler continued to fill his game vest. This morning I started out hunting with Buzz.  One of the first things he did was run down a wounded pheasant and retrieve it, so I stuck it in my vest and called it my lucky pheasant.  Buzz and I saw a quite few more birds on that hike, though none shootable. Then Buzz spent the middle of the day resting while my lucky pheasant and I covered a lot of ground seeing almost nothing! It wasn’t till the last hunt of the day that Buzz and I went out together again and the first thing we did was put up a covey of quail.

Just so you know quail make me “get the flutters,” as Tyler would say, and I haven’t been able to hit one yet.  Just imagine walking up on a stock still dog thinking you are about to flush a large pheasant out of a clump of tall grass, when all the short grass around you erupts with little birds! The quail take off low to the ground like bats out of you know where as you try to get over the shock of it all and pick one bird of the dozen or so to try to shoot. Unsurprisingly I’ve taken a lot of long, poor, unproductive shots at the “little bastards” as Tyler has affectionately taken to calling them.

After the covey went up and the “flutters” were got by both Tyler and I the quail sailed away I realized something: It must have been Buzz who was the lucky dog and my lucky pheasant had just been dead weight (literally) that I’d been dragging around all day. With an optimistic outlook I crossed the crazy log that Birkie later trapped me on, yelled at Buzz as he rolled in cow manure and finally found more pheasants!  Tonight was the first time I had a shot at a pheasant all trip. Thankfully my Mom and Tyler with their years of experience and faster reflexes were nice enough not to shoot it before I did, but they were ready to be back up if needed. They weren’t!

Tomorrow is our last day, and Buzz is hunting with me!

Kansas Holes

Tonight as we discussed our favorite moments of the day we realized that many of them had something in common.

Watching people fall into holes.

Unfortunatly it wasn’t watching “people” fall it was watching me fall.

Normally when you are hiking if one foot disappears up to the knee in a hole you lunge your second foot forward to catch yourself, stumble a bit and move on.

Here in Kansas land of gigantic holes completely covered with prairie grasses that’s not the case.

Here once you lose one foot there is a very high chance that when you try and save yourself you will instead end up with both feet in a huge hole. Then comes the teetering, and the tottering, the attempts to save yourself, save your gun, and the praying that no birds go up while you are so compromised. Sadly no matter what you do, you still end up on the ground.

I was not the only one to have this problem, just the only one to have witnesses.

Both times.

Tyler described his favorite moment of the day as when he looked over and saw Mom walking though the field and a hat sitting on the ground…. I was under the hat.

Mom described her favorite moment as watching  me try to save myself as my body “bent like a willow stick in the wind” while my feet and legs looked like they were “stuck in cement.”

Sadly I never got to see anyone fall today.

Instead my favorite moment actually involved hunting and watching Misty point and then circle around in front of me to put up running pheasants between us.

My hope is tomorrow I tomorrow it’ll be my turn to watch someone else fall in a hole and that the birds Misty puts up will be roosters instead of hens!

Notable Numbers from Norton

Today was the first day of hunting in Norton, Kansas for my Mom, my brother Tyler and I.

Notable numbers so far:

30 mph winds

20 degree temperatures

6 great horned owls

100 prairie chickens

30 bob white quail

20 pheasants

5 good dogs who had too many points to count

23 deer

1 giant buck

1 coyote

1 friendly guide

6 staples in a dogs nose

1 bluebird

3 dead pheasants

This is the first bird up, killed by the first shot, dead when it hit the ground. At least that's what we thought until we looked at each other and saw three people, three empty barrels, and three dead birds... just in case anyone is wondering!

1 dead prairie chicken

1 very tired brother

4 marsh hawks

26 tired legs

1 delicious pumpkin pie

1 great day

Happy Thanksgiving!

Persistence

John has been out hunting since the start of the bow season.  Waking up early, hunting evenings, taking trips  and sitting in the cold for weeks, he’s had nothing but a few stories to show for all his efforts.

Finally today, four days into the gun hunt, just when I think he was starting to fear that he had some sort of anti-deer force field around him John came back to the yard with a giant grin and a big buck! Most people called it “a little eight pointer,” but John jumped up and down with a big grin and rightly said “I shot an eight pointer!”
(I probably don’t need to point out that he’s never got anything near that big before!)

Then my Dad went out and got this nice little deer of his own, but we don’t need to talk about that… …because John shot his first eight pointer ever!

Packing

It does not matter how wonderful a place I’m going, what I’m doing there or who I’m going with. I still hate the packing.

-I hate it because our house is always messy and John and I have conversations like, “Have you seen my Swiss army knife?” … “Yes, It’s behind the cedar chest.”

-I hate it because I have to pack myself, and two kids, and two dogs and get all the home chores ready and line up people to take care of things while we are gone.

-I hate it because I can’t remember any of the things I should do without a list.

-I hate it because I always am losing my lists and then spend more time trying to find the list than the items on the list.

-I hate it because I try to pack 12,000 things at once and end up standing in rooms wondering what I came into that room for when I know the next four things I need are somewhere else.

-And I hate it because at some point, no matter if we are leaving for a weekend, a day or a week I just want to give it up and stay home.

Then on top of my general hatred of packing I have to watch John pack.

I try hard to pack in an organized fashion, I use lists, lots of lists, I put things directly into the bag they will be traveling in, I do laundry first so I can find everything easily, and spend the entire time getting crankier and crankier. On the other hand John, spreads his stuff out on whatever empty surface is available and wanders around “playing” with it saying obnoxious things like, “Isn’t’ this fun!?” and “Look at all my cool stuff!” which fuels my general crankiness.  Then for one last insult he stuffs it all into his bags, and knowing that with his strange haphazard ways everything is packed,  immediately falls asleep.  Meanwhile I toss and turn while thinking of the two million more things that must be done before we leave and worry that only one million of them are on a list.

The real kicker.  With all my lists and “organization” I’m still the one who forgets stuff.  I think this is because I have to pack a much larger quantity of things than John (another item that must have been in the “stay at home mom contract” I don’t remember signing) and so I forget a proportional amount of items. Then John brings up the fact that I haven’t seen my keys or my sunglasses since sometime before the 11th of November, and I think I might be hopeless.

Then I hear, “Hey do you know where my flask is?”

and I say , “Yeah, it’s under the bed.”

and I’m pretty sure I’ve got company in my hopelessly unorganized state.

 

Now I must get back to packing, enjoy your weekend, and if you see a set of keys with a pair of sunglasses let me know!

Bad Queen

“Mom, let’s pretend you are the bad queen who hates everyone and I’m the princess.”

I hope Ivy came up with this new game because of the many books and movies that involve a bad queen.

I fear it was actually because of the mood of her mother.

On a positive note, so long as I use my “bad voice” she’ll happily do all sorts of chores around the house while I threaten to lock her in the basement if she doesn’t.

Being the “Bad Queen Who Hates Everyone” is actually rather cathartic.

Art Guilt

Guilt.

It’s a common theme amongst mothers.  A mother can find something to feel guilty about in anything.   Working mom, stay at home mom, public schools,  McDonald’s, nursing , co-sleeping, formula feeding, diapers,  soap, playing,  learning,  reading, house cleaning, TV watching, socialization, pretty much if a mom or a kid can do it some mother somewhere is feeling guilty about it.

I like to think I do pretty well at avoiding feeling guilty, not perfect but perhaps better than average. Lately though I’ve been struggling with a doozy dose of Mom Guilt.

My current dilemma…

…artwork.

Admittedly what Ivy creates has only recently achieved a status that I would call artwork, but whatever you call it what do I DO with it? In the last few days she went on a frenzy and turned most of a package of computer paper into pictures for us.  In the past her pictures have involved five swipes of color on one sheet of paper.  I can leave them sit for a few days by which time they get eaten, crumpled or spilled on and then I can throw them away guilt free.   Now I have a ream of pictures, many of which are family portraits. (Just in case you were wondering these aren’t heads and necks, they are heads and legs. Just wanted to clear that up for you so Ivy didn’t have to.)

The sensible part of me says to follow my past plan and throw them away after a few days. The sentimental part of me wants to keep them. The sensible part says, “Where Jessie, Where would you keep them?” to which the sentimental part answers that there must be someplace that I can stash a few drawings. Then the sensible side says that there are truly NO artwork storing area in the house and I’ll end up putting them someplace stupid, lose them, forget about them and find them in ten years having been eaten by mice. The sentimental part retorts that at least I’ll have tried.

As my multiple personalities war inside me,  all I end up with is a big dose of guilt as I slowly filter pictures off to the garbage. To combat the Mom Guilt I have collected a few pictures and stapled them together into a book. The sentimental part of me is going to go put them some place stupid, lose them, forget about them and probably find them years in the future having been eaten by mice.

But at least I’ll have tried.

 

Independence

I have independent girls.

Sometimes people exclaim how wonderful it must be to have such independent children, I say yes but… Have YOU ever heard your daughter say from two aisles over at the grocery store: “Do you know where my mom is?” This is a normal occurrence for us. Unfortunately the adult being asked where I am is unaware of this and I see a bit of panic in their eyes when I pop around the corner. Because while Ivy may not know where I am she’s pretty easy to keep track of, you just listen for her constant chatter. But I digress…

Some of their independence is just personality. Ivy has always been out and about on her own without a problem, and now that she’s three that’s been taken to a whole new level!  Clara also seems to have got some of that same personality.  She won’t even let someone hold her hand while she walks, try to do that to help her out and you get rapid head shaking followed by yelling if you persist in trying. Clara is going to do it herself!

Other parts of their independence (particularly Ivy) is a learned thing. My favorite parts of motherhood do NOT include putting on clothes, shoes, socks, jackets, getting glasses of water, finding toys… Therefore the general rule I follow is if she can do it I’m not going to. Which is why last year when Ivy was two I woke up one morning to the sound of firewood being dropped on the floor. I went downstairs to discover my two-year old had gotten up, gone down stairs, put on boots and a jacket and hat, gone out to the porch and brought in a load of firewood.

She was very proud.

I was a bit worried that I was able to sleep through all that.

Truly though I love that Ivy is so self-sufficient and independent. Today as we were getting ready to go to the park I tried to remember that.  Last year, I would find the clothes and shoes and things and she would put them on. This year she does it all. The problem is she does it all on a three-year old’s time table (which translates to no timetable or urgency but lots of stories about princesses).  As we slowly, slowly got ourselves out the door I thought how easy it could be…

If I found her clothes and put them on her, if I found the socks and shoes and stuffed her feet in them, if I found the toys that were apparently completely necessary for our five minute drive we were taking and if I loaded her into and buckled up her car seat.

It’d take ten minutes.

But when we got to the park would she have played by herself and with Clara while I walked dogs  in circles around them?  Fixed her shoe by herself? Figured her own way up the unfamiliar ladders?  Relentlessly followed other kids around the park talking to them? Maybe.  But after the 30 minute struggle to get out the door I like to think that what I’m doing is actually helping her become a better person rather than just torturing all of us.

Besides had Ivy been glued to my side she never would have had the opportunity to excitedly yell across the playground: “MOM! Guess what!? I can get boogers out of my nose with my tongue!”

Clearly this is not a recent picture of Ivy. This is Ivy with her finger up her nose at four months. At four months it’s sort of funny, a current picture of her activities would not be so endearing!

Flocking

Flocking birds fascinate me. Therefore I have spent much of my free time and some of my not-so-free time the last two days staring out my window at this giant flock of red-winged blackbirds. Even Ivy said they were “Marvelous!” and I’ve only ever heard her use that word before when she discovered that some trees turn pink(!!!) in the fall. They were awesome, really awesome.  If you are also fascinated by flocking birds you can click on the picture below. It will link to my flicker page and my mediocre attempt at video taping them. I by no means did them justice but I tried!