Cattails and Kisses

Posted by OfWoodandEarth March 07, 2026

Cattails and Kisses

Hazel turned one month old! This time around is hurting my Momma heart hurt a lot more. But just for fun, here's a comparison with the rest of the crew!

I'm going to start out with a bunch of cuteness. I have the sweetest friend that wanted to do newborn pictures as a gift for me. I've never done newborn pictures before, so this was a lot of fun! Even if Hazel did not agree, haha.

This dress was mine when I was little, and Nene made the quilt for Hazel.

Will holding his little sister's feet!

I call this one the angry fist photo, haha. It makes me laugh every time. You can tell she had had it with the photoshoot. She was cold and hungry, and hungry babies make fists. It's one of the tell tale signs, if you didn't know!

She has very expressive hands just like Mena did.

We had such a fun time (and we didn't get to try out some of the baskets that I wanted to because Hazel was ready to be done) that we decided to try some photos of our own!

A heart basket just in time for valentines day!

This one is one of my favorite pictures ever! You can see my beautiful Super Cute Dress (the actual brand name), and she's looking right at me! It was such a precious photo that Sam got!

This basket with the blanket her GodMomma made for her was perfect for taking pictures. When Hazel got fussy, I swung her then set her down and snapped a picture as quick as I could!

More on the family side of things, Ash Wednesday was this month, and we decided to do our annual tradition of putting ashes on baby doll foreheads! The photographer friend, Maggie Coleman, was supposed to bring her sweet Charlotte, but mine and Trulee's kids were both sick with colds. So we ended up doing a little lesson just ourselves...which still was hectic enough!

We were one away from 20, so Hazel had to join the baby line-up!

We started out the lesson talking about the purpose of Ash Wednesday, and I even told them the silly story of the town that put sack clothes on cows to repent! Then, we got started with the crosses. I crushed some charcoal from my fireplace in a bowl and packed it over to Pippa and Pap Pap's house.

Cousin snuggles!

We made a King's Cake to celebrate MardiGras. It was DELICIOUS! And for the first time since we started making one several years ago, we were able to put an actual Jesus inside the cake (mnms and silicone dinosaurs have been used in the past). Nonni was the one blessed with luck for the year!

Hazel's first Ash Wednesday! It was a good start to lent.

While I had the good camera out, I decided to take some pictures of my Baby Caterpillar book!

Feel free to share them with your friends and family!

I was posting them to Facebook, but I thought people might get tired of seeing the same sort of posts over and over again, so I ended up making an author page on Facebook called Books By Victoria. I created an Instagram author account as well that you can also follow (all social accounts are linked at the bottom of our blog posts)!

My sister Trulee had some good ideas for promotion with her upcoming book (WICK...coming June 2026), and I decided to try and design some business cards and bookmarks that Caroline and I could give out to local children's boutiques and bookstores and even give out at our craft events that we attend. I started in Powerpoint, but Trulee introduced me to Canva, and there's no going back now! All the illustrations are Caroline's from our book!

May be a doodle of text that says 'Baby Caterpillar Read, Sing, Snuggle, LOVE! စကစံ'

May be an image of text that says 'Baby Caterpillar From the creative hearts of Victoria Burns & Caroline Russell'

I've been slowly working on getting my ancestor wall together and purchased metal stripping that would stick to the wall and allow me to very quickly move the location of a picture frame. That idea has led to a bunch of other steps that I've had to do before my project is complete. One project was that I needed to order more neodymium magnets. I had a lot of leftovers after I was done, so I ordered some prayer coins and made more needle-minders!

If you aren't aware of what needle minders are, they attach to your backing using magnets and hold your needle for you when you have to step away from a project. St. Anthony to help you not lose your needle.

Mary Undoer of Knots to help you not knot your thread, haha.

And St. Clare is the patron saint of needlework! Needle-minders are $12/each for those of you that like to cross-stitch or embroider. I also ship them!

Speaking of St. Anthony (patron saint of lost things)....I couldn't resist! We had two extra AirTags after sticking two to our TV remotes, and there is a company that makes this air-tag holder specifically for your keys! It was too funny to pass up. And now Sam can't fuss about me losing my keys, haha.

On the farm side of things...Sam has spent almost every warm day working on the backhoe. (Spoiler, he was able to start it yesterday for the first time in a long time!).

It still has a while to go before it's drivable, but Sam is very excited about all it's going to be able to do for us on the farm.

One of the projects we are going to use it for is to dig a trench so we can burry the fencing a little for our Peacock pen. Right now, they are spending the winter in their little house. We did have a raccoon that broke in and killed three of our meat chickens, so Sam had to make fencing door covers that would prevent the critters from getting in. They turned out really well, I think!

He tried for several nights to go hunting for the raccoon. He shot at it one time and never saw it again. We bought a trap and instead of catching a raccoon, Sam caught a skunk! He shot it, and the dang thing stunk up the entire farm so much that Pippa and Pap Pap had to close their windows at their house! Thank the Lord it rained that night to get the smell out of the air.

We've been trying to get out of pigs for awhile, but we have had a lack of interest in purchasing them (one of the main reasons we are getting out of them). We finally found someone, but they were only willing to buy our herd of 7 for $500. To put that in perspective for you, when we started out with Kune Kunes a couple years ago, we bought one six month old boar for $350 (which the lady felt short-changed about), and we sold our piglets for $200-250. So $500 for a 2 year old registered boar, his 2 year old breeding partner, and five guilts all about a year old....$500 was just like a slap in the face. We even had to deliver them almost an hour away for these people. And they didn't want to pay a delivery fee. So yes, I'm bitter about it, but we aren't having to pay for feed anymore, and it really was time for us to get out of them. It's just not the right season in our lives right now for livestock that take that much effort. We'd like to turn our attention to different things on the farm.

Meet pork-chop...the rooster who thought he was a pig. We managed to catch him and sent him to live with his pig family on the new farm.

Harry Porker on the right, Dandelion, her niece, and her four daughters on the left.

Waffle was even nice enough to let Mena sit on her after we got the pigs rounded up! Mena calls her "Wafu". It's so cute.

When I checked the farm monthly to-do list, I saw that we are supposed to get the swarm catchers out by the first week in March. So I went by all the trees and took the swarm catchers down, only to find that they reeeallly needed to be scraped and re-painted if we wanted them to last another season. We called Pippa up and invited Leia and Mela over to have a painting party! We had some good helpers!

Before we can hang them up, I will have to put frames back in them (preferably some of the frames should have drawn comb on them. The ones with actual comb do a better job of attracting bees), put the entrances back on (which allows us to close the bees in if we catch a swarm), and spray the back of the box and entrance with swarm command. Swarm command is basically a concentrated lemon grass spray that mimics the smell of Queen bees. A bee expert we spoke to a few years ago told us to spray once in the back and once at the entrance...anymore than that and the bees won't want to come!

On one of the warm days, the kids wanted to go hiking down at Shaker Village. We found a new spot to hike, and we had a really great time!

William spotted a little salamander! He was pretty cute.

I'll end the post with some more cute pictures of family life. We hope that you all had a great February, too!

My favorite part about nursing (yes, I'm nursing here, and you can't even tell. Thank you Super Cute Dresses!), is holding their little hand. Mostly, this is to keep them from trying to chew on their hands, but I will never turn down a good hand hold! Especially from such tiny fingers!

Sam went to bed early one night, and three kids fell asleep on me. Did I try to call him to rescue me? Yes. Did he answer? No. Luckily, I climbed out and put everyone to bed without anyone waking up! #skilled

I can't get over how good this color looks on Hazel! And you can kind of see her grey eyes in this picture. Depending on what she's wearing, they switch between grey and brown. Luke's were grey for the longest time, and his are hazel, now. Wouldn't it just be perfect if this sweet girl ended up with hazel eyes, too?