Conversations with a seven year old

DD7: Mommy, chickens are disgusting.

Me: Really.. why?

DD7: Because they step in their own poop!

Me: *Giggle*

DD7: That would be like if we went to the bathroom and then stuck our foot in the toilet!

Me: Hehehe!

March 20th marks our first day of Spring here in the US! Our weather was sunny and wonderfully warm and our lovely hens chose to celebrate the occasion by each laying an egg! That's right THREE eggs today! The one on the left is suspected of being a double yolk. We'll find out this weekend when we crack them all open for Saturday breakfast!



We chose to celebrate the start of Spring by planting flower seeds.


The children all got to choose four different flowers from my apparently never ending flower seeds supply.

DS4 chose to plant a wildflower, a black eyed susan, a blue morning glory and cosmos.

DD7 chose to plant a marigold, blue morning glory, forget-me-not and a pink morning glory.

DS9 chose to plant a shade wildflower, forget-me-not, morning glory and marigold.

DD11 chose to plant a daisy, cosmos, forget-me-not and a snap-dragon.

DD13 planted a sweet-pea, snap-dragon, phlox and foxglove.

Exciting stuff! We also went out to start gathering supplies for our chicks which will be arriving at the start of April. In the next couple of days we'll be getting delivery of topsoil and aged manure so we can start filling our raised beds.

Spring is wonderful. I think I love it so much because it gives us just a small taste of how amazing it must have been when God created the world. To see each new and lovely thing.

When you plant a tiny seed in the ground and witness a new plant growing from that tiny seed and how perfect the whole process is.. you're witnessing the awesome beautiful power of God.

In moments like these,
I sing out a song, I sing out a love song to Jesus,

In moments like these,
I sing out a song, I sing out a love song to Him.

Singing I love you Lord, Singing I love you Lord,
Singing I love You Lord, I love You.

Levers, Fulcrums, Plants and Cars!

What a combination! This post really just has to do with some photos I want to share.

We're currently learning about levers in school and discussed how a seesaw (oddly not a playground item you find very much in the US!) is a lever. We spoke about the very primitive seesaw that the Ingalls girls played on in the Little House on the Prairie TV series we're currently watching. This afternoon when they went out to play, what did I come outside to find?

Hehe. Put together mostly by DD11. Fulcrum in the new word of the day!

A little peek at our seedlings in case you were wondering how they are faring.

And lastly, DS4 used some of his birthday money to buy this "Cool Fewawwi". He was very disappointed when he took it out of the packaging though.
Do you notice something wrong with the car? Like maybe they put the front wheels on the back instead of on the front? LOL! Those front tires are too big for the front so they won't turn at all.

We'll have to find him another "Cool Wed Fewawwi" because the body is pop riveted together and there's no way to change it.

I wonder if it has any "strange and unusual" collector's value? Nah...

First Brown Egg!

And it would have been a real beauty if it hadn't been laid from the roost! But alas, the pullets are still in the learning stage and we hope that whoever is responsible (we strongly suspect Shimmer is) will wisen up a little and use the nest box next time!

From the left: Our first brown egg, one of Miss Pearl's

most recent eggs and a store-bought egg.

Birthday Boy!

Our youngest turned a whole four years old today. Four! I'm not used to having a young child without having a "babe in arms" as well, so this is a new experience for me, and I'm loving it!

Family tradition is to go into the birthday person's room before they're awake and we all sneak in and then wake them up with the Happy Birthday song. After that DS opened up his gifts which pretty much revolved around cars and also a mini skateboard. His grandparents all sent him an email, he also got a card with money in and they also called later in the day to speak to him in person :) He also got an email from one of his aunties and a dear friend :) Unfortunately we have no photos of the opening of gifts because our camera battery was dead.

We had a little family party today, unfortunately DH couldn't be home with us, but we had him on speaker phone while we sang happy birthday and brought in the cake.

DS4 is not a big fan of cake, so instead of cake I made brownies and decorated them with Hot Wheels cars, and followed through with theme plates, hats and napkins, he loved it!

The party quickly evolved to meltdown silliness and hilarity, as can be witnessed from these photos:

This afternoon he got a card and money in the mail from a very special family friend.

I also decided to buy some of those "twisty" balloons with the intention of entertaining the kids with my amazing creations. Well, I guess in a way that's exactly what I did! They were very amazed by my supposed dog that had a long tail, non-existant body, huge ears and tiny nose. They were also very entertained by my dog that had a teeny tail, huge ears and long nose - they decided it was an anteater. When your kids are laughing so hard they can hardly stand up straight.. well.. I guess that means they're amused and very entertained! Ha.

DS9 watched my feeble attempts and quickly twisted up a perfectly proportioned balloon dog.

Hm... better luck next time mama!

DS4 also got to choose a movie to watch, which was Cars.. what other movie could you possibly expect a wheel loving little boy to choose?!

All in all, our cute little boy had a WONDERFUL day :)

Dust Bathing

First Egg!

Great eggcitement (hehe) in our household today as we got our first egg from our chickens!

Today was DD11's turn to check for eggs which they do three times a day, morning, noon and night. So after lunch she went out and here's what she found:

I don't know if it's "normal" to be so excited about such a little thing, but wow, what a feeling seeing that first egg! It was fairly clean and appears to have come from Miss Pearl (so named by DS9) since she had blood on her foot.

DD13 also informed me that you can tell the color eggs a chicken will lay by looking at their ears. Miss Pearl has white ears and the other two (Henny Penny and Shimmer) have brown ears.

We're quite proud of Miss Pearl. The egg is smaller than what you can buy in the store which we expected since we know that it takes a while before they lay regular size eggs... but it has a lovely shape and a very good shell.

Emerging Beauty

Yesterday the first of our seedlings just barely started to emerge, and today a few of them were big enough to go under the grow lights.

Isn't that just a thing of beauty?

Our grow lights are set up on a bookshelf in the basement. DH attached the lights to chains so we can raise them up slowly as the seedlings grow. We also use a small fan to blow gently on them. This discourages mold and also makes the seedlings stronger. If we do spot mold we spray the plants with a diluted solution of hydrogen peroxide and water.

So this is their new home for a while:

I have to check them every day to make sure they aren't getting dried out. Colorado is extremely dry and these little pots aren't great at retaining water.

We didn't do much today that was terribly exciting, but we did shop some great sales for fruit at the grocery store today. We bought apples, oranges, grapefruit and green, black and red grapes . The kids love it when fruit goes on sale because they would rather eat fruit than candy! Wednesday night is our dessert night, but we chose to have grapes for dessert instead :)

Online Homeschool co-op: Gardening

Another gorgeous 70°F day today!

We decided to get started on the garden beds for the children's gardening project for March. They have to plan out a garden and start seeds. So we planned and built (free bricks, yay craigslist!) the garden bed for the eldest three today. They will each have a 4' x 4' area where they will be completely responsible for whatever they choose to grow in it.

Everyone helped, even the littlest people! I didn't though, this is their deal, so I just observed :)

They were quite pleased with their efforts, but I suspect DH is going to want to level the one wall that's doing a "wave"!

We still have to figure out a gardening area for the youngest two.

And of course.. once the work is done there is always time to play a little!

I cleared out one area that will be used as an herb garden this Summer. The ground under all the hay and straw was a beautiful black and smelled wonderful. I even found some very plump earthworms!

Need I say it again? I'm SO READY for Spring!!!!!

Foxy fox?

On March 1st (beautiful 70°F day) we built our raised bed boxes (see below.) We stapled weed barrier cloth to the bottom of the boxes and also laid empty rabbit feed bags under each box to help keep the weeds out. For the last box we ran out of feed bags and used an empty cat food bag for the last small section.

On March 2nd it snowed and our temps hovered just above 20°F. That night we were visited by an animal who decided to dig through the weed barrier cloth to pull out the cat food bag. Luckily not *too* much damage was done!

Here is a photo of the tracks taken at the area where the animal pulled the bag out. I know foxes usually direct register, but this was taken at the place where he was busy, not merely walking. The animal jumped over the 6 foot wood fence after finding the bag was empty and held no treats. From what I remember the tracks across our yard were indicative of direct registering, but after telling the children about the animal and them going out there to "track" it I had more human prints than animal so couldn't confirm that. Want to know more about tracking animals? Here's a great site!

The animal also left us another gift.. got a photo of that too, LOL!

(Yes kids, when your mom says not to put money in your mouth because you don't know where it's been... well.. now you know!!! LOL!)

Fox or coyote scat contains lots of hair... well... let's let it dry out some and then break it open and see what we find! Oh, and don't worry, I'm a mom of five so I'm used to all kinds of icky stuff!

Yup, lots of hair. Now, we've seen a fox in our front yard before and I've seen a coyote cross the main street 1/4 block from our home so it could be either.. but I'm more comfortable thinking it's a fox than a coyote!

Bulk Yeast

For those of you who bake a lot with instant/active yeast but are still buying it in sachets or those little bottles.. there's a better way!

Costco and Sam's Club sell bulk yeast bricks. Sam's has Fleischmann's sold in a package of two 1 lb bricks and Costco has Red Star sold in a 2 lb package for $3.39. The bricks feel SOLID as they are vacuum packed but once you open them up they're granular and exactly the same as the yeast in those little sachets.

2 1/4 tsp instant yeast = 1 yeast sachet

I keep some in a small jar in the refrigerator and the rest gets kept in the freezer. It doesn't lose its potency.

In case you don't know what to look for, here's what the Costco yeast looks like (milk in there for size reference) and you can find it on the bottom shelf under the spices, right around the area you'll find the Vanilla extract.

Quilts

My oldest two girls made quilted items in an online homeschool co-op for February. DD13 made a pillow and DD11 made a small quilt for a display antique Sindy doll I gave her. The end products are beautiful!

DD13 was really inspired by her success and made a lap quilt from my fabric scraps. It came out quite cute! She designed, cut and sewed the quilt all by herself.

I've never made a quilt before but I've started a denim rag quilt that (once finished!) will be big enough for our bed. So far so good!

The promise of wonderful things to come!

Bok Bok

Two weeks ago we got our first chickens. Since the earliest we could get chicks is in April we decided to get some older hens to start out with so we can have eggs earlier. We found three lovely 4 month old pullets and spent a weekend setting up the area to keep them in. We got a white leghorn, black sexlink and red sexlink.

Aren't they purdy?

This weekend DH finished modifications on their coop which used to be a rabbit hutch that didn't quite work out for our rabbits. DH had to put in bigger wire in the bottom so all the poop can fall through under their roosting area. Of course the girls are SO curious about what's going on and had to be part of everything!

Their actual roost area is another box section that fits on top of where DH is currently working in this photo.

DH also made modification to their waterer so it can hang instead of being on the ground where it got sand kicked into it constantly. I think they appreciate the modification!

We haven't gotten any eggs yet, but I can tell you that our whole family is enjoying the antics of the chickens immensely! They are MUCH more entertaining than rabbits could ever hope to be, LOL!