Signs of Spring...

Like this...

...and this

...this...

...And these.

And, oh yeah, this:

The First Cookout of the Season!

hi

I thought I should post something. After all, it's been a while. Trouble is, not much is going on around here, I mean, we're busy but not anything that I'd take pictures of. Just schoolwork, chicken stuff, church, and that sort of thing. No one has fallen and cut themselves open lately, or won any large amounts of money (darn), or won the Nobel Peace Prize.

So, hey! What's up with you all? What is the most mundane thing you've done today? Me? I think it would have to be smearing Vaseline on a chapped kid. :-) Top that!

Knock on wood...

...That's what I said to Steve last night after he commented that it is amazing we haven't had any big injuries or broken bones. But Steve didn't do it.(Vitali, Before.)

Today, little Vitali was dancing through the basement when he fell and knocked his eye hard enough to split it open on a wooden chair. The girls heard him crying and came running to get me, Hannah carrying Vitali up the stairs where I met up with my bloody-faced little guy.

(Vitali, After)

He had a split that would likely have needed two stitches if we had taken him in. I decided to see if it looked like it would hold together with butterfly bandages before we went in for the stitches. Fortunately, while there was a lot of blood at first, it also stopped quickly so I was able to get the bandages to stick well and not have to worry about them slipping off and opening the wound. Satisfied with how they were pulling it together I bundled my little guy up for a little snuggle, warmed a blanket in the dryer, and let him pick a movie (He picked Zoro--a nice, long movie) to watch with Ivy to keep him still while it began to knit.

Then, we all watched another movie together (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs--a very dumb movie) after dinner and he and daddy snuggled on the couch together.
He's worried about going to church tomorrow with bandages. He is always so concerned about looking perfect. I told him it would be cool to get to tell everyone about it. He didn't buy my story. Oh, well. Should've knocked on wood.

35th birthday party.

Anyone from my family and those who have grown up with my family will appreciate this picture. In fact, I am glad I took it. A picture of dad getting his "arrival of the guests" video. I am pretty sure he was glad that my birthday was on a weekend so we could have the party midday for better lighting in the videos! Ha ha!

We were invited to my mom and dad's for lunch Sunday to celebrate how young I look for 35. Or something like that....

Mom made me this peanut butter frosted chocolate cake studded with peanut butter chocolate chips and what looked like way more than thirty five candles. Mmmmm....Then came the gifts! I think that in this picture I am opening Ivy's gift which was a pair of red plastic goblets with pink plastic hearts decorating the stems. Lovely! LOL! I love the gifts the kids pick out when given free range at the Dollar store!

Then we played this game, My mom, Dad, Evan and me. Mom won. So we played again.

I tried to win based on the fact that it was my birthday. But I had to settle for winning because I'm AWESOME!!!

This is what I looked like while I was busy beating the socks off of everyone.
We had this pretty view out the back door due to a freezing rain the night before. I am apparently not as good at capturing the light on the ice as I was hoping. This picture is not nearly as pretty as it was in person.

As we were leaving, I saw what the kids were doing while we were playing the board game.
Ain't he cute?

Green eggs and no ham

Found the flowerpot egg this morning on the front porch and I walked in with it just as Misha came up the stairs. I suggested that there might be eggs in the coop too. Misha brightly offered to go and get them and stepped into Max's big, black barn boots which pretty much live by our back door. He clomped up to the coop and called, "Two eggs! One brown, one white!" then a moment later he puzzled his brow and called, "No, not white--GREEN!"
And there is the morning haul. Two more expected today, we'll see. I am sorry to keep posting pictures of eggs but I am just having so much fun! Haha! Who knew I would enjoy these chickens so much? Must come with getting older....

More talk of eggs and chickens and kids.

We are getting a predictable three eggs per day now. Pinky (who is actually named Kelsey, the kids have corrected me) was the first to start but after a week or so of one egg per day, we came home in the evening and found another white egg in the flowerpot on the front porch! Then we were up in the backyard a day or two later and Steve noticed two eggs under the neighbor's work truck. A white and a brown! Now we had a mystery layer. We figured out that the flowerpot-layer is Mini, a brown chicken with a flopped-over comb like Pinky-Kelsey, but who was laying that brown egg?
I figured it out today. It is a black chicken named Toe White (like Snow White because her center toe on each foot was white when she was a chick). I "caught" her in the act today, sitting in the coop bawk-bawk-bawking for everyone to hear. She was apparently very proud.

I still have some store eggs in the fridge so I decided to cook them side by side and see if I could notice a difference. The store egg spread all over the pan. (Steve burned the butter before I fried this egg so it has brown edges; oh well.)
The egg from our backyard took two or three times of trying to crack it before it cracked into the pan. I had forgotten that free range chickens have much thicker shells. When it flopped into the pan it stayed all together. My mom, who poaches eggs, says the same about dropping them into the poaching water.

At first glance, they are obviously different looking. My egg (right) is orange-yolked while the store egg (left) is a paler yellow. You can see it clearly when they are both on the plate:
As far as taste, they seemed to me to taste mostly the same but the texture of the yolks was different. The store yolk being grainier and the home-grown egg yolk being smoother.

After I took this picture, I put them back in the pan topside down to finish cooking. I used to like the yolks runny but now I like to pop the yolks while the egg is still in the pan but that would have ruined my picture!

We arrived home from school today and found our flowerpot sporting a little white egg. A little later Max came running down from the coop laughing loudly and holding up another white egg. You would have thought it was a candy-filled Easter egg the way he carried on. It is fun to watch the kids enjoy this new phase of chicken-rearing.

And the kids really do their part happily with helping to take care of the chickens with Max and Annette doing an especially large part of the care. Each morning Max wants to let the chickens out first thing. He ASKS to go out in the cold/rain/snow(who am I kidding? We don't have any snow)/whatever to let the chickens out of the coop. At night, he is the one that most often shakes the few out of the tree beside the coop and closes them in.

And, I am not kidding, this is an actual conversation I had with Annette the other day:

Me: Annette, I don't want to bother with cleaning out the coop right now so can you just sprinkle some clean bedding in there on top of the old?

Annette: Oh, MOM! Do I have to?

Me: It won't be hard, just take this bucket of pine shavings and sprinkle them around.

Annette: (in all seriousness) But, Mom, PLEEEASE can't I just scoop out the poop?

Me: OOO-Kaaay, I guess so...
:-)

Another random, late Christmas photo..

Egg #3

Misha stood outside the chicken coop with us and watched as an egg fell noiselessly under the chicken who had endured an audience for the last ten minutes or so. He then held up four fingers and proudly proclaimed, "Now we have three eggs!" His mouth was right. His hand needs more practice.

Max displaying a still warm egg.
(In the background, you can see Pinocchio, the half-beaked chicken, shoveling
cracked corn and chicken food out of one of her precious buckets)

The egg on the left is a store-bought large egg. The one on the right is our egg-of-the-day. See how much smaller that is? I don't know when or if the future eggs will get larger but I think they do start out a little smaller in the chicken's first attempts to lay.

The Mama. Side view.

The Mama, front view. Yeah, she doesn't get any prettier from different angles. Besides having the huge knock against her that she is a chicken and can only truly be considered lovely by other chickens, she also has a problem because with that comically flopped-over comb nobody takes her seriously.

Random Late Christmas Photo

Fresh from a Chicken's bum....

Our first egg! (Oh, The excitement in our house this morning!) Compliments of a floppy combed white leghorn named Pinky.

Cutting the Tree! (alternate title: Yay! Snow!)

Off to find our tree!

All lot of snowballs went flying!

Who likes this tree? Misha does.

Why God made boys.

Taking home the prize.

My pretty Hannah.

Watch out! She's got a snowball!

Hannah took a bunch of pictures too.

Ivy liked the "baby" trees.

We all really enjoyed warming up with hot chocolate when we were through. Mmmmm!