Insights and Ramblings About New Year's

     The other day at lunch I explained the tradition of celebrating New Year's Eve to GD. I told him about staying up late, throwing confetti, and blowing noise-makers. My ever-practical five-year-old was terribly unimpressed. He looked at me as if to see if I was just making it all up, blinked a couple times, and then asked very blandly, "Why would people do that?"

     "To celebrate it being a new year. It's 2017 and it's going to be 2018."  

     Again, he stared and blinked at me and said, "But it's just like any other day."

      Then my husband chimed in and told him about the ball dropping in Times Square and how everyone stands outside in the cold waiting for a lit-up ball to fall and then makes a mess with confetti. 

     GD looked very perplexed about the inefficiency of it all. "Maybe we could just watch a movie and get out the new calendar or something."  

      I'm with you, kid. I don't understand all the hype about New Year's either.   With all of the Christmas festivities over the past couple weeks my kids are holidayed out. My toddler doesn't even want to celebrate his birthday this week. So if they want to eliminate the New Year's celebration I'm ok with that. KM would just eat the confetti anyway. 

      But then G and I started to wonder as we boycotted watching the ball drop, Why do we celebrate New Year's Eve anyway?  What are we celebrating?  The passage of time?  (This was part of an extended conversation involving humans celebrating in general and our lack of endurance for extended partying). I asked the omniscient internet this question, and it took me to a Psychology Today article that said that the celebration of New Year's is intrinsically linked to our motivation to survive. 

       Now I feel like we should do more that just watch a movie and change the calendar.

        I also had told GD about New Years resolutions. To be honest, I just told him because I was curious what his unfiltered efficiency-minded opinion on them was, and I was not disappointed.
        "I really think all this New Year's stuff is pretty silly," he told me.

       I'm not totally opposed to New Year's resolutions. I just don't understand why they have to be made at New Year's (in case you were wondering, these too are linked to our motivation to survive). G and I have, in the past, made resolutions for our family for the new year and kept them.  And we've also made resolutions and quickly realized that we were just trying to be people we are not and joined the 88% of people that do not keep their New Year's resolutions.  

      Like last year, we decided that we needed a break from house projects and would not be starting anymore projects in 2017.  Before the ball even started dropping we were discussing what walls we were going to cut holes in for more windows and how we wanted to redo the kitchen.  

     Or the year I decided that we needed to be "organized."  I downloaded pretty planner pages I found on Pinterest and even bought a pocket calendar.  I was going to be an organized "planner person" (I do believe in the blogging world this is an actual term).  I didn't even end up printing the planner pages.  The five days I kept that pocket calendar updated were so very stressful for me.  I ended up giving the calendar to GD because he liked the "teeny tiny numbers" in it and went back to just remembering everything.  Writing things down just takes too much time.  

     So, for 2018 we did not make any resolutions, we did not throw confetti, and we did not watch the ball drop.  We did get out some noise makers for the kids, but did not end up watching a movie because they were so busy playing with the noise makers and passing around slobber (which might explain why we've all been sick for the past week).  I don't know if we'll even change our wall calendar in the morning.  It still says November.  

S-W-I-N-E

    GD told us a couple years ago that he did not want to raise animals for meat if those animals had eyes. I guess he didn't want to look his food in the eye, which I don't think is unreasonable for a preschooler.  However, about a year ago, right after eating a delicious Christmas ham, G started talking about getting some pigs.  

     GD was excited about the prospect of pig farming. My mom asked him, "Would you be all right with raising pigs for meat even if they have eyes?"

     "Well," GD answered, "I really like bacon." 

     And so it was tentivitely decided that we would be getting a pig and naming it Christmas Ham. 

     But after a rough winter losing 21 chickens and a goat, we decided it was best to wait to add to our livestock collection.  Until a few weeks ago when we were sitting around the table watching the boys chow down on ribs. That's when G started talking seriously again about getting some S-W-I-N-E. 

      G has learned it is unwise to just show up with livestock without warning me first. I don't mind surprises, I would just rather they not have four legs and require food and housing. So over the next couple weeks he asked me several times about getting a S-W-I-N-E.

      And then gradually that became two S-W-I-N-E, because "it really wouldn't be much more work for twice as much meat."  Whatever. 

       

         Now, there are two reasons to refer to your pigs as S-W-I-N-E. 

1.  You automatically spell everything because you think you're fooling your children but, really, there's no fooling them (after all, I have been trying to teach them to spell). 

2. S-W-I-N-E is much less endearing than calling them P-I-G-S. P-I-G-S conjures up images of prancing piglets and children's storybook characters. It's harder to become attached to S-W-I-N-E before you send them off to the butcher. 

After putting a down payment on two partially grown S-W-I-N-E (yes, around here you do need to reserve your craiglists swine before someone else snatches up the bargain), we did finally tell the boys we were getting some future bacon.  

     They were pretty ecstatic at the prospect of being swine farmers. They insisted on going to pick up the swine and go out to check on them everyday saying, "We're going to eat you someday."  We do have an agreement with them that they won't be required to do any chores for the swine because they don't want to become too attached to them. 

       I think that's wise.  I don't do any chores for them either. The pink one is just too happy to see me for me eat him someday.   He (or she?  I didn't ask, I don't want to know, my food does not have a gender) looks at me with those happy eyes and all I can think about is Babe or Wilbur. 

     And that's why food shouldn't have eyes. 

(No picture of the swine, we may get too attached to them if they're in our photo album) 

How to Make Everything

     GD is a kid that always wants to know "how," especially how things are made.  And then he wants to make the things himself. A few weeks ago he came out to the kitchen with a spool of thread and started cutting lengths of it and laying them out on the table, announcing that he was going to make his own fabric by weaving thread. He said then I would never have to buy fabric ever again. Sometimes his ideas get a little grandiose. 

     This led to me getting out my old loop weaving loom and an all-out investigation into weaving. While perusing YouTube for weaving videos we stumbled upon the How to Make Everything Series, watching a segment where they showed how to hand-weave threads made from natural materials into fabric for a men's suit. GD is now hooked on the "How to Make Everything" channel and he gets to watch an episode every night before bed.  In this series the host, Andy George, attempts to make everyday items like a book or a sandwich completely from scratch, even collecting his own raw materials.  

    It's an interesting series. I have been enjoying watching it with him and it is educational. We've learned how to collect silk from silk worms and that silk worm moths can't eat because they don't have mouths so they just mate and die (something he found very disturbing). We learned that acorns are actually not poisonous to humans and you can make flour out of them (we haven't found any acorns to try it yet, much to GD's disappointment). We leaned how to make our own cheese and butter, how to bind a book, and how to tan a deer hide. 

GD has also picked up some new vocabulary. In the episode showing how to collect hemp to weave into pants, GD was introduced to the word "marijuana."  I hadn't expected Andy George to go off on a tangent about how legalizing marijuana would be good for the hemp industry, and I thought GD would just gloss over it, but evidently the word "marijuana" has a ring to it and he started letting it roll off his tongue, trying it out in different voices.  We had to pause the video to discuss what marijuana is, why we can't grow our own hemp, and that it's not a word we should go around saying for fun.

That's why he doesn't watch these thigs by himself.

   Recently we watches the series on how to make Thanksgiving dinner from scratch in preparation for Thanksgiving.    We were kind of disappointed that there was only 8 episodes because we were hoping it would last us until Thanksgiving. But Andy used a lot of leftovers from when he made his sandwich and his root beer float so we watched those too.  

    A few nights ago we watched Andy go wild turkey hunting. If I had known how much footage there would be of the turkey flapping around after getting shot in the head twice I probably would not have shown this at bedtime, but in my defense I thought the video was going to be about Andy raising his own domestic turkey  (Yes, maybe I need to pre-screen these things).  Fortunately GD fully understands and accepts where meat comes from and has been inspired to hunt his own wild turkey.

The next day he and GE set up a turkey blind out of some kitchen chairs and GE's security blanket "Bee" and proceeded to hunt stuffed chickens with air pumpers.  While GD instructed GE to aim for the head, KM took a more hand-on approach.

While they were setting all this up I realized that when we made the "our kids do not play with pretend guns" parenting decision, wild turkey hunting had not been a factor we considered.  I texted G at work asking what our parental position was on using pretend guns for hunting and if that decision extended to using pretend guns for hunting if your brother is pretending to be the turkey.   His opinion was both of those were ok, but I'm still not too keen on pretending to shoot turkey-siblings. 

After that GD hauled the chicken-turkeys to his kitchen and plucked and cooked them.  He then proceeded act out the other 6 videos in the series, collecting cranberries, sugar beets, acorns, and potatoes.

By the way, Andy George does not include pie in his Thanksgiving dinner.  It just seems wrong.

My Favorite Thing About Fall

    I actually wrote this last fall and never published it.  I found it in my drafts and I have been celebrating the end of sunblock for the past couple weeks so I thought I would finally post this. 


   My oldest son is kind of obsessed with fall.  I've already written about that, but the level of his love for all things autumn is really beyond description.
    I, on the other hand, do not have warm fuzzy feelings about this season.  Well, I guess I do if you're referring to the two layers of fleece sweatshirts I put on when the temperatures dip below 70 degrees.  There are a few things I do like about fall....the colors, the crisp air that reminds me of running high school cross-country and marching band at football games with my favorite drummer, and the festive feeling of the approaching holiday season.  But mostly my thoughts about fall revolve around how we're entering 6 months of freezing darkness and doubts that my house can withstand the forces of two little boys cooped up inside for days on end.  Basically, I just can't enjoy fall because I have a really bad attitude about winter.
  But, I have found a silver lining to all of this.  This realization was the highlight of my week last week.

    WITH THE END OF SUMMER COMES THE END OF SUNBLOCK.

    I feel very strongly about the importance of sunblock application in young children.  My husband would tell you I'm tad bit obsessive about it (well, maybe more than a "tad bit"--I have been known to use up an entire 8 ounce bottle of kid's sunblock in one week).  My fears of my children being expose to too much UV radiation are not unfounded; I have two very light-skinned boys, one with red hair, and a significant family history of melanoma.  So two or three times a day every day from March through September my boys get a thorough slathering of Banana Boat.
    Research shows that when applying sunblock only 25-50% of people use the dermatologist-recommended amount of lotion; most people apply much less than the 1 ounce recommended for adults and most don't re-apply it every 1-2 hours.  I can assure you that, at least when it comes to sun protection for my children I am not a part of this statistic.  Despite being outside for several hours a day every day in the summer, my boys are just as pale as they were last February.  Their pediatrician actually said I deserved a standing ovation for my obvious diligence in their skin protection when I took them for their week visits in July.

    But despite my zeal for broad-UV-spectrum protection, the twice-daily sunblocking ritual is not something I --or the boys-- enjoy. The four-year-old usually sighs and rolls his eyes like a teenager as he plops into our official "sunblocking chair."  Meanwhile the toddler takes off running through the house screaming "Sunblock!  Sunblock! Sunblock!" until I chase him down and all but sit on him to get him slathered in sunscreen (I've actually considered filming this whole process and marketing it as an exercise video). 

   So, last Thursday on the first day of fall as we got ready to head out to the pool in 90-degree heat, I looked out at the north-pointing shadows and decided that the intensity of the sun's rays had waned enough that the boys could survive 45 minutes outside without sunblock. 

    When I told the boys they could head outside without sunblock they exclaimed with delight, and I almost thought I heard the sunblocking chair sigh with relief.

Freeloader Farms

We had big plans for our little homestead this year.  Our hopes, dreams, and expectations for 2017 were beyond optimistic. Just to name a few:

-Continue our successful chicken farming

-Become successful dairy goat farmers. Get buckets and buckets of goat milk, never have to buy milk again, make our own goat milk yogurt, maybe even make our own soap. Sell the baby goats and make some money for more livestock. 

-Harvest enough garden produce to can and freeze to feed our growing family through the next year with enough leftover to sell at farmers markets. 

-Start a vineyard.

-Add more trees to our orchard.  Harvest some apples, peaches, and pears 

-Add a pig named Christmas Ham and maybe some turkeys to our little farm. 

This was just the homesteading goals.  Also on our to-do list were things like "refinish the kitchen cabinets," "add a mud room in the garage," and "knock out two windows in the living room and fill in the existing one." 

Oh, and raise three children. And there's that place my husband has to go to every day so we have money. 

So let's take a look at how all of our goals panned out so far this year. 

-We lost 21 chickens this past winter in three separate horrifying coop invasions, including a few chickens that were beloved pets. We replaced them with chicks that grew into chickens that refused to lay for so long our toddler would chase after them shouting "You bunch of freeloaders!"

-Mr. Goat died under our care. (We actually lied about this to our children because they were already too traumatized by the chicken massacres.  We just said he went back home.  I thought it was worth lying to save their little hearts.  GD figured it out though.). One of our own goats died. We got one cup of goat milk total. We kept the baby goats because they're cheaper than therapy for the boys.   We now have freeloading goats.

-We got a late start on our garden. It got flooded three times. Then it got overtaken with weeds. Then we didn't get rain. Then we got bugs. Then the baby goats ate half the stuff. And then we stopped caring. We froze a couple bags of beans. I thought I would miss the excitement of canning. But I didn't at all. Walmart has plenty of frozen vegetables. 

-Everything else failed so we didn't test our luck with a vineyard. 

-We had about 50 gorgeous bug free peaches we were so excited about. Some critter came and ate all of them just before they were ripe enough to pick and left us nothing but a pile of peach pits. And we had lots of pears but they tasted bad. 

-We were too traumatized by the chicken massacres to add edible livestock to our plate (pun intended). 

The only produce our farm harvested this year was 100 lbs of apples we picked out of ditch down the road. Just call us a bunch of freeloaders. 

The Table Slide

I actually wrote this in February.  I never posted it because I was trying to add a video that just would never load.  So as you're reading it remember this was in February, and we were tired of winter.


This is what happens when you leave three engineer-minded males alone:

This table slide was actually the result of a brainchild of the two-year-old engineer. But the backstory starts last summer.

Last August I noticed some standing water in our basement. Our basement had always been dry so I mentioned this to my engineer husband expecting him to promptly diagnose and fix the problem. Evidently he thought my "the basement is flooded" reports were just the over-reaction of a pregnant woman because he didn't investigate.  In fact he just reassured me, "It's a basement, it's supposed to be wet" (this is really out of character for him). Until the door to the storage area wouldn't shut because it was swollen with water and there was mold growing on the walls we put up just months before. Then he acted on it rather quickly. Turns out our water softener was leaking.

Side note: You know how with your first pregnancy you follow all the rules and microwave your lunch meat and won't even look at Caesar dressing. Well, by the third when your husband reroutes the water around the filter to fix the water soften for a week and half, it doesn't even occur to you that you shouldn't drink it. And then once the water system is fixed you're like, "oh that's why I was so sick."  But that really has nothing to do with the table slide.

Really, the only thing the basement flooding last summer has to do with our table slide is that it left our banquet table water damaged and unusable for normal table purposes.  We had planned to get rid of it, but hadn't gotten around to the task of maneuvering it through the basement around the toys, up the stairs, outside, and to where ever one disposes of large water damaged banquet tables.

The whole table slide came about because of another basement flood.  I was down doing laundry on a very raining day and noticed puddles again.  I texted G, "BASEMENT FLOOD."  Evidently he's learned to believe me about these things because he came home over lunch to investigate (this was the first of two times that week I sent him urgent texts and he had to home over lunch, the other time was a few days later when we had the chicken massacre).

GD was in little engineer heaven.  He put on his rain boots and headed downstairs with G to solve the problem.  They discovered it was not the rain that caused the flooded, but our 20 year old water heater had rusted through and it was time to replace it.

One piece of advice my mom gave me growing up was, "Marry someone who can either fix things, or afford to pay someone else."  I married the former, and then gave him two little assistants.  Within four hours we had a new water heater up and running, partially wired by a four-year-old.

And a cardboard box that it came in to play with.  The cardboard box was turned into several different things before, about a week later, GE had a eureka moment that it would make a great slide coming off of their plastic play fort in the basement.  The cardboard wasn't quite strong enough to hold two boys trying to slide down it.  So their father brought out the twice-water-damaged banquet table and, tadah, we now have the latest and greatest innovation in mid-winter indoor fun.

We've had minimal injuries on it. So far.

How NOT to Milk a Goat In 40 Easy Steps

     We have been milking Tractor for about a week and a half now and, let me tell you, the excitement and glamour is definitely waning.  The "buckets and buckets" of goat milk GD was planning on getting is in reality only 1/4 a cup a day.  I probably could get more, but Tractor doesn't like to be milked.  According to a couple different blogs I should be able to milk-train my goat in 3 days or less using such methods as feeding, talking calmly, caressing, and psychic powers.  Although I haven't tapped into my psychic powers yet, it's been 10 days and I'm still getting kicked.  Since there are over half a million google hits on how to milk a goat, I thought I would tell you how NOT to milk a goat.

  

Goat Milking

     If you've ever read or watched Curious George you know there's nothing that little tailless monkey can't do. George pretty much knows everything.  Or at least that's what GD thinks. So he was pretty adamant that he didn't need to be taught how to milk a goat; he already knew how because he watched curious George milk a cow    (GD also claims the Berenstain Bears taught him how to ice skate without him ever stepping foot on the ice.). I tried to reason with him. 

      How do you know George knows how to milk a cow correctly?  Does he have extensive dairy farming experience?  Is that the only way to milk something?  Are cows and goats the same? Is George even real? 

Basically it was all met with "but he's George!"  GD has never believed in Santa clause but he is convinced Curious George is real. 

     Eventfully I convinced him to watch a YouTube video of some random hillbillies showing how to milk a goat (side note, I recently taught him how to click on other videos in YouTube and he is utterly amazed at the amount of videos my computer contains. He really has no idea. ). Turns out George didn't really do it right. I don't think George even cleans off the teats or sterilizes the bucket when he milks The Rankins' cow Daisy.   GD was kind of crushed that George's pedestal was taken down a few notches by backwoods YouTubers; I guess to him YouTube is even more omniscient than George. Honestly I did kind of question the reliability of such a video but I figured it was a more accurate goat milking demonstration than a cartoon personified monkey learning to milk a cartoon cow in 12 minutes or less while teaching kids to love STEM.  

     Anyway, the moment the boys had been anxiously waiting for finally came.  Mower was two weeks old and Tractor was ready to be milked. The boys built a stanchion, we gathered up milking supplies, and we headed out to the barn in the rain. 

     The first issue was that the boys forgot to account for Tractor's horns in the stanchion dimensions and we couldn't get her in without taking some of it apart. The second problem was that Mower had been nursing recently and Tractor had no milk to be milked. After GD, G, and I all tried without a drop of milk in the bowl, GE said exasperatedly, "Let me do it."  I kind of expected the two year old to end up being the successful one. He definitely has a way with animals so I wouldn't have been surprised if he had been the one to finally coax some milk out. But he didn't. And Tractor was totally over it. 

     The next evening the boys went out to try again but were again unsuccessful. I decided, having substantial lactating experience myself, that I was going to take control of the situation and get some goat milk. I happened to be wearing KM at the time and , So I milked a goat while baby wearing. It was an interesting experience and probably not the best idea but I did get a little milk out and felt like a real pioneer or super crunchy or...something. And then Tractor stepped in the bowl and got manure in it so the milk was a little crunchy too and we had to dump it. 
    The next night we put KM in the stroller and got just enough for the boys to each have a taste. The verdict from GD was that it tastes like coconut milk but G said we need to work on it tasting less goaty. 

Twins!

We had two more baby goats join our goat family last week!  Farmer had twins, Bushhog Grass and Weedwhacker Bill.

Bushhog Grass is the white one.  GD gave her the middle name of grass so that everyone would know that she was not named after a statue of a bushhog, but a real working bushhog.  The brown one is Weedwhacker Bill, named after farming legend "Tractor Pa."

Mower

    Last Monday evening GD burst in the door and say, "You HAVE to come out to the goats!  Tractor had her baby!"

    I didn't believe him at first, but he said, "It's absolutely true!"

    So I went out to this little thing prancing around the barn yard:

Tractor had somehow silently and unassisted birthed her during the afternoon, and the baby was all cleaned up and happily skipping around.

The baby of course is very loved.

The boys named her Mower.  They evidently at some point discussed it, picked out names, and decided who would get what baby.  GD gets this baby, and GE gets Farmer's baby who will be named Bushhog.  I'm sure if Tractor has twins, the boys will let KM take the other baby, but right now KM is happy to just let Mower climb all over her. 

 In my mind, this photo session was going to yield a darling photo of them both cuddling in the basket and gazing with wide eyes at the camera that I would turn in to a vintage-looking print to hang on our office wall.  But Mower was looking for her mother.

This is how Farmer feels about still being pregnant.

Expectant Goats

   We kind of know nothing about this whole dairy goat farming thing. Aside from the little G has read online and the vast amounts of goat knowledge GD claims to already have, we're making this up as we go along. Last fall a lady from church who used to raise goats was talking to me about milking goats like I knew everything about it. I just smiled and nodded and directed her to ask my husband if we needed to borrow their stanchion and pretended I knew what a stanchion was.
   The last I wrote we had accepted a candidate for Baby Goat Daddy. Well before he even met our lovely ladies he sent them a Dear Jane letter. I'm sure it said something like , "It's not you, it's me," but we never heard from his owner again. So we had to move on to Bachelor #2.
  We finally introduced Mr. Goat to our females in January. This was much later than originally planned but I didn't mind because I didn't want to share my due date with a couple of goats.  He was very smelly and was with us for about 6 weeks.  Then it was time to just wait to see if anything had happened.
   Supposedly the only way to know if a goat is pregnant is to have a caprine ultrasound done.  Well, that's definitely not in the homestead budget, and we thought we would just have to wait and see if any baby goats showed up this summer.  Every time we went out to see the goats, GE would ask them "Baby in tummy?  Baby in tummy?"
    Hopefully he realizes that it may be fine to ask a goat that, but it is not okay to ask a human female.
   Several weeks ago I began to suspect that we may have one or two pregnant goats.  They seemed fatigued, they were waddling, and they seemed to have developed an almost maternal-like interest in baby KM.  I was pretty sure I could feel baby goat kicks if I pressed my hand up to their bellies long enough.
   Then one day GD went out, looked under them, and loudly proclaimed, "Yep, they're pregnant!  They have udders, so they must be having babies!"
     He just seems to inherently know how this all works.
     Then GD and GE were able to feel the baby goat kicks.
     Which inevitably led to a discussion that added the term "womb" to GD's vocabulary, and a discussion of how only girls have wombs...well, only girl mammals...yes, the girl cat has a womb but no she can't have babies...yes, Mommy has a womb...
     I really don't know why they don't just take middle school health classes out to a barnyard.
     Something I bet you've never stopped to ponder is, "Do pregnant goats have cravings?"
     Well, judging by the amount of times the break out of their fence every day to chow down on the grass in other parts of the yard, I would say yes, they do have cravings.  And they also are very moody.  They go from friendly and wanting attention to head-butting, especially at feeding time.  The one night I sent G out to check on them at 2 in the morning because I heard one of them crying.  The best he could figure out was that Farmer was upset because she saw a deer.
      Goat gestation is around 24 weeks, so we are expectant to have baby goats sometime mid-July to mid-August.

A Sad Day on the Farm

     My brother loved the movie The Fox and the Hound when he was little, and even though I have never seen the whole movie start to finish he watched it enough I have a good idea of the story line.  A poor orphaned baby fox is adopted by an old lady who names him Todd.  He becomes best friends with a neighbor puppy, Copper, who is destined to be a hunting dog.  Todd and Copper grow up, Todd is released back into the wild, and Copper is trained to hunt for foxes.  There is a moment of great suspense when Copper must decide whether to hunt down his childhood best friend or not.  Throughout the whole movie you're made to feel so sorry for this helpless fox that is being hunted down.

   Honestly, I don't remember what Copper decides to do.  I'm guessing he lets Todd go because it's a Disney movie.  But I really wish that Copper would have led the hunter straight to Todd, viciously attacked him, and then attacked all the other foxes in forest.
    Most specifically the fox that got all 12 of our chickens the other night.

     On Friday morning I thought it was odd that I didn't see them running all over the yard, but I figured since it was cold and snowing they were being wimps in the coop.  When we went out to check on them later that morning, we found a massacre.  All 12 chickens were dead.
     All 12 chickens.
     Even Dusty, who was carried around the kitchen in a bucket for much of the first week of her life and is more like the family dog.  And Watermelon, who I had been planning on finally matching up with a fellow this spring to give into her baby fever.  And Mack, the hen with psychological issues with a twitch who is GE's favorite, who doesn't even sleep in the coop with the other girls but insists on sleeping in the garden shed.

    The fact that the fox went over to the garden shed to also attack Mack made this feel more like a cold, calculated mass chicken murder than just part of farming and the circle life. 

      No, foxes definitely aren't the cute fluffy forest creatures pictured on baby's pajamas. 

     And the fox didn't even eat any of the chickens. As GD would say, "That's not very efficient."

      The boys are handling it pretty well. GD is being his practical farmer/engineer self and approaching it like a problem to be solved. His first response was, "We can get some more. The guy at Tractor Supply said they're going to have chicks soon."  And then he started studying the mud around the coop looking for tracks to identify what animal attacked. 

     GE is a little young to completely understand. We didn't let him see coop and GD was a good big brother and very gently broke the news to him. He sat down real close to him and quietly told him, "Our chickens got hurt. And they all died. But it's ok, we'll get new ones.  Tractor Supply will have baby chicks soon."  GE was sad that day, but we've been stuck inside because of the cold and rain so he hasn't had too much of a chance to miss chasing his chickens. 

     I, on the other hand, am 8 months pregnant. I usually handle death pretty well, maybe even too well. Death was a daily part of my job when I worked so I have kind of a bizarre relationship with it. But 12 of my children's beloved pets dying in one day was not something I have the emotional stability for right now. G tried to assure me, "They're livestock. It's part of farming," to which I sobbed, "Most people don't have portraits of their livestock in their living room."  G is now seriously reconsidering whether I can really handle raising broiler chickens and a pig named Christmas Ham this year.

    I even had a hard time using eggs for baking a couple days later. 

    We have plans to get replacement hens in the next few days (and keep them securely locked in the coop). The boys need chickens to chase, and our yard looks cold and lonely without the feathered girls running all over. And the boys will get to raise some chicks again this year. Who knows, they may even get some ducklings or a bunny out of this because I feel so bad about it. 

The New Ottoman

    I have been nesting in full force since I was about 6 weeks pregnant. I've been in a constant de-cluttering and organizing  mode. As a result the storage area and my craft room have been purged several times and the Goodwill near my OB office has seen a spike in donations. And also as a result our coffee table ended up in the burn pile. 

    We have been talking about replacing the coffee table for years. I bought it at a thrift store for $10 before we were married. I thought it was a great deal when I got it, we loved it for a time, and it served it's purpose, but it had to go. We had been looking for something not quite as ugly to take it's place but never found anything we both liked. It was big and dark and covered with cat scratches and a irremovable layer of stickiness that comes from years of toddlers eating breakfast at it. All it did was collect clutter.  So one day I couldn't take it anymore and hauled it outside. 

    The boys instantly loved the extra space it's absence left in the living room and right away got to work plowing, planting, and combining the fresh carpet under where the coffee table stood. The extra space also proved to be great for wrestling, playing "shark" and "T-Rex" and just general rough housing in the living room.  I wished I had gotten rid of the dark, dated, ark-like coffee table months ago. 

    But we still needed something there, so I made an ottoman. Supported with headliner foam and stuffed with about 10 bags of fiber fill, the boys quickly discovered that the new ottoman is a big squishy irresistible pouf of playtime potential.  It was like an indoor playground just for them. For the first couple weeks of being proud ottoman owners we had to hide it from the boys because of the general recklessness it caused. We are now able to keep the new ottoman in the living room, but not without a few new household rules. Like more household rules than I care to admit, this set of rules has evolved over time through the usual course of "unrealistic expectations," to  "I'm going to lose my mind trying to enforce this," to a list of "they're more like guidelines anyway."

    If you visit my house, this will be what you see the ottoman possibly being used for, and the new household rules enacted as a result.

-Rolling the new ottoman all over the house.
New house rule: The ottoman is not a toy boulder.

-Jumping on the ottoman.
New house rule:  The ottoman is not a toy trampoline.

-Sumo wrestling with the ottoman.
New house rule:  The ottoman is not a toy to be used to smoosh your brother no matter how hilarious he thinks it is.

Sprinting across the kitchen, diving through the air, and landing on their stomachs on the ottoman.
New house rule:  Yes, you jumped really high but the ottoman is still not a toy.

Continuing to roll the new ottoman all over the house.
New house rule:  Even though you still think that the ottoman is a toy, it must stay in the living room.

Starting on the couch, jumping off and using the ottoman as a springboard, sprinting across the kitchen, and sliding on their knees into playroom, seeing how close they can come to smashing into the wall without actually hitting it.
New house rule: If you say, "I better go get my bike helmet for this," even though Mommy is proud of you for taking safety precautions, you probably should not be doing what you're doing.  (Unless you're skateboarding, somehow skateboarding in the kitchen was approved by the parental council as long as one is under 4 feet tall and wearing a helmet).

Sprinting across the kitchen and jumping over the ottoman ("See Mommy, I'm not even touching the ottoman now!").
New house rule: Oh, whatever.

Lining up the trampoline, the giant Lego cushions, the ottoman, and the couch to make a "bouncy" room.
New house rule:  If you get hurt using the ottoman as a toy, I will not feel bad for you.

Jumping off the recliner, almost touching the ceiling, and landing on their stomachs on the ottoman.

New house rule: This not allowed. However they were able to get a couple jumps in while I watched wondering how we've managed to never have to take either of them to the ER.

The new ottoman--it's a bit more lopsided now than it started out.