The school year will be over in a few weeks. Suddenly, I am going to have A LOT more time on my hands.

Well, except for the part where I have to start preparing to homeschool on my own next year.

Oh, and the garden. That takes a good chunk of my time during the summer. Especially when I have to start canning it all.

And then there's the big house purge that needs to be done if I'm ever going to get organized.

It is almost summer. And I might have a minute or two of cumulative spare time over the next three months. So I did the logical thing. I ordered chickens.

I can hear you all laughing and shaking your heads. Don't think that I can't.

I started thinking about raising chickens close to a year ago. Sean and I talked about it some and he showed enough openness to the idea that I ordered a Dummies book on raising chickens. Not long into the book, I discovered that chickens live about 8 years, but usually only lay eggs for about 4. Now, I'm a big softy and can't imagine killing and eating something that I have lovingly raised from its infancy. But I'm also a realist and had no desire to support a bunch of post-menopausal chickens who want to live on the dole.

Sean felt the same way. The chicken discussions stopped.

Then, a couple of months ago, Sean emailed me a Craigslist post from someone wanting to sell off their chickens. Why was he looking at chickens on Craigslist? I have no idea. But I'm sure he regrets it now, because it got me back to wanting chickens.

I read. We talked. He consented. I ordered a catalog.

Can I start by saying that if you don't want chickens, NEVER look at a chicken catalog. They are just too much fun. Different colored birds that lay different colored eggs in different sizes. Chickens that look like chickens. Chickens that look like turkeys. Chickens that look like Muppets! (And I'm not even talking about the Muppet chickens that followed Gonzo around, because those chickens looked like chickens.)

Be still my beating heart.

And believe me, I'm not the only one who felt that way about the chicken catalog. Eli still likes to sit and look through it. (Chickens! EGGS!) And the day it came in the mail? After searching the whole house because it wasn't where I had left it, I finally asked Caleb if he knew where it was. He smiled, went straight to his little brother's bed, and pulled it out from under the mattress. Which, of course, if he's going to be hiding magazines with pictures of breasts under the bed, I'm glad it is at least a chicken catalog.

So, after much oooh-ing and ahhh-ing and OH MY GOSH, DO CHICKENS REALLY LAY EGGS THAT COLOR???-ing, I finally placed my order yesterday. I am getting four female Golden Buff chicks:

These are the superheros of the brown egg-laying world.

 

Then, I ordered three female Wellsummer chicks:

They lay dark reddish-brown speckled eggs!

 

But that's not all...

These are Ameraucanas. Or Easter egg chickens. Because they lay either blue or green eggs. And, yes, I got three female chicks in this breed, too. That brings me up to ten laying hens.

 

But wait! There's more!

Black Silkies! (OK,total honesty? I wanted Partridge Silkies, but they didn't have any available with my other chickens until August). These are the Muppet chickens I was talking about. They are bantams, so the hens only get about 2 lbs (as opposed to the other chickens I'm getting, where the hens are 4-6 lbs). Once again, I ordered three, even though I don't really want/need that many. Yes, they will lay (little) eggs, but they are mainly ornamental birds. The problem is, they are so small that they can't be sexed as chicks. I ordered three in the hope that statistics will be on my side and at least one will be a hen. I'll have to rehome any roosters (and pray that someone will want them).

My birds will be hatching on June 14th. I will pick them up from the hatchery that day or the next.

So, in just over a month, I will have thirteen chickens. And I've never so much as fed a chicken in my life.

We better start building a coop.

 

 

 

 

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I just did something. Something BIG. Something scary. Something I hope won't end up scarring my children for life.

I just informed the online school that we won't be returning next year.

As of this moment, we are an official, 100% independent homeschooling family.

Gah!

Of course, I thought about doing it last year. Ultimately, I stayed with the online school so I would have a paper trail saying that Wyatt started school this year. A couple of months ago, I started thinking about it again. Some of you were extremely encouraging. And that gave me the courage to look a little more seriously. I found curriculum options that wouldn't put us in the poor house (buying the online school's curriculum without actually being part of the school is insanely expensive).

I decided that this was what I wanted to do.

But I still didn't do it.

For about a month now, the school has been sending emails and recorded calls reminding me that I can register. I need to register. Would you please just tell us whether or not you are going to register, already???  And I kept putting it off. Because this is a scary decision. And I'm a weenie.

Today, we had our final conference call with the boys' teacher (she talks to them every couple of months on the phone, per the schools requirement, but SHE'S the teacher--I'm the learning coach). We have worked with her both years that we have been with the online school, and I actually like her a lot. It didn't take long before she asked the question I knew would be coming...were we going to register for next year? I told her my feelings. I told her my reasons. She asked if I had decided on curriculum and I told her what I had found and what I still needed to come up with.

She supported me.

Seriously, that was NOT the response that I expected to get. I expected her to try to talk me out of it. To try and resell me on all of the benefits of the online school. To make me question my ability to do it. Instead, she said that she could totally understand why I would feel stifled by the curriculum since she has had the same experience as a teacher for the online school. She said that she could tell that I had my children's educational interests in mind and that I was obviously taking it all very seriously and that she thought it would probably be a good thing for them.

She even offered to go into the system and mark them as not returning for me. And I told her not to because I wanted to check with Sean ONE MORE TIME to make sure that he was on board with the idea.

He is.

So, tonight, I clicked on the little box that says we aren't returning. It was exhilarating (hey, I don't have a lot of excitement in my life). It was freeing.

It was terrifying.

I have a lot of work ahead of me.

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Every year, as Spring arrives and the weather gets warmer and wetter, we develop a mud pit at the bottom of the steps to our deck. This is especially troublesome since on our deck is a door that leads into my kitchen. And that door includes the doggy door that my dogs (and, at times, my kids) enter and exit my house through. This means that I spend months fighting (and giving up fighting) the constant muddy footprints leading through my kitchen.

This year, Sean got a bright idea. He commandeered one of the bales of straw that was waiting to go in my garden and spread it over the muddy area at the end of the steps. I have the occasional stray piece of straw find its way into my house, but the mud problem is 100% better. 

Of course, now, I have a hard time getting my clothes dry.

What???

It turns out that birds like straw.

It turns out that birds like stuffing straw into my dryer exhaust. 

They also like filling our grill with straw. (Although that doesn't effect how quickly my clothes dry.)

For weeks, I have sent my boys (mostly Noah) out almost every day to pull the hurriedly made nests out of my dryer vent so I could dry my clothes. A few days ago, despite having cleaned everything the day before, when the boys pulled out the latest nest, they also found two eggs.

 

 Today, they found another one in the grill.

 

Yes, I feel guilty that we are taking these eggs away so they can't hatch. Of course, not nearly as guilty as I would feel if we accidentally ignited a bunch of baby birds the next time we wanted to make hamburgers.

 

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Saturdays are always a little bit frustrating for me. I start out with a clear idea of what I want to get done and the belief that I should have plenty of time in which to do it.

And I should.

If I didn't have a family to feed, kids to chase around, unexpected visitors, unexpected errands, and a husband who wanted to put new brakes on his car (the nerve!).

So, by 7:00 Saturday evening, I felt like I had been running all day long and had barely even scratched the surface on the things I wanted to do. So I did the logical thing...I made rice crispy treats.

Then I worked some more on my list.

As I finished the evening working on my last endeavor on the list, a giant batch of homemade granola, I found myself reflecting on an experience from my past. Honestly, I don't know if I've told this story here before. If I have, it has been a long time.

At the age of 21, I finished up college (well, except for a couple of courses I was doing through independent study), left Utah, and came back home. My husband and I had been engaged at one point, then he left the country for two years to serve a mission in Hungary for our church and, through a series of event that I won't go into right now but could probably be classified as all my fault, we had broken up about a year earlier. Even so, I was so absorbed in the college part of being a college student that I had completely neglected to date during that time period. I may, in fact, be the only reasonably normal person who can say that she made it through BYU with only having gone out on two certifiable dates.

Seriously.

So when I left the land of plenty (of Mormons) and returned home to a very small congregation of young singles, I was in for a new experience. An experience not unlike being thrown to a pack of wolverines. With a pork chop tied around your neck. My social calendar was so full that it took, well, a calendar to keep up with it. I was literally having lunch with one guy and dinner with another the same day.

One young man made a particularly good impression when he asked me out by leaving a copy of Where the Wild Things Are, rewritten in a way to ask me on a date to the zoo, on my doorstep. There was a slight hitch in his plan when I refused to come to the door when he knocked and ran because I had been asleep and was convinced, for some reason, that the constant pounding on the door must mean that someone was trying to kill me and I WOULD NOT COME OUT FROM UNDER MY COVERS. Because that was the logical response.

I ended up having to work the day he wanted to go to the zoo, so we went out to dinner. After dinner, he told me that since he had fed me, I needed to feed him next by cooking for him. I found it a bit odd and laughed it off. Our next date, we went bowling. (Remember those last couple of independent study classes? One of them was bowling. Yes, really, my graduation was being held up by a BOWLING class.) This time, he declared that the winner had to make dinner for the loser.

Yeah, he was pretty confident that he was going to win. And he did.

And I still wouldn't cook for him because OH MY GOSH I was beginning to feel like he thought he was auditioning for a Betty Crocker cook-off.

If I had to take a guess, I'm betting that at some point in that young man's life, someone (probably a misguided youth leader) told him to make sure that a girl would be a good homemaker before he got too attached. So he was determined to find out if I could cook.

Now, anyone who knows me knows that I don't put up with nonsense like that. Anyone who knows me knows that I MESS WITH people who pull nonsense like that.

Which is why, when that young man finally married someone else (who probably cooked for him on the first date), he STILL thought that I didn't even know how to boil water. We went out on several dates. And I wouldn't even make him macaroni and cheese. Out of a box. Even when he begged. Which he did.

I wonder what he would have thought if he knew I would be a good cook, a good mother, a good teacher to my children, a gardener, a woman who plans to raise chickens, maybe not the best housekeeper all of the time, but good enough at plenty of other things to make up for some dust and clutter (I hope). I never stopped traffic because of my beauty (although I have warranted some horn honking as men have driven by), but I also have never stopped traffic because of my hideousness. All in all, I was a good catch (if I do say so myself). Not that his opinion now would make a difference to me..I was the one who walked away from that potential relationship.

All of this to say, I walked away because WHO THE HECK WAS HE to treat me like I was on an interview for the perfect spouse, as opposed to just a date? And this was in 1998...years before shows like The Bachelor, and (heaven help us all) Rock of Love, which I'm pretty sure qualifies as a definitive sign of the impending apocalypse. Back then, the idea that finding a suitable partner was some sort of interview process was ridiculous. Now, people think nothing of filling out questionnaires on internet dating sights so they can match you with the "right" person.

When I fell in love with my husband, I was seventeen years old. We weren't thinking about whether or not we were a good match for marriage. We were just going on personality and hormones.

Lots and lots of hormones.

I never had some detailed "must have" list for a spouse. Sure, I had some broad qualifiers. He had to share my religion. He needed to have a good work ethic. And he needed to be good with kids. My husband is all of those things.

But if I had made some random list of qualities, or filled out some questionnaire?  I don't know that we would have ended up together. And that would have been a shame, because we work.

What do you think? Is our society creating a skewed sense of courting and marriage with all of these dating shows and web sites? Or do I have it wrong? Did you have a specific list of what you wanted in a husband (or wife)? Did you get the things on your list?

 

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Seven years ago today, I sat in my office for the last time. I tried in vain to find meaningful things to do to occupy my mind. Instead, I thought about a young woman three hours away who was being induced with her first child. I wondered how her labor was going. I wondered if the baby had been born yet.

Most of all, I wondered if she would change her mind. I wondered if, on that day, I would become a mother, too.

Tonight, as my family drove an hour to the closest IHOP so Noah could celebrate his birthday at his favorite restaurant, I looked at the redbuds blooming along the highway. And I remembered how, making that trip to meet my son, was the first time I ever really noticed the redbuds. I can't see them without instantly going back to that gray rainy day and the excitement I felt as each mile brought me closer to seeing him.

He made me a mom.

How is it possible that seven years have passed since that day?

Seven-year-olds aren't little kids anymore. They have opinions. They're independent. They like Justin Beiber (I guess someone has to, right?).

They want computers.

A little while ago, Noah started talking about saving his money to buy his own computer. He has saved about forty dollars. He was excited about the idea of getting birthday money to go towards his goal. We talked to various grandparents and figured he would probably end up with over $100 in birthday money. 

In Mormon culture, I think that a large percentage, if not most people, have heard of the parable of the bicycle. This story (which comes from a book called Believing Christ by Stephen E. Robinson) tells about a child who really wanted a new bicycle. So he worked hard and saved all of the money he earned for weeks. Finally, he took his piggy bank and went to the store with his father. But when he saw the price tag on the bike he wanted, his face fell because he had only earned a couple of dollars. After proclaiming in despair that he would never have enough, his father told that if he handed over all of the money he had worked so hard for and gave his father a big hug and kiss, the father would make up the difference.

This story was used to illustrate our relationship with Christ and the power of the atonement.

All of that to say, we decided this was a bicycle moment. 

The only problem was that we had a hard time finding something that went into the budget (we decided to spend more than we normally would on a birthday present, but not ridiculously more). At first, we were just going to go with Craig's List. But we weren't entirely comfortable with something with absolutely no warranty. Finally, yesterday, I found a nice-looking netbook that seemed perfect for him. Only one problem...it isn't carried in the store that sells it. It has to be ordered online.

I decided to have a conversation with Noah to set up the expectation that there wouldn't be a big present on his birthday.

"Noah," I said, "You have two choices. We were planning on helping you get your computer for a birthday present, but we would have to order it, so you wouldn't get it until a few days after your birthday. If you want to be able to open everything ON your birthday, we can get you something else, but it will be a very long time until you can earn enough money to get a computer. What do you think?"

"Well, um..." he thought, "I suppose maybe I'm a bit young for a computer. I guess I'll take toys."

WHAT???

Yeah, no parabolic lessons here. (Is that a word? If it is, is it the right one? Or did I just use a math term, in which case, there were OBVIOUSLY no parabolic lessons because I can't teach something when I don't even know what it is...)

Make no mistake about it, that child WANTS a computer. He has been talking about it for weeks. He just has no patience. And he wanted presents.

After a bit more talking about it, Noah finally looked at me, heaved a huge sigh, and said, "FINE. I'll take a computer."

This kid, obviously, doesn't know how good he's got it. But he's only seven, so I'll forgive him.

Of course, we made sure that he had three gift bags of small presents to open today. And he's having a big family party on Saturday. He got his traditional day at the office with Daddy today. And the coveted dinner at IHOP.

This evening, after he finished talking on the phone with his birthmom and telling her all about his day, he handed the phone back to me.

"He sounds like he really had a great birthday," she told me.

He did. 

And he can't stop talking about getting his computer.

Happy Birthday, son. I love you.

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