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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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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Today, I enter day four of sick baby/massive teething fever/maybe it's an earache/I don't know what the heck is going on so I guess I will take her to the doctor's today.

What I'm saying is, there hasn't been a lot of sleeping going on around here this week. Which is why I felt like I should have been going to bed earlier than 11:00 last night. Nevertheless, there I was at 11:00, surfing channels to find something on the television worth falling asleep to.

Wait, have I told you that I fall asleep with the TV on? Yeah, I've been doing it for almost a year and a half now. Ever since our car accident. It started because, back then, I couldn't handle being alone with my mind. Every time it got quiet, I would replay the car accident, but with different outcomes. Not pleasant. I would turn on the TV so I had something else to concentrate on until my body eventually gave up and shut down. And while I usually no longer have to fight visions of fiery explosions, disfigurement and decapitation (lovely, right?), I still have to have something to listen to while I fall asleep.

And that is how, at 11:00 last night, I ended up watching Life of a Sperm on the National Geographic channel. Because who can resist a show that promises to blow the experience of a sperm up to human size?

And while I'm not in the habit of recapping television shows on this blog, well, I just HAVE TO share. Of course, I didn't record it, so I have to go on my memory from last night. Which may be a little fuzzy since I was laughing so hard and the tears may have blurred my vision. So it is possible that not everything I say actually happened. But most of it did.

We start with a doctor who, I KID YOU NOT, specializes in scrotumology, or something equally ridiculous sounding. He tells us that, if sperm were the size of people, a testicle would be like a massive skyscraper soaring into the clouds. We see thousands of happy little spermfolk, all dressed in white, crammed into the testicle sky scraper. In what I am pretty sure is a departure from reality, there is a large open space down the center of the world's largest gonad and, inexplicably, ticker tape is floating down through it. I suppose it was the stationary version of a sperm parade because...

Boom chicka bow wow!

Glen arrives home to find Emily cooking dinner and is apparently turned on by how she's chopping the vegetables. While little sperm people sit knitting in Glen's vas deferens (which, as tightly as they are packed in, looks like a workman's comp claim JUST WAITING to happen), Glen and Emily move it into the bedroom, where they roll around and make out until...

Shots of terrified sperm people as they shoot through an enclosed water slide!

And then, THE LINE of the whole show:

"For Glen's sperm, entering Emily's vag!na is like landing at the beach on D-Day."

It's war, people.

Except, instead of a beach, the bewildered spermfolk are looking around a vast mountain range. 

Then, all of the sudden, SWISH! They are all washed away in a giant Summer's Eve tsunami.

Or not. But it wouldn't have surprised me if they went there.

Millions of spermfolk begin stampeding like deranged wildebeests in white pants. Then they reach...nothing. They stand there confused until giant ladders descend from the sky (should I tell you they are supposed to be cervical fluid, or is that too much information?). It's a miracle! The spermfolk begin battling their way up The Stairway to Heaven.

Ahem.

It was about this point that I decided that the script for this show was obviously written in a college dorm room. While a lot of alcohol was being consumed.

As we enter the cervix, a disembodied voice ominously proclaims that this is Sperm Hell. We see girly parts flowing with lava and shooting flames.

I'm not going there. It's too easy. And wildly inappropriate. And that's coming from the girl who has already mentioned feminine freshness products.

Returning from commercial, the Hell, fire, and brimstone are gone and we are informed that the cervix is an urban area. And OH MY GOSH! most of the sperm are being crushed by urban sprawl. The sperm are losing their habitat! I'm sure it's the Conservatives' fault! The majority of the sperm are killed.

About 1% of the remaining spermfolk don gold chains, diamond-studded grills, and oversized clocks and decide to quit the quest for fertilization in order to pursue a career in entertainment as Flav o Flav impersonators.

And Darwin rejoiced.

I left the room for a bit at this point, but I'm pretty sure the remaining urban spermfolk jumped in their Cadillac Escalades  and headed west. Half of them were killed by hippie protesters who objected to their large carbon footprint.

When I returned, the spermfolk had made it to the Great Plains of the uterus. This is where they encountered Emily's natural defense system, the leucocytes or, as I prefer to call them, the Druid Orcs (that would be a Lord of the Rings reference for those of you with a low geek IQ). Amazingly, the spermfolk press on, despite the fact that a normal reaction would be to RUN LIKE HELL. But not the brave spermfolk. No! They have a purpose! And the fallopian tube is in sight!

Like any major hotspot, we find out that Club Tube has a velvet rope. All of the quiet, awkward sperm who still live in their parent's basements are turned away and quickly devoured by the Druid Orcs.

The fallopian tubes are a quiet, mellow place where the spermfolk can float down a peaceful river on tube rafts while dropping acid.

Or maybe that was the show's producers.

The egg appears in the distance and the reinvigorated spermfolk jump in the water and start shedding their clothes as they race each other to the egg. Sperm skinny dipping! Woo Hoo! And all of the female viewers cursed at the TV, wondering why the producers didn't cast Michael Phelps as the winning sperm who, FINALLY, fertilizes the egg.

Back outside the womb, we get a closeup of Glen's fully-clothed scrotum, which then pans out to Glen and Emily walking in the park and pushing a stroller.

The End. Roll credits.

I went to sleep to Fox News.

 

 

 

 

 

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This weekend, the toilet in the kids' bathroom became clogged. I know, what else is new, right? Except one thing...No amount of plunging could fix it. Nor could vinegar, bleach, or toilet bowl cleaner.

I know a lot of things that can break down toilet clogs. The wisdom of experience.

Yesterday, I finally called Sean at work and told him that the toilet situation needed to be put at the top of the "To Do" list. I mean, I've kept my mouth shut about the fact that he hadn't replaced the wax ring after I bought a new one almost a month ago. I just dealt with the fact that sitting on the toilet was akin to riding a Tilt-o-Whirl. But the constant plunging and having to let the kids use my bathroom? No dice. It was time for action.

He set to work while I went to Cub Scouts. Part-way through Scouts, he called to ask me to pick something up. When I told him that I would have to call him back since I was in the middle of something he said, "OK, but you're going to LOVE this one."

My mind went to candy wrappers and egg shells. And it wasn't a leap. I had seen wrappers in the toilet. The eggshells? In the bathroom trash can. (What? Don't you peel eggs in the bathroom?)

I was wrong.

In case you were ever wondering, we have now determined that a three inch chunk of carrot will stop all kinds of things from flushing.

Most likely, my two-year-old is responsible. Or the five-year-old, who just confessed as much to me. That, or the Easter Bunny flicked the butt of his carrot stogy in my toilet. 

Oh, and speaking of awkward Easter Bunny moments...

What is the worst thing that a child can find during the big Easter egg hunt? A dead rabbit. Or, in this case, a DISMEMBERED dead rabbit.

What can I say? We have hawks.

The rest of the day, I got to listen to my seven-year-old proclaiming, "Someone decapitated the Easter Bunny!" (Which, Go Noah, for the correct use of  "decapitated" in a sentence! I am so proud!)

And honestly? I considered going down, scattering some candy wrappers and egg shells, and taking a few pictures. You can thank my complete wussiness about dead things for the fact that you aren't looking at a gang banged Easter Bunny right now.

But now, Easter is over and life is moving on. The carrot was removed from the toilet. With a serving fork. Which I'm pretty sure is a breech of etiquette since it was a raw carrot and obviously qualified for the use of a salad fork. (Don't worry...that particular eating utensil has been discarded because, eeewwwwww!) And we ended up having to buy a new toilet anyhow. Apparently, with all of the "help" Sean was getting, the toilet tank somehow ended up cracked. So sacrificing my serving fork to the porcelain god was entirely unnecessary.

All that is left to do is work off those extra calories from the obscene amount of Easter candy consumed this weekend.

 

 

 

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