Clucking Nuts!

Today I got 15 eggs out of the coop. Beautiful eggs that taste like nothing you can buy in the store. I love fresh eggs. And I love to bake, and baking with fresh eggs makes everything taste amazing. Here's a little useful information for you. Did you know that, typically, fresh eggs from chickens raised in someone's backyard have half the cholesterol of most store bought eggs? Not only that, they have twice as much vitamin E, 6 times as much vitamin A, and 4-6 times the amount of omega-3's. And it doesn't end there, those are just some measurements using the popular buzz words. The differences in health benefits are beyond measure. It seemed like it would take forever for our chickens to start laying eggs. We put a lot of money into building a secure coop and run for our birds. We brooded several sets of chickens in our house. All in all, it has been a lot of work. My birthday is August 24th, and I went out to the coop thinking, "I can feel it. T...

This is an infamous week in our house. The week that any parent of a teenager wanting to convince them of the importance of abstinence, should have sent their kid to our place. One evening this past summer, Alex and I were hanging out watching a movie together after the kids went to bed. We do this on the weekends, get some grownup pretentious snacks, rent a movie, and have a date at home. We were not very far into our movie, John Carter , as I remember (a movie that will forever be ruined for us), when Micah came running out of his room looking scared. "I swallowed a piece of metal!" We sat there shell shocked. Our four-year-old, first-born, Mister Responsible, Mister Never-puts-things-in-his-mouth... We reeled for a second, then simultaneously realized that we needed to stay calm if we wanted him to tell us what happened. I asked him to draw me a picture of what he swallowed. He very neatly drew a bolt, with rounded head, threaded shaft and flat bottom. Alex drew ...

One of the things I find most fascinating about life is the way that people change. When I got married, I knew I was not marrying the same man I started dating 6 years earlier. Now another 6 years have gone by, and the man I am married to now is neither the man I dated nor the one I married, but someone new entirely. On the same note, I have known my mother in-law for more than 12 years, and our relationship has evolved drastically several times over. Our second group of baby chicks was a mix of Barred Rocks and Golden Comets that we purchased from a feed store. My mother in-law ordered 15 chicks, she picked them up, picked out the 7 she wanted, and gave us the other 8. These chicks were already sexed, meaning they were all hens, supposedly. Now not one of ours turned out to be a rooster... and not one, but TWO of my mother in-law's did. A couple weeks after getting the chicks, my mother in-law kept saying to me, "I think Rosie is a rooster." I thought she was p...

"Aggie" as it turns out is not short for Agatha, but rather Agamenmon. That's right, we have a rooster. Of all the breeds of chicken we have, all can be sexed when hatched except the silkies. We got 2 silkies, knowing they could be roosters. For a long time we thought we were safe, but then one Sunday morning on the way to the coop, we heard that unmistakable sound resonate from inside the coop. I actually really like it. Before when people referred to our place as a farm, I would roll my eyes and say, "it's not a farm... not yet anyway." Now, every morning when I hear Aggie crow, I feel pride vibrating inside me, and sometimes can't help but gleefully shout, "It's a farm!" The rooster makes it real to me. At first I had declared that the day a rooster crowed in my coop, he would be that night's dinner. Roosters can be very mean... very, very mean. And I had images in my head of a rooster latching his spurs into Eden...

I went for my first run in the country, and when I came home, I announced to Alex that I was never again leaving our house without my phone, a can of mace, boots and bug spray. Here's why: I had planned for weeks that on the day I was 6 weeks postpartum, I would go for a run. Since I had such an easy labor and delivery with Declan, I was approved to begin exercising early, but nothing intense until 6 weeks. I was dying to get back into shape, but also remembering my first run after Eden . Two months after having Eden , I attempted a run. I made it a quarter of a mile, and was a wheezy, sweaty mess, and feeling undiscovered levels of discomfort in the area that used to be my abs. So I had somewhat low expectations for my run. Nevertheless, I was excited. I took my car out and measured the shortest trip by road, making a block around our property. It is just under 3 miles. I made note of landmarks every quarter of a mile, so I would know exactly how far I had run. On th...

We have the greatest and strangest cat. I am not a cat person... at all. I like other people's cats, but never wanted one of my own. Well, then Alex and I bought a house. It was nearly a hundred years old and was not what you would call a tight house. Our heating bills were atrocious. So, we knew we had leaks. Shortly after moving in, we began to discover mouse droppings. So, I went and bought some mouse traps and Alex set them out. Days went by and we kept finding droppings, but did not catch any mice. So, I bought more traps. This was before we had children, so I was at war. Our house was a gauntlet of traps. Still we did not catch anything. One morning I woke up and watched a mouse the size of a hamster walk across the middle of the floor and help itself to the dog's dish. When it saw me, it calmly walked back across the middle of the floor and disappeared down the cold air return. I was furious. I told Alex that if he did not figure out where they were coming in...

My son has a cardboard fetish. I can't tell you how many times he has come up to me carrying an empty cardboard container with a hungry look in his eyes, and asked, “Mom... Can I have this?” His room is a sea of diaper boxes, shoe boxes, and other random boxes. He does not just hoard them. He builds with them, using in his words, “good, strong tape.” I did not start labeling this a fetish until one night, after the kids were asleep in their beds (or so I thought), and I went to the bathroom. Once past the point of no return on the toilet, I looked over and noticed that there was no toilet paper. Now this happens often. I should have bought stock in toilet paper before Eden started potty training. You would think I would learn to look before committing myself to the toilet... Oh well. Anyway, when I noticed that the toilet paper was used up, I called out to Alex my predicament. And I heard a little voice from Micah's room. “Mom? You know that round cardboard thing......

We now have 14 chickens and 4 more coming in a month. My house is beginning to smell like a barn, but the coop is not done... not that that matters as the older chicks are not yet fully feathered, and it is too cold for them to live outside. I'm becoming impatient to get these chickens out of my house... mostly because they are escaping. A few days ago, when we got home, we did a quick head count and found that one chicken was missing. Our biggest bird, Gwendolyn, was hanging out in our laundry room. This is not the first time that Gwen has escaped. Chasing chickens around my house is not what I had envisioned when I agreed to this crazy scheme. I have now completely gotten over my chicken phobia. Our birds are very friendly, and will hop right into our hands and snuggle down. Chickens are strange animals. When we got our first brood, one was injured. The little fluffball baby chicks were going at the injured bird trying to peck it to death. We learned that thi...

I'm a person who is naturally wired to raise boys. My son makes sense to me. He and I speak the same language. I always wanted to have a girl also, but the idea also scared me.  Well, then Eden came along, and broke every preconceived idea I had about having a daughter. She is the perfect little girl. And by perfect, I mean that before her first birthday she knocked out a tooth, she wears clunky boy's boots with a pink fluffy skirt, laughs when boys throw rocks at her, and is the world's best cuddler. She is already tall and slim for her age, has porcelain skin and looks like a small angel. In contrast, her laugh sounds like a witch's cackle, her smile has a hint of crazy in it (which is aided by the missing tooth), and she has wispy hair that flies in every direction. She has a vivid imagination. Recently I was sitting on the couch and she came running up to me in a dramatic frenzy. She scrambled into my lap, tucked her feet in, and said in a mock terrifie...

Early on a Tuesday morning, I got a phone call from an excited lady at the post office, "I have a package here for you, and it's peeping!" I knew the chicks had been shipped the afternoon before and were safe in the box for 72 hours, so I made arrangements to pick them up in the afternoon. I decided that with 2 very excited preschoolers, it would be better to wait until Alex was home to open the box. It also bought me more time before I was committed to actually touching a chicken. Picking up chickens from the post office was a new experience for both myself and the post lady. With a grin she confessed that she had been peeking in the holes all day, and sent me off with my box, wishing me luck. I put the box on the floor of my van where the kids could hear the cheeping, then drove home slowly. When we got home, I had Micah place the box on the kitchen table. And after a few minutes of the kids bumping the box trying to peak through the holes, and whispering ...

Two weeks before the arrival of our third child, I went into labor... that's right. I had been having Braxton Hicks contractions for a while, and they were getting more intense, but one day they just kept coming. I kept track of them all day... 15 minutes apart... 10 minutes apart. We went about our normal business, taking care of our children and put our kids to bed. Alex and I sat up watching a movie, timing contractions, when we heard the unmistakable sound of vomit. We ended up spending most of the night cleaning up our son and changing sheets, while he fought the stomach flu. By 5 am , my contractions were 5 min apart and a minute long... time to head to the hospital. So we packed up our kids, and brought Micah a bucket. I sat in the hospital for an hour or so while the nurses monitored my contractions. It seemed I was in labor, the contractions were real. But when they checked my cervix, there was no progress, which was not normal. Well, then I started vomitting. The low po...

The country life was not originally my dream. It was my husband's. And even after I began to share the dream, I flatly refused to have chickens. Firstly, my dad grew up across the road from a chicken farm, and drilled it into me from a young age to live as far away from chickens as possible. And secondly, chickens creep me out. I would not call it an actual phobia, but chickens make me very uncomfortable. Consequently, we are getting the silliest, fuzziest, most docile chickens you can raise. As I was reflecting on our life in preparation for this blog, I came to a monumental revelation. I have always considered myself to be a decisive person. And I have even come under a lot of criticism for pushing my husband around. But looking back, I realize that all my current plans started as dreams of my husband's. And thinking more, I realize there is nothing my husband declared he wanted that we have not done. Alex knew what he wanted, got me to want it too, then somehow got me to pl...

I'm not sure at what point it became our dream to live in the country. I think it all started as a small dream for a little privacy, and Alex's statement, "I want to be able to walk out my back door naked and not have anyone call the cops." Somehow this evolved into a full blown country dream complete with 5 acres, 45 minute commute, chickens, horses, home schooling, and living off the grid. I enjoy writing and keep journals for myself and for each of our children. Occasionally, I get the chance to write something that people actually want to read. My husband and a few friends have been bugging me for a while to blog about our adventures in the country, and the hilarious stories of our energetic children that have lead to so many funny facebook statuses. Recently, Alex and I attended a class on raising chickens (yes, this is our ideal date... when did I become that person ?), and afterwards Alex declared that it was time to start the blog. We ordered our chickens ar...