Spring chickens!!

Can you tell what the theme is around here? I want spring!)

At the end of February my four kids and I drove to a local hatchery my friend and her husband have just started and picked out 4 day old chicks.

Each child got to pick out their own chick and name it.

The black one is Buddy's and he named it "Blackhole".  The one on the top is DuderMan's and he named it "Tiger". The one on the bottom is Dollar's which she named "Peep". Actually it was more Pee-pee but we morphed it into something not potty related.  The one in the middle is PieGirl's chick which she named Bella. I swear she did not get that name from Twilight.

They were so incredibly cute! They spent the first few weeks in our bathroom.

And since my town now allows us to have up to six chickens within city limits, I of course had  to go out to the local ranch store and get two more.

You can see the smaller Buff Orpingtons I brought home at the bottom of the picture. These two didn't have anything to reliably identify them separately so they do not have a name. They are also the most wild and want nothing to do with us. Except for those pesky things like water and food.





Tomorrow I will show you what the chicks look like now....

And it will be still farther away

Today is the first day of spring break. My children laughed at me when I yelled down to their rooms to get up and get moving. Hurry up!

But it's SPRING BREAK!!  

Yeah, it might be the a break but it is not spring.










Light fluffy things started falling from the sky at about 6 this morning. Within two hours we had two inches of it covering everything. Including my strawberry plants that had finally begun to grow.

Sigh. So it will be a little longer before I can put my new chicken coop with its month old chicks outside.

Spring is far away

Since it is February in Idaho, spring is long time from coming. At least for the plants. I went to a workshop at a friend's farm this last weekend and this is what I found. Doesn't this ewe look like the best place to get warm?

 But there is another way to keep warm. Grab a couple of your siblings and cuddle up under a heating lamp.

Secret Obsession

Maybe it isn't so secret.

I want a farm. No really, stop laughing. I want a farm with several acres and lots of animals.

I want a big old faded red barn with lots of noises coming from it.
I have rabbits and will have chickens within a few weeks. That is all that can fit on my current city lot. But I do have a goat. :) He doesn't live with me but at my friend's farm. She has almost 3 acres and I am so grateful to her for allowing my goat to live there with her goat.

I want to add turkeys, geese, ducks, pigs, sheep, more goats, and possibly a pony. My husband thinks I am crazy and he is probably right. But I think it might be a disease and I am not alone.

Barnheart

So much the same

So much is the same around here and yet so much has changed. The children are growing and learning. I can't keep my now 3 year old from leaving the back door wide open after I leave the room despite the 3 inches of snow on the ground.

My 10 year old Pie Girl is growing up to be such an amazing and gorgeous young lady. She is now taking violin lessons and will serenade you with Mary Had a Little Lamb at a moment's notice.

I have started a new direction in my life. I am now raising and breeding German Angora rabbits. They are stunning! I have two REWs (ruby-eyed white) and one chocolate self. The REWs are for my spinning and knitting business and the chocolate will be for my own personal enjoyment of spinning and loving on a gorgeous bunny. I have been blessed with a very thoughtful husband that has indulged my need for more animals and he is so grateful he doesn't have to clean up after them.

My boys are amazing

I didn't want to leave my amazing and gorgeous boys out of the love fest here on the blog. I have two amazing boys. But today I will talk about DuderMan. He is my 5 year old who is also my comic relief.



He is almost always able to make me laugh and even when he is trying to be angry like in this following picture, I am able to make him laugh.



And he always has something on his face. I swear I clean his face after every meal but somehow he finds more and smears it all over his face.

His also my most accident prone boy. He cut my birthday dinner short two years ago when my sister called to say that he tripped in to her rocking chair and split his cheek open and would need stitches. By the time I got there he had a huge gaping wound on his cheek but happy as a lark and he did not want to leave. In the previous picture you can see the scar that was left after the stitches were taken out.

This picture is of him just after he and his older brother decided to hold our two cats at each other and make them scratch each other. What they didn't realize is that they would get scratched too.



Can you see the bandage on his cheek covering his stitches?

He is always willing to be happy and loving. He still loves to come snuggle on my lap first thing in the morning and I take advantage of that as much as I can because once he is off he doesn't stop until he collapses, usually in bed but sometimes on the couch on top of a hot pad.



I don't know how comfortable that hot pad is but he seems perfectly content.

A Few of My Favorite Things

I know that it has been way too long since my last post. Considering that it was about the fair last fall is a sad, sad commentary on my posting skills. So to finally kick off the new year (I know that it is almost March but this is my first post of the year so please forgive me), I am going to share my favorite things of late.

I have finally, with my oldest daughter almost 10 years old, discovered that I like to do my girls' hair. This is an amazing thing considering that usually they look like this...



And yes, that is a goofy hat on backwards.


An online friend posted some pictures of some fantastic curlers that I knew I needed immediately and so I ran to Sally's Beauty supply and bought these spiral curlers that have been an Hallelujah opportunity for me. I'm sure you remember those terrible foam curlers that your mom put in your hair every Saturday night for church the next morning. I don't know about you but always by Sunday morning at least one if not several had fallen out in the night and I was left with stick straight hair in some places and super tight curls that didn't relax until Tuesday in other places. Then I bought these and put them on Doller Heart.




The don't fall out. They are not heavy. And they make amazing curls!



This was without any styling product on her hair. So I decided to do Pie Girl's hair for church and this is what my nonskills were able to do.



I love these things!!!! You must get some.

Now for my final favorite thing of the day, a fantastic website that has me going crazy with all of the things I want to make: www.knockoffwood.com. It is completely brilliant and I can spend hours on here and on the Facebook fan page looking at real projects. I love it!