Freezing rain and snow last night and more snow in the forecast for today, so school is closed and Sister is home.  The roads are slick so Will is home too.  Good thing.  I went to check the chickens this morning and found a surprise.  Remember the tree tarp that worked so well to shade the pen in the summer?  Well a tarp in the winter brings other advantages (no snow in the pen) and problems (a tarp covered with snow and on the verge of collapse).  It is almost 1:30 and we are just in from a little over two hours of scraping and bracing and shoveling.  There is still more work to be done but we are beat.  Time to start a fire and roast some hotdogs with the kids.

Chickens in Summer

Chickens in Winter

Later… We are all warm now and the snow is coming down so much we have opted to NOT go outside anymore today.  Instead we stayed in and made advent stockings.  We made ours out of paper and wrote activity ideas (have a cup of hot cocoa, sing Jingle Bells in a round, etc.) on the back instead of putting something inside.  What a fun family project!

Later still … With so much to work with, who can resist making snow ice cream?  Here’s our recipe.

• 1 large bowl full of fresh snow
• 1 can Milnot
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 tbsp vanilla extract
• milk or cream

Mix first 4 ingredients then add milk or cream until desired consistency is reached.

Our September egg count was 82 or almost 7 dozen.  Our October egg count was 325 or 27 dozen!  Wow!  Most of these we gave away to family and friends but we hope in the coming months to sell them for a modest price that will in turn cover the cost of the chickens themselves.  There’s not a lot of profit in eggs but it’s fun anyway and at least we know exactly what’s in them. 

I’m hoping to create a page to track this in a little more detail but will have to wait until Will can give me a bit more html instruction.

We have eggs!  I didn’t expect any until late October but one Pearl White obviously didn’t get the memo.  I’m not certain when she started exactly but she had laid six by the time I found them and a seventh today.  We did the fresh egg test and they are all good - though small.  I expect that as she matures her eggs will become larger.  Later in the day either one of the Rhode Island Reds or Black Stars laid one brown egg.  So we’ve had eight total with only two hens laying… I hope this doesn’t turn into too much of a good thing. :)  We love painting!  In creating a load for Goodwill, I came across a set of sidewalk paints we hadn’t seen in a while.  Fun, Fun.  Sister is learning about design at school and part of that involves learning about watercolor and acrylic paints.  Will & she had a chance to try their skills at family orientation night.  (Sister’s creation, Will’s creation)  Brother too likes painting but sometimes to avoid the mess of actual paints we visit jacksonpollock.org.  Speaking of art, there was a reception for Mary at the State Capitol this past Saturday.  We packed up the kids and drove to the city.  It was good to see family and friends though somehow the setting made things odd.  I dressed up for the occasion but my shoes gave me blisters and actually removed skin from the top of my foot (TMI, I know… I was so glad to be back in my Crocs.)  Brother got his head stuck in the second floor railing around the rotunda.  Sister had a major meltdown at picture time.  And Will, who had not had a chance to talk to his Grandmother in a month, only managed a perfunctory “hello, nice to see you” before we had to leave.  It was like entering a sort of alternate reality where even simple things are a struggle and stress is the norm.  On the upside, no one else seemed to share our Twighlight Zone experience.  In fact, they all seemed to have a fine time and it was a nice honor for Mary.  Also, the strange haze seemed to lift as soon as we were en route home.  And the kids behaved beautifully in the car which gives me hope for our trip to Wichita this weekend.