Chickens and Unschooling

We looked at the house again on Friday. It seemed smaller than I remembered. Still, it has enough room for each kid to have their own room (though C will not have a closet). I really wish a different house we looked at were on this lot. I liked that house more, but it is next to an empty lot that scares M and our realtor. Ah well - location, location, location.

Our realtor got to talk face to face with the selling realtor as he happened to be there on Friday. The selling realtor has promised to poke the bank again for us, but he really has no more power than we do in this situation.

Hopefully we'll get an update by the end of the week.

H was lamenting the lack of Thanksgiving songs - then she decided to write her own.

Oh when the roast turkey is on the table,
And the pie is in the oven,
And we've just began to eat,
Happiness is in every soul.
And when that happiness is in you and me,
is when Thanksgiving is here.

H. - Nov 2009

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Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

-crazychicknlady

At least once a week I find my dream horse on craigslist. Well, my dream first horse. A horse that makes me think "Awww, I want her/him." (Assuming, of course, that the horse is reasonably close to what is represented in the ad - definitely not a sure thing when it comes to horse shopping.)

So even though I likely won't get any of the horses I fall in love with over the next several months, I'm reasonably certain that there will always be another horse.

At least with Thanksgiving looming the next week should go by quickly.

As we have been looking into buying horse property, I have been spending a lot of time reading up on all subjects horse (it gives me something to do while waiting for the real estate end of things to come together). Since trying to learn what it will take to be responsible for a horse on our own property, I have come to realize just how much I didn't know about caring for a horse, buying a horse, riding a horse, feeding a horse, etc.

Thanks to google, horse forums and horse blogs I have filled in a large number of the gaps in my knowledge in the last six months. There have been, however, a few unexpected side effects to this:

The treatment of the horses in the kids' cartoons now annoys me. I know they are cartoon horses, and no real horses were harmed in the making of said cartoons, but I see way too many problems if I watch very closely.

Also, now that I have a better grasp on proper horse conformation (I have a long way to go in this area, but I am getting better at recognizing when a horse is just plain fugly), I don't think my horse calendar is as pretty anymore. I keep seeing the flaws in the horses, and wondering why those particular horses were even chosen in the first place.

H got a silkworm a little over a week ago. She took care of it and it has survived well enough to start spinning a cocoon. H is sad, since the life expectancy of the average silkworm after it emerges as a moth is one week. She is already morning it's passing. She wants to remember the silkworm forever and wrote a song for it.

Oh Silkie, my Silkie,
my wonderful silkworm.

You are so wonderful,
even if you are a girl
or a boy or a both.

I'll love you forever and ever, a thousand times that.
And every ever is two million and a thousand and one.

And I'll remember you, oh Silkie,
for as long as I will love you.

I'll love you even if you are a moth or a silkworm.
And you are one of my best friends.

I'll love you even when you're gone.
And even I'm gone, too.

Even if you cannot hear me, or understand me,
I will still love you.

You are so brilliant.
The smartest silkworm I've ever known.

It's very special to find a man who appreciates that a girl has her own hatchet.

A few hours ago, C wished on a shooting star to never never never leave here.

Two days ago I showed him a pretty gelding and he told me we should move and get that horse.

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Yesterday S watched a butterfly land on our volunteer lantana, and decided she never wanted to move.

Last week she watched a YouTube video like this one and said she really really wanted to move and get a horse.

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H has gone back and forth between wanting to move and being very sad at the thought of leaving the only house she remembers living in.

It has been brought to my attention that the bank that owns the mortgage for the house we are trying to buy requires 56 to 90 days to do a proper evaluation before they get back to us. (In normal real estate transactions one expects the initial offer will get responded to within 72 hours, not days - but short sales these days are far from normal.)

56 days (8 weeks) is the minimum time for them do do their mini appraisal and cost benefit analysis to determine how big of a loss they are willing to take. They already loaned way more than this property is now worth to the current owner, it's just a case of how big of a mistake they are willing to admit they have made.

At the start of this process our realtor warned us it could take a loooooong time. I've managed to stay relatively calm for nearly four weeks. We may even be at the halfway point. What I dread the most, at this point, is not the wait. It is the possibility of the selling agent and the bank having very different ideas of what this place is worth. So even though we have presented the bank with what is essentially a full price offer, they could still come back and laugh at us.

I like where we are living now. I'd like an extra room and enough space for horses, but most everything else is great. One of these days I'll make a list to remind me why it wouldn't be that bad if the bank did come back and laugh at us and we just stay here.

C (armed with a foam Lego Land sword) and S (armed with a flower wand, also acquired during our trip to Lego Land last March) were preparing for a battle. The following is an excerpt from their pre-battle discussion on weapon capabilities:

S: "And I have a cold attack, it doesn't freeze you but you move slower."
C: "And I have the firey wirey attack."
S: "You don't get it C, that's a sword."
Me: "And what does Inu Yasha have?"
S: "Inu Yasha is a cartoon." (stated in an exasperated, why don't you understand the obvious Mommy, tone.)

Hmmm... I guess real life imaginary wands trump magical cartoon sword capabilities. Hee hee.

(In all fairness to S, she did relent and allow for C's sword to have magic attacks.)

"Playing with mousetraps is fun." - H, age 8 and a half.

It's been two and a half weeks since our offer went into the bank.

A few months back I read an MLS listing where the realtor was bragging that their house was NOT a short sale it was a bank owned property (foreclosure). Now given the often trashed condition of foreclosures, I didn't understand why the selling agent thought this was such a good was to push the property.

Now I get it.

It has been two and a half weeks since our offer went into the bank.

Only as of today have they decided to do an expedited BPO (according to my realtor that is like a mini-appraisal, but she'll explain it more to me in depth tomorrow when I see her in person).

Don't let the word expedited fool you. It could still take many more weeks before they get back to us (minimum this Friday). I suppose that is better than Months, but no wonder trying to buy a short sale property is such a PITA.

Oh, and we still don't even know if they'll think our offer is reasonable, and won't come back wanting tens of thousands more from us (which they won't get).

I really am getting better at waiting. When we started this adventure it made me twitchy to wait two and a half days ;-).

Last week looked like this:

Monday: H had karate (I was on my second day of the cold that was going around our house and finally got to me).
Tuesday: H had Girl Scouts (I dropped her off so she could watch Aliens in the Attic with the other girls in her troop. My little girl (8.5 yrs old) went to a movie without me or her father, and had a blast - Sigh - they grow up so fast ;-). My back was causing me much grief that day, so dear hubby came to the rescue and picked H up after the movie was over. Then later he took her to basketball.
Wednesday: H had karate again.
Thursday: Bug day at someone's house over half an hour drive away (normally wouldn't have been a big deal, but my back was still bothering me some, and driving exacerbated the problem).
Friday: Was supposed to be gamer day, but the girls were willing to skip it (thank goodness, seeing as my neck took the opportunity to become tweaked earlier that morning).

After much application of heat, most of my aches and pains are under control.

After a calm, uneventful weekend we're ready for next week. Thankfully basketball and Girl Scouts are only twice a month (and H does not have Wednesday karate due to Veterans Day), so next week's schedule should be a bit lighter. We might even have some time to hang out with friends.

One of my first chickens was a white leghorn. I didn't know much about chickens back then and we mostly picked her because she was a pretty light yellow puffball. I knew she would give us white eggs and that was about it.

It turns out white leghorns are very good egg layers. That was nice, and for a while, once she matured, Trigger gave us lots of eggs (sometimes as many as one a day). It turns out that white leghorns are also a bit spastic, and also really good at scrounging food from their environment.

Trigger got a lot of handling as a chick, so she ended up very friendly and calmer than she may otherwise have been. She also managed to try to eat every last bit of green (grass, weed, or otherwise) out of the chicken yard. The other chickens took their cue from her and as a result, the chicken yard was bare of greens.

It has been several years since Trigger died. Now, even with four chickens contained therein, our chicken yard is overrun with weeds. Maybe someday I'll get another white leghorn so she can take care of the problem.

We'll be heading out for our very long Halloween walk later tonight. We'll be bringing Pete in his Jack-o-lantern costume.

The following are pictures of our real jack-o-lanterns (and H). H carved her own pumpkin again this year, and she did all the cutting herself, even cutting off the head. I helped scoop out the guts, but just a little bit.

H joined a Girl Scouts troop this year. It is the last year this particular group of girls will be a troop together, so rather than having the standard meetings they are doing classes and field trips and such.

This is nice, since it gives H a chance to do things I wouldn't manage to organize on my own. For the last four meetings it was cake decorating.


From lesson two.


Made for S's 7th Birthday.
(after lesson two)


Made for C since he wanted a cake, too.
(after lesson two)


From lesson four.

H missed lesson three since she was sick, but she was really glad she didn't miss the lesson on roses.

We put in an offer on a short sale property.

Now we wait.

Maybe five weeks.

Maybe five months.

Maybe until something better comes along and we put in an offer on that something better instead.

Maybe the bank comes back and they do not agree that the price the real estate agent set was anywhere near where they wanted to be.

We'll see.

While watching Hazel and Pete play yesterday, I came to a conclusion. Besides saving her from the evil people who used to own her, getting Pete is the best thing we've ever done for Hazel.







I never realized how much doggie fun we'd been depriving her of all these years (Hazel had been an only dog for just over 6 years when we got Pete.).

So what do you do if you buy the wrong kind of toothpicks, and you have an excess of mini marshmallows?

Well, we built stuff.



A space ship made by S.


The spaceship with a person (also made by S)
standing in front of it.

The last three were made by H. She was kind enough to let C play with the spinner.






This is a moose family.

We found a Halloween costume my Mother-In-Law made for H when she was a baby. It had been worn by all the children a time or two over the years. This year we found someone else to wear the jack-o-lantern costume.

He didn't seem to mind, especially after the fifteen or so doggie bones he got out of the deal.








Pete is so good at walking on the leash, that we've decided to take him trick-or-treating with us this year.