Chickens and Unschooling

A little over a week ago I moved the babies' cage out to the back porch. This had the advantage of freeing up space in the laundry room, and giving the babies a chance to acclimate to outside weather and get some fresh air.

A couple days ago I moved the cage into the chickens' yard. The plan was to give the hens a week or so to get used to the babies through the cage, before letting the babies loose in the yard.

Well today (the second day of the let the chickens get to know each other slowly plan) when I went out to feed and water the chickens I found someone had sprung the babies. They were crowded together at the gate to the chicken yard. I refilled their food and water, gave them some freedom for a few hours, then put them back in their cage.

Now we'll see what tomorrow brings.

BTW, some pictures to show how much the babies have grown.


Three days after we got the babies.




Two days ago.

According to the neighbor girl:

There are roving packs of twenty or more coyotes that will kill our dogs if they run across them (we looked it up, turns out that when they do band together they average pack sizes of 3 to 7).

Penguins have fur, not feathers - and if you want to look up whether or not she is correct there is no such tool as a google search engine, you have to go to dopenguinshavefurorfeathers.com.

Of course, this is the same friend who thought our hens were roosters. But, admittedly, that was her mother's fault. Then again, they don't even have a computer in their house, and a ten year old girl thinks penguins have fur not feathers - so maybe it is all her mother's fault.

I've sometimes reassured myself with the thought that even if I mess this homeschooling thing up pretty badly, my kids will still be better off than if they went through school (saved from the emotional trauma I went through at the very least, and not burnt out by being force fed information they'll forget soon after the test.)

At least, if nothing else, my kids are learning how to question their assumptions, and look things up to expand their knowledge base. And they know penguins have feathers for crying out loud.

(warning: the following is very stream of consciousness, so read at your own risk ;)

It was a good trip over all. Our realtor brought her kids (who happen to get along famously with my kids, so much fun was had by all), and M had a couple of friends out to climb all over the place. No major issues with the house, and after the AC guy comes out on Monday we should be good to go.

The only thing slowing us down at this point is the seller's realtor. He's decided he needs to get explicit permission from the bank before he can order the septic inspection. So it all rides on how bloody long it takes for the bank to get back to him, and how bloody long it takes him to get off his ass and get an inspection ordered.

*Sigh*

If it weren't for the septic we'd probably be able to close by this Friday. As it is, I'm hoping for the Friday after next, and expecting closer to three weeks out. I hope I'm wrong and it all pulls together really fast, I'm looking forward to moving in.

Even C wants to move now, because S told him once we move we could call his best friend and invite him over and they could have sword battles.

One of our new neighbors (the one with all the birds S loves to look at) has the same name as one of my brothers so it should be really easy to remember.

On his way home M picked grapefruits from a friend who has more grapefruits than several hundred people could manage to eat (and they'll be within a mile of our new home so it will be very convenient to restock :), and the kids have eaten their way through eight or nine so far just in the last hour.

I think our realtor is being a little overly ambitious, but she thinks we might be able to close on our new house by February 12th (M tells me she's backed off from very sure to 50-50).

This all still seems a bit surreal to me. Maybe because I still haven't seen a copy of the acceptance letter I've been told exists.

We are, however, acting like it's real:

We have had a termite inspection, and received a quote for treatment.

We have an AC guy waiting for confirmation that the power has been turned on.

M has gotten one of his friends to agree to crawl all over the house with him on Saturday (he's working on getting a hold of another).

We've received SPDS and initialed to confirm their receipt.

I've e-mailed a guy about a horse.

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I'll keep you posted.

But, my estimated time line wasn't far off (note the line near the bottom of the linked post right before the very heart felt "AAAAAAAARRRRRRG").

Supposedly we got an acceptance letter from the bank yesterday. It has to be signed by the seller before it gets to us, but we may actually be moving forward on this new house thing.

It's now warm enough for Pete to swim in his water dish again. We use a plastic child's sand table filled with water for the dogs' water bowl. Pete likes to climb in, lay down, then drink to cool himself off (see picture below).

I used to want a doggie door for our dogs. At our old house, with our first dog (Dusty) we had a doggie door. Other than her occasionally using it to sneak baby toys outside to hide them under the porch, this set up worked very well for us. When we moved to our current house, we were faced with a very nice back door that had glass in it. While convenient for viewing the back yard, there was no easy way to put a doggie door in.

When we started looking for a new place to live, the girls (particularly S) put in the request to either find a place with a doggie door or have Daddy install one when we moved in. This was agreed to.

Then we got Pete.

Water dog has made it abundantly clear that if he had access to a doggie door he would use that opportunity to drench the entire inside of the house, including any couch or bed he could sneak his way onto. The request for a doggie door has long since been withdrawn by the children.


Pete - photo taken the day after we got him.

H had her karate test tonight, and she nailed every move the Sensei asked of her. She received her youth blue belt (skipping the purple belt :). When the Sensei handed her the belt she asked why he gave her a blue belt and he told her "you earned it". She was great, none of the other kids did as well - many of the kids with higher color belts did worse on the same moves H successfully demonstrated. I'm so proud of her.

H lost a baby tooth today (well, technically it's not lost, seeing as she knows where it is - in a little tooth shaped box her Grandma gave her many years ago). This was her ninth baby tooth to fall out.

We are going to put in an offer on a different house tomorrow. We're still waiting for a response from BofA on the first house.

Basically, we're going to play the see which bank gets back to us first game (and seeing as BofA has a three month head start, you'd think they'd have the advantage, but I'm not counting on them to come through).

Also the inner skeptic in me figures we'll get our offer in around 2:00 pm tomorrow and someone else will have beat us to it by getting their offer in by 10:00 am.

M figures there is a chance there really is someone at BofA assigned to our case now. He also figures the new house's bank will sit on all offers for a week to be able to cherry pick the best. Either way, I'd better remember to take a lot of deep breaths during the next week.

In case you're new here, I'll let you in on a bit of personal information about me: I hate waiting ;-).

At least the trees, at the house we are trying to buy, will get a good watering and maybe live a little longer.

The other day I went on a mini rant about the misuse of the words sell and sale in online ads.

Well, a guest blogger on FHOTD (Fugly Horse of the Day) did one better by detailing the many other ways horse sellers screw up their ads about their horses for sale.

Somehow I found it very gratifying that I am not the only one bothered by this sort of stuff.

How many times in your life have you had the opportunity to utter the instructions, "No zombies in the kitchen."?

I now have two out of seven chickens laying. This isn't as bad as it sounds considering, of the ones not laying, three are babies and two are over the age of three years.

We are still in a sort of Limbo with the bank that owns the mortgage on the house we are trying to buy. Several times we were told an adjuster had been assigned to our case. Several times this turned out to not be true.

As of yesterday we were told Fannie Mae needed to order a BPO before an adjuster could be assigned to the case.

Today we were told an adjuster has been assigned and a BPO has been done.

Mind you, both hubby's reaction and mine to this latest news were very similar - the boy had cried wolf too many times, and we'd believe it when we saw something in writing from the bank (M did not use that analogy, but he did reference predictions made with chicken entrails).

I'm torn between cynicism and hope. Man I'd love this whole mess to have a happy conclusion. I'd like a house, and some land, and a horse or two. I'd like to give my youngest his own room and my middle child a usable closet in her room.

*pounds head against wall*

There, much better.

So H, at the ripe old age of 9, has decided to call me Mom. She says Mommy sounds too little girlish. Ah well, at least she isn't insisting on only calling me by my first name.

Pete was a good sport and got lots of biscuits for his patience with us silly humans.

It was very important to the girls this year that they give everyone in the family their own special Christmas gift. H got S a mermaid Barbie (and a ghost puppet she made) and got C a mini Nerf football. S got H a mini stuffed animal horse and got C a Slinkie. H bought me a used copy of The Golden Compass movie, and S gave me a skull ring she got from a quarter machine. M ended up with three king sized Snickers bars (one from each kid). The girls also painted pictures for Christmas gifts this year. I took photos of the paintings in case they got damaged or lost over time.


Kitty for S from H.


Rainbow and butterflies for S from H.


For C from S.


For H from S.

A while back H took a series of cake decorating classes with her girl scout troop. Since then she has been looking for opportunities to put her new found skills to use. She was going to make a Thanksgiving cake, but she came down with a cold a few days before Thanksgiving; we decided for the sake of the general health of the rest of the household (particularly the visiting grandparents), we would forgo cake that Thanksgiving and make due with pumpkin and apple pie.

Come Christmas time, H was in much better health, so she decorated a cake for us for Christmas.

A few months ago, two of our hens - Wing Flap, S's Buff Orpington, and Daisy, C's Americana, were looking very scraggly. They were bald in spots and had some very beat up looking tail feathers. I've kind of decided they must have been molting, since in the past few weeks they've grown in some beautiful feathers and Wing Flap has even started laying again. I didn't document their sorry states, but I did take some recent pictures of them in all their resplendent beauty.


Daisy.


Wing Flap.

Rose, H's New Hampshire Red, has not had a problem with her appearance lately, and until a few weeks ago was the only hen still laying. I took a current picture of her as well - this is supposed to be a chicken blog after all (at least some of the time, anyway).


Rose.

A few days before I took the following shots of my hen Lantana, our Rhode Island Red, I was finding clumps of loose feathers here and there in the chicken house and yard. It all became clear on the day I noticed her looking like this:


Poor molting Lantana.


From the other side.

True to their words the girls have played with the new chicks several times each day in the two days since we got them. Their goal is to get the chicks used to them, so they will be friendly as hens. Here are some pictures from the first day.

H's Looloo.


S's Nutsy Rose (back) and H's Looloo.


C's Goldie Feather.


New Cat observing the process from on high.