chickens, part four: the coop

One of the things I have come to know about my husband is that he can pretty much figure out how to do anything he wants to. So when he said he was going to start building the chicken coop one Saturday and then proceeded to design and draw a plan, figure out and purchase materials, and get to work I was not surprised. Pretty sure he didn't even do internet research for this one-- just came right out of his brain. [Edit: John read this and informed me that I was too generous with my praise here because he had gone over to a neighbor's house and looked at their coop to give him some ideas for ours. So I guess the idea wasn't completely out of his brain, but the rest was :).] My life would be so much less exciting without him around :). Here are some photos of our coop building journey.

Try not to be alarmed that our children are playing so closely to the deadly power tools. We obviously aren't :).


This is the position that George would assume every time John used the saw. He didn't like how loud it was. Pearl, as you can see, was not fazed in the least.


This is where we put Pearl when we need her out of the way for a little while. She likes it.


Until her brother decides to join her.


She is a little walker these days. She can walk across rooms and down halls, but she still probably crawls about 70% of the time. It's faster.


I love Pearl's little outstretched arms to her daddy. She reaches for him constantly and one of my most favorite things about him is that he always wants her back. He adores his baby girl.


This was from a different day out working on the coop. These pictures are supposed to be switched-- the sequence was her coming up and grabbing onto him, him looking over at her,


then her leaning in to plant a kiss on his lips, followed by her turning around to go about her business.


"Her business," meaning: surveying the scene from her tractor, and getting busy with the tape measure.


And smiling slyly.


She was also pretty helpful with the chicken wire :). And there is a peek of the coop up to that point. The chickens looove it.




This is the best photo I have of it while it was still under construction, but I need to get a new one. It is all done now, complete with a galvanized metal roof and dark brown stain (which we thought was a disaster at first but has grown on us).


And to finish our chicken posts off, here are the last two photos that show our immersion in all things chicken. In my class at school we had the students make these little chicks out of yellow paper plates and their handprints and George really wanted to make one. We didn't have yellow plates, but painting was more fun for him anyway.


Pretty happy about the sneeze I caught in this last picture :).


Now I can blog about regular life again! I have much to do.

remember when?

This is a catch-up post.

Remember when we went to Sev's birthday party? George loves his buddy Sevrin, and that makes me so happy because Sev's mama just happens to be my very best friend. Rachael and I have been BFFs since we were two years old. We lucked out in having our firstborn babies be so close. Hooray for second generation BFFs!

This was the only picture I took of the two of them looking at the camera and it is really unfortunate. George looks like a freaky freak and Sev looks angry and bored.


Here the boys are from behind, sporting their superhero capes as they climb together.



Sev got tired of his cape, but George wanted to wear his the whole time.


I love these cute pictures of the boys going down the slides together.



Much to Georgie's dismay, Sev did have other friends he needed to socialize with, so George hit the slides solo a few times.


Peachy Baby was there, too, and she loved it. Here she is on a little carousel.


There was this little area for babies that Pearlie loved playing in. Little Blue Eyes.


I love how intently she is studying the blocks in this first picture.


These next two are probably my favorite photos from the day. I love the way the composition turned out with the toy blurred in the foreground and her little eye in focus staring right at me.



Sev gave George one of his giant balloons and I snapped a few pictures of George with it as we walked to the car just for fun.


I like how you can see him through the balloon in this first one.

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Remember when George learned how to peel carrots and insisted on peeling them all for our dinner one Sunday? That was fun. And required much patience on my part.


This boy loves carrots. It is the best when we grow them in the garden all summer long, but these store-bought ones do just fine for Georgie.

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Remember when Pearl had her very first braid? It was just a silly little one that I did after church one day, but I took pictures to document it nonetheless.

Don't mind that from the waist up my kids look ready for church, but from the waist down they are in their party pants (or lack thereof).

My sweet boy still loves his two "gaygies." ("Gaygies" means "blankies. He has called them that from the time he was first talking and couldn't say "blankies" right, and even though he can say it fine now, the term "gaygies" is here to stay.)

He recently informed me that he especially loves his yellow one because the corners are softer and he can poke them in better. If he loses a gaygie in the night and asks for it he always wants to know which color I am handing him. I can't fool him, either. He knows which one is yellow just by the way the silky corners feel (which is strange because they are exactly the same blanket, just in different colors).

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Remember when George and Daddy caught a bitty little snake in the yard? (This was clearly quite some time ago before it was freezing :).)

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Remember when George painted monsters by blowing on watered down paint with a straw. Hours of entertainment.

And then he used his fingerprints to paint little people. We added details with a pen later.

Disregard the fact that he is not wearing pants. 

When Pearlie woke up from her nap she got to join the party. She was pretty happy just observing as long as she could play with a straw. (This was clearly in her pre-crawling days.)

My squishy babies.

I put Pearl up on G's bed to keep her out of the way for a bit, but George decided to join her. He really loves playing with her.

I love her chubby little hand grabbing his arm.

And lastly, luckily I am not in a contest for the Mother of the Year, because this picture (along with a host of other unimpressive habits) would surely cost me the title. Yes those are the airborne legs of my three-year-old jumping dangerously close to his baby sister to make her laugh. And I let him.

Ah, I feel like I just cleaned out my closet! There are a few more things from the archives, but mostly I can post about current events now. (Like my 5 1/2 hour experience in the ER on Saturday for an MRI that showed me three happily bulging discs in my back and some torn muscles on my sacrum. Yay! We are trying to take it easy around here and let things heal, but that is hard to do when you have an 11 month old baby to haul around. Things have improved drastically from Friday night (Saturday morning, I guess) when we called our dear neighbors at 3 AM to have Martin come over and help John give me a blessing. I couldn't walk or move or bend without collapsing down to try to find a position that would bring relief from the pain. Anyway, I am very hopeful that I'll be back to my normal self again soon. Things are getting better every day.)

on again off again

So I haven't been blogging. Perhaps you noticed? It started with baking and frosting 250 mini cupcakes, turned into a week-long Montessori conference (in Honeyville!), and culminated with being seduced by the sewing machine. I have some pretty sweet fruits from my labors, but I sort of have a really tumultuous, hot then cold relationship with the sewing machine. I sew myself into a frenzied passion for about a week and then don't even glance in the sewing machine's direction for months. I think I'll be back to blogging regularly now until the sewing love affair resumes in oh, probably June. 

If you live in Utah and have small children please tell me you know about Babinski's Baby. I love almost every single thing in that store, but most of it is WAY out of my price range. My mom and I were there a couple of weeks ago and I spotted some darling little vests by Sandbox Rebel. I loved the casual, almost punkish look of the vests. But they were $35.00 for one little tiny vest. Anyway, I showed my mom and then I was like, "I could totally make one of these." Which at the time was all talk because I'm not a talented or experienced seamstress at all, but I knew I could figure it out. So the vest became my mission. I found a pattern that I sort of liked (in case you were wondering, finding patterns for boys' vests is a nightmare), altered it a little so the shape was more what I wanted, found the material (not exactly what I was going for, but it worked), and spent an afternoon ignoring my child, poor little thing. But he got a vest out of it! And it turned out better than I was expecting, so I went to Saver's and got some mens' suit coats for 99 cents that I can cut up and make some more out of. I'm pretty happy about it. Here is the vest:

(it has three different kinds of material-- the front is one thing, the back is another, and the lining is another)

Here is Baby G sporting his new apparel:

Since I was in the relationship with the sewing machine, I decided to go ahead and make an apron for Baby G. I have been wanting one for a while because he loves to help me cook and I knew he'd love one, but I hadn't found any cute ones for boys. I found some cowboy material and went to work. 

He especially loves the pocket. He likes to put mints in it and get one out to eat whenever he wants.

There were a few other items on the sewing agenda, but this is what you get for today. I have a few more blog posts brewing, so hopefully it won't be too long.