Zoo Time

After all our hard work over the last few weeks, we decided that everyone needed a day of fun this Sunday.  Since the new polar exhibit had just opened at the zoo, we chose that as our destination.

The polar bear put on a grand performance, Amber got to see her beloved elephants, and the boys enjoyed the romp between the animals.  It was just the day of fun we all needed.

Castle Coop

One of the main requirements in a home when we moved here, was to find a home where we would be able to have chickens.  Our Realtor spent a lot of time reading HOA documents, till she found us our home in the county with no HOA.  Our first year here we tested the water by attending the Tour d'Coop,  a weekend festival where local backyard chicken farmers open their homes to share how they are raising backyard chickens.  

The first year was a reality check.  We learned that taking care of chickens was not like taking care of goldfish, so we decided to wait a year and get our orchard and garden established first.  That was no small task. Chris had to build huge terrace walls for me to have flat ground to garden, then wheel-barrow in truck fulls of fill dirt, compost and mulch.  He got it all done in time for me to plant in early spring(more on our progress in gardening in another post).  

This year we attended the Tour again.  Like last year, it was another busy day (baseball games for Lance, Jared and Titus in the morning, followed by Jared's Irish Dance Recital in the evening).  After this Tour, strangely instead of chickens, we seriously consider getting some rabbits (a home was giving them away for free).  However, we realized it would take a lot of work to make a rabbit hutch or a lot of money to buy one, so we decided to forego that endeavor.  Regarding chickens, the tour once again made gun shy about getting chickens.  The construction project necessary to get them set us was much greater than rabbits.

Then on May 30th, for a date, Chris and I attended a three hour lecture at NC State put on by the founders of the Tour called "Chicken Keeping 101".  The lecturer and his wife (Bob and Judy) just happened to bring seven pullets they still had available.  At the end of the lecture we felt much more comfortable.  We believed that becoming chicken keepers was attainable but Chris, being wiser than me, stopped me from bringing the seven pullets home immediately.

We spent the rest of the weekend in discussion about coops, buying or building and if building; what design we would use/create.  On Monday, we decided to contact Bob and see if he still had the pullets and how long would he would be willing to keep them while we got our coop set-up.  As it turned out they still had all seven and could wait till June 17th.  

Chris was working crazy at his real job so we spent the week planning out the design of our coop in detail on graph paper and running our final draft past Bob & Judy for review and correction.  That brings me up to my last post, where I finished questioning Sunday morning if we were going to make our Wednesday deadline.  By Sunday night the house was painted and all the sides put on, when we realized it couldn't be moved by us from the driveway to the bottom of the garden walls.  Thankfully, our kind neighbors were willing to step in and five of them helped Chris move it to its final location.  It's solid, and a bit over engineered house, we joke we should go there in a tornado.  This was not our first challenge or set back, Chris had already had to take down the walls once and put them back up in a slightly different manner, he had accidentally sawed through his circular saw cord (Grandpa put on a new cord), etc.  However, with the house was built and in place, and we had 90 minutes till Agrisupply closed.  Grandpa watched the kids and we raced over there to buy all the hardware cloth and chicken supplies we would need to finish building the run. Oh, I forgot to mention during all of this we were having a heat wave with temps in the 100s, so during the heat of the day Chris had already been to Lowes to buy the lumber for the coop, and he was doing this all while fighting a nasty chest cold of some kind.

Yet, Chris got up early Monday morning and actually framed out all four 8x12 ft. walls for the chicken coop before going to work.  While he was working at his real job the boys an I attempted to attach the hardware cloth to the frame with poultry nails as directed.  This was tremendously hard work, it took us over an hour to attach one of the twelve panels and we were all exhausted.  Grandpa Harv came home as were finishing and tried a different technique to make the process easier but even that was laborious and slow.   We decided to try screws with washers so Grandpa ended up driving all over town that day and the next morning to find the right ones (nothing about this process was easy).  After work, Chris was back at it again hoping to quickly install the roof on the house.  That of course wasn't simple or easy either (as we were led to believe).  At this point we were feeling pretty defeated because it was clear we could not get up all the walls for the run, on our uneven quartz pit, in the one night we had remaining.  We left an apologetic voicemail explaining all our set backs that made it impossible for us to pick up the chickens on Wednesday.  We went to bed that night expecting to have to look at our half complete coop the rest of the year till we could get chickens the following spring.  It was a very sad night.

The next morning, I woke up to an email from Bob saying they had post-pone going out of town till Saturday, as they had some things to finish in town.  So the race was back on.  Chris was up before work working, and back out after work till the sun set working.  Kids and I did what we could during the day and we and Grandpa helped again at night.  Dinner was around 9pm those three days.  The uneven land made it difficult to find a design that would work as a base for our walls, but we did.  After that, we had to get all the hardware cloth installed, we gave up the washer screw technique in lieu of trim pieces.  We'll have quite the coop to illustrate what to do and not to do when we enter the Tour ourselves someday.  Chris ended up taking Friday off work.  The kids and I were busy putting down the anti-vermin skirt around the coop, while Chris framed out and installed the coop door.  It was all hands on deck and at 7:30pm on threat of major rain we put in the last screw, then called Bob and Judy to tell them we were ready to pick up the girls.

I took this as we were leaving to pick up girls.

The inside of the coop with perches on Saturday, 3 nest boxes in back.

We still hadn't eaten dinner and we thought everyone deserved at treat, so we picked up Chick-fil-A on our way north.  It was a 40 min. drive to their house and the skies opened up along the way.  It was pouring down rain when we arrived at their home.  They had wisely packed up the girls as the rain threatened in an old cardboard box so they were able to hand them off to us without much ado.  

Stormy

I sat the box, with the chickens, in it on my lap in the car.  We were all fascinated at the variety of vocalizations they made.  We tried to use reassuring tones to calm them, as we proceeded to try to come up with names, still never having seen the chickens in the dark and the rain.  Jared came up with the first name "Stormy", which we later appointed to our Coop ambassador.  Titus came up with next name "Dandelion", whom we now call "Dandy", she's our other white chicken with a yellow spot on her back.  Lance chose "Rosie" for one of the blacks but to this day I must admit I can not tell the difference between the five blacks based on any variation in their markings.  As a result, two were given names based on their behavior but we can't distinguish them when they are calm in a group; the one that frequently rials everyone up (for seeming no reason) we have given the name "Lady Catherine de Coop", another makes an odd sound, so we call her "The Triller". As a collective Amber said they should be called "the girls", not "the ladies".  She's also named one of the blacks "Amber Elizabeth" but once again we don't know which one.

Rosie

So through much trial, we are now chicken owners.  Chris finished putting in a few final touches (like the perches) on Saturday and then got some much needed rest to recoup (no pun intended) from exhaustion and his illness.  Needless to say we took the past week off from much of anything.  The girls do provide a lot of entertainment, and now that the building phase is over very little work.  We are free ranging them a little, when were out working in the garden, but careful of the abundance of predators about (Opossum and fox who live on our property and the numerous hawks and owls flying around). 

The girls coming in from a walk-a-bout.

Details:  The Chickens are Brahma Bantams and are actually from three different hatching in the spring.  The youngest is "Stormy", hatched April 11th, but she's also the most personal; outgoing and confident, meeting us at the door and letting us hold her.  The rest of the chickens (in every sense of the word) follow her lead.  I assume Rosie is the black one that hatched with Dandy(our other white with yellow spot) on April 5th.  The four we can't tell apart are the blacks from the first hatching on March 27th.  Bob and Judy bred their chickens first for temperament.  Then when they had that figured out they started breeding for the biggest eggs.  We got them for the temperament, we'll find out in a month or two about the eggs.  We are already planning for new chickens in the spring.  However, phase two of construction will be bit more laid back over the cooler months of the coming fall.

This young buck came by to check out the coop on June 22nd.  Our girls are quite the curiosity of ALL our neighbors.

Second Hatching

After hatching the five wrens in the garage last spring, we were a little disappointed that we hadn't seen any new nests or babies this year.  The boys had built a special nest box for them and put it in the shelter of our front porch.  Recently, we started seeing two wrens flying back and forth with twigs from the nest box.  It's always a fine balance when checking on bird nests.  Curiosity says check every day but wisdom says don't disturb them. The first time I asked Chris to reach up with his camera and see; he was nearly knocked off the chair as a wren flew out at him (Hee, Hee).  Then opportunity arose again, when we happened to see the adults fly out.  This time we were rewarded with the picture of our new baby wrens.  We had heard the peeping sounds but its always nice to have concrete proof.  Grow big and strong my little friends, I need you to help in my garden.

I certainly don't need help from these new babies in the garden but but boy I sure have a hard time hating these stomachs with legs. 

Update 7/17/15:  Two of our wrens still find the safety of the porch their favorite spot.

Time of Discovery

Though we have taken the last two weeks off from formal schooling that doesn't mean the children have stopped learning.  One of goals in homeschooling is for the children to have a life long love of learning, simply for the sake of learning.  The last two weeks have been full of those opportunities.

On their own they have been pulling all kinds of books off the shelves, devouring and sharing them with each other and us.  When they aren't reading they are creatively building.

In the yard, we have been very busy in the garden.  Harvesting our first crop of Elephant garlic, and planting the remainder of our seeds.  All four helped replant our corn, add pole beans, pumpkin and muskmelon to our "Three Sister" garden.  Jared and Titus planed the peanuts.  Lance and I planted the radishes and carrots.  Titus got so excited about germinating seed that he experimented by planting a cantaloupe seed from one we'd bought from the store.  When it actually germinated, he then decided to try a cherry seed.  If the cherry seed experiment works too, I may have to give over the maintaining the garden to Titus, he's got quite the green thumb.

Maintaining the garden alone is a learning experience and a lot of work; weeding, watering and finding ways to manage our pests.  The number one pest right now is the squirrels (thus the need to replant all our corn).

We've gone on a number of field trips and activities outside our home:

On the 3rd, we attended a lecture about Carnivorous plants with the HS Gardening Club.  We followed up with a trip to the Farmers Market in search of what carnivorous plants they had for purchase.  We think we'll wait and build a habitat/rain garden in the front bed with we have all the run-off.  Besides learning about plants we also learned how narrow people can be in their thinking.  Carnivorous plants grow in bog like conditions, which is also a  perfect breeding ground for mosquito.  The lecturer told us how he used their floating poison donuts to control the mosquitos but he had also told us about a carnivorous plant native to NC that lived in water and ate mosquito larvae, Bladderwort.  I asked him why didn't he just use that (it was the one plant he didn't have a sample to show us) and he looked at me confused.  When we asked the vendors as the market if they had Bladderwort, they thought it was strange too.  Seemed perfectly logical to us.  Thankfully when were ready, it is legal to collect Bladderwort in the wild, so I guess that's just what we'll have too do.  The boys also learned in conversation with one of our FM Peeps how to fish with Crayfish.  I learned form another FM Peep how to repel deer with Cuban Oregano.  We all learned when we brought the Cuban Oregano home to keep the windows open, it is definitely fragrant enough to gas us out.  Hopefully the deer the will find it too much for their sensitive noses as well.

On the 6th Jared learned how to make pizza at CPK and had fun jumping at a trampoline warehouse for his friend Will's birthday.  While he was doing that Chris and Titus road tripped to Durham to look for building supplies for our chicken coop, at the Re-use Warehouse.  This company takes down old buildings and then sells the parts.  They explored every inch of the warehouse, Titus asking and learning about all the different materials they found there.  Titus was amazingly patient as it took them three hours to find and get all we needed in the back of the van, so much so that even the owner complimented him.  In the end it was definitely worth it, they got all the lumber for the chicken house for only 20% of what it would have cost us new at a big box store, a whopping $27.

At a graduation party for our neighbor the next day, the boys brought their fishing poles.  They had spent the morning re-lining them with 50lb line, the 8lb line had broken too much their last outing.  However, they learned that more is not always better.  The 50lb line turned out to be too much for their reels so they couldn't cast.  However, they also learned to make due and just hung their lines off the dock with bobbers to try to encourage a bite. 

On Monday, we had a pool birthday party for a friend and full day after of piano lessons and golf lessons.

On Tuesday, we went on a field trip to the RC Raulston Arboretum.  Our guide was incredibly engaging with kids, even Amber.  Amber was most excited to have her own clipboard to "write on" like the big kids.  They learned about all kinds of plants and habitats (Titus and I want the flower that smells like chocolate).  The children even petted a bumble bee in the perennial garden (I skipped that experience). Afterward the kids played and we mom's exchanged/learned from each other about various things. 

On Wednesday, we took advantage of the "one free game a day" summer deal and went bowling with friends.  Grandpa Harv came along to give the kids tips on how to bowl, as we plan to make this a weekly activity through the summer.  One game of course was not enough so we paid for two more.  The kids had fun, Lance had a turkey, Jared and Double and Titus scored an even 100.  I enjoyed the down time talking to a friend.

Friday, Jared had an Irish Dance workshop across town.  It was quite the workout but his teacher and the guest instructor said he was doing really well.  The workshop lasted 90 minutes and was quite the aerobic workout.  Since we were out though we ran errands on our way home, gathering up supplies at a discount where we could for the chickens.  Jared found a clearance door (only $10).  We got paint at 80% off (mis-colored clearance) and it just happened to be the perfect color for me, green.  As we traveled we kept our eye out for a big group of wild elderberry we had heard about after we spotted that Jared was able to spot many more along the road (they are in bloom right now). Then for dinner we all sat down to eat the same food together, Spaghetti; learning to eat new things is learning too.  That's one day full of learning.

Saturday, Chris was up bright and early to continue working on the chicken coop.  It's coming along well.  Will it be done by Wednesday, when we have to pick up the chickens?  We'll see, but it won't be for lack of effort.

While Chris was building the coop he let/encouraged Amber and Titus to play with the scrap wood.  During this "play" Amber discovered the concept of a lever for launching things.  Chris then encouraged this further by having them take their wood into the shade and see who could launch the small pieces of scrap wood the farthest.

Then a piece got stuck in the maple tree and Titus asked Lance to help get it out.  When lance went to climb up the tree, he found all these strange groups of herding insects.  He took my camera to get a picture and a video.

My budding entomologist then brought the picture inside and we proceeded to identify the insects.  They were called Tree Cattle/Bark Lice.  I was expecting the worst, now something was killing my maple tree (its been that kind of spring), so needless to say I was exuberant when I found out they were actually good for my tree!  Thanks God! I needed something positive, see even I am learning.

But all work and no play wouldn't be very fun so we are working in a fair share of that too like bringing out the slip and slide today.  It's good sometimes to drop the schedule and let learning and life be spontaneous.

Rabbit Day Book Review - May

Lance and Jared took April and May to finish their respective Independent reads, our lives were a busy and the books were a bit long.  I specifically chose these two books because they were both about life in Holland which was the focus of our history studies at the time.

Lance's book was one I have been waiting a long time for him to be old enough to read; Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates by Mary Dodge.  I had held it back for two reasons; its rather long and it has some romantic (though innocent) aspects to the plot.  The story has a number of plots; Hans searching for the family fortune hid by his father before the injury that left him daft, Hans trying to find someone to cure his father, and Hans trying to still be a kid and find his place among his peers.  I truly enjoyed reading this book, it has such depth of human character development and adventure to boot.  I was pleased that Lance equally enjoyed the book.  He said he liked how detailed the author was in all her descriptions because it made him feel he was a part of the book.

Jared got to read one of our family favorites; Wheel on the School by Meindert DeJong  I read it aloud to Lance when he was younger and was excited for Jared to finally experience the story.  The plot appears very simple; a young girl is determined to put a wheel on their school, so the storks will build a nest their when they return from their African migration.  However, all the people and adventures that result is this seemingly simple undertaking lead to a truly engrossing book.  I was quite pleased to hear Jared excitedly narrating to me about the latest goings on in the book as he worked his way through.  Jared's favorite part of the book was all the different adventures the children found themselves.

Read Aloud Historical Fiction with Chris this month was The Loyal Grenvilles by Hendry Peart.  This book took me a long time to get my hands on.  My motivation for finding it was that it was written by same author as Red Falcons of Tremoine and it covered England under the Cromwell/Puritan rule; a period in history rather void in historical fiction.  I'm glad I took the time to find it, we were not disappointed.  The boys just finished the book today and their first comment as they came down was "Jared's going to write a sequel, there is so much more that we want to know".  So clearly, the boys found themselves connected to the characters in the book; many of whom provided a basis for character quality discussions.  In addition, I love a book that gets brought up at dinner and discussed a each turn in the book. 

Our night time read aloud this month was Rabbit Hill by Robert Lawson.  Once again, I can take no credit for finding this incredible book, Amber or Titus found it and shoved it on our library bag; I'm so glad they did. From a literature stand point it is absolutely superb, Charlotte Mason would definitely approve.  From an entertainment standpoint it was equally outstanding.  The story takes place around 1930 in rural America.  It centers around they animals thoughts about a new family moving into the neighborhood and twists quite a bit from there.  The best word to describe it is "charming", it just makes you happy.  I have since bought this and added it to our permanent collection, and admit that I'm trying the families technique on our troublesome squirrels.