Sidewalk Paint, The Munchkins and Neck Rolls *Photo Dump*

Oh these little kids!  They bring such joy to our life!  I was listening to a friend talk about how brief and passing these moments are when they are little....and it is so true!  Too soon they will be all grown up and these baby years, toddler years, little kid years will be gone before we know it.  Here they are using the sidewalk paint I tried out the other day!

It's 1 cup water + 1 cup cornstarch + how ever many drops of food coloring you want.  And no worries- it comes off the driveway after a good rain (which we got only a few hours after these pics!)

 

Here are  my little munchkins all together!

 

 

 

 

 

And finally the neck rolls....luckily, not mine. 

But this little sweetie's!

 

See them?

 

 

Wait....here's a better shot!

 

 

Wait for it!!!!!!!!  BAM!

 

 

I've never had a baby with neck rolls like this!  I'm lovin' it!

 

 

 

 

Meet our chickens!

So we got our chicks from McMurray Hatchery at the very end of February.  That makes them about 12 1/2 weeks currently.  And boy are they fun!  I had no idea chickens had such personality.  They lived in the brooder in our garage for about 6 weeks and moved out into the chicken coop roughly about the time that Caroline was born.  We have 8 in all:  2 Rhode Island Reds, 2 Barred Rocks and 4 Speckled Sussex.  I basically just read the reviews and picked the friendliest sounding ones!  With the kids, my first priority was to have "nice" chickens that would be able to survive being handled by a 7 year old and a 2 year old.  They are all nice, but the Barred Rocks and the Speckled Sussex are by far friendlier than the Rhode Island Reds.  They all have names, thus my big dreams of eating these chickens one day had to go by the wayside.  They are definitely pet chickens who will hopefully be providing us with some awesome fresh farm eggs in the next couple of months! 

Their names are:  Joyce, Roxy (Barred Rocks),  Gloria and Cherry (RIR's), Little Peeper, Tenderfoot, Isa and Gigi (Speckled Sussex). 

Little Peeper is Isabel's favorite....she had a few rough days in the beginning and we had to nurse her back to health.  Tenderfoot was named after she hurt her leg....not sure how, but we had to give her some TLC as a chick and now she is just fine, but she runs with a limp!  Joyce is definitely the boss.  She and Tenderfoot will come running across the yard to greet you when they see you coming!  It is just hysterical.  Joyce is also the one chicken who will try to follow you back to the house while all the other chickens will stay together around the coop.  They are just so funny.  Here are some pics as they are growing up!

 

(No!  She's not at all excited about day old baby chicks of her very own!) 

 

(Barred Rock and 3 Speckled Sussex)

 

Rhode Island Red up front.

 

That might be Tenderfoot. 

 

Ian caught a Rhode Island Red.

 

2 Reds trying to hide.

 

No, Little Peeper is not dead in the above picture!  This is literally how Isabel cradles the chicken!

 

They won't eat the potato bugs off the potato leaves, but if the kids pick them off and put them in the dump truck, they love them!

Joyce or Roxy....not sure.

 

 

I think chickens are my new favorite animal.  I could seriously get rid of the dog and the cat at this point and just have chickens! LOL!

The Garden

So here are some pics from our gigantic garden.  It is really overwhelming how big it is, and because it is so big, I was very ambitious with the amount of seeds I ordered.  Here is what is what we've got going on:

 

The grapes.  These are scuppernong.  I have no idea what to do with these!

                 Teeny tiny blueberry bush transplants from my parents' house.

 

 

 

Two different types of green beans, obviously climbers ;)

Pepper Plants

 



 

Tomato Plants...not sure how these guys are going to do.  I started them late, they grew slow and I was late putting them in the ground...only time will tell.  They seem very scrawny to me!

 

Zucchini and Squash, and Kennebec Potatoes in the row to the left.

 

The one and only surviving tomato plant that I grew from seed that my dad gave me. 

 It's a Cherokee Purple.

 

Sweet peas.  I was late getting them in the ground, so not sure how they will do since they like cooler weather.

 

Scarecrow!  And it works!

 

Sweet Corn (my two dinky rows...our neighbor planted two FULL rows of his own sweet corn in our garden for us).

Watermelon!  Just starting to pop up!

 

 

I'm just excited that the seeds we put in the ground are coming up and growing!  It's so exciting to watch!  Now if they'll just keep growing and produce something edible! :)

 

Finally, right? Some house pics...

Yes, it's wayyyy overdue to show some pics of the house.  There are things I like, and things I don't. ;) 

 

There are a million projects!  It's like a renovation in every room!

 

So, the backyard.  I love it.  It's gorgeous.  It's just so out-in-the-country.  It's so much fun to discover all the different plants and flowers as they start to open up for the spring!

 

You can see the garden in the pic below:  wayyyy back there.
 

 

Our bedroom wall color:  I really like. It's just a putty gray.  However, there are nail holes that were patched up by the previous owner (which I won't show you because they look awful), but not repainted.  So we have these white putty patches all over the walls and are going to have to try to match the paint.  Hmmmm...

The tin ceiling in the kitchen.  Love this!   It just looks really "farmhouse rustic".

 

A view from the opposite side, looking back into the kitchen. 

 

I've painted the walls in here a gray color that sometimes looks a tad blue. I like it. It used to look like the picture below....mint green.  YIKES!

 

 

The awesome wallpaper that I've tried to hide with a massive kid's mural of family photos.
Giant sheet of brown packing paper + oil pastels + Isabel = hours of entertainment
Score, Mommy! ;)

 

Oh, and by awesome, I mean horrendous.

 

 

Piano room.  Oh, I mean, narrow-entry-from-the-front-door-in-which-we-stuck-a-piano.  And let me tell you why this works:  our front door is never used.  Well, except by unassuming strangers.  All of the parking is in the back of our house and there is not even a real pathway to the front door.  So I figured if it wasn't really going to be used as an entry, I should make it functional in some other way. This entry had a different sort of horrendous blue floral wallpaper on the lower half which we removed.  And by "we", I mainly mean Isabel and Ian.  They went to town pulling strips off.

 

Guest bath:  I'm working with what I've already got.  The bottom is a painted, textured wallpaper that was already there and I really liked it.  Just added an old stained glass window above the toilet.  And need to change out all the gold fixtures.

 

You can kind of see the textured wallpaper in this pic. 

This was before we changed out the wooden toilet seat....gross. 

 

 

 

Our house is really a mixture of things that have already been updated.  Like a few rooms have been updated with white moulding instead of the old brown stained stuff.  And the lady who lived here before us could not really decide and stick with one "theme"....for instance in our master bath, it was remodeled (well partly), but there is chrome, brushed nickel, crystal, clear glass, old 1970s bronze,  white, cream and hand-painted green and blue....all in one tiny space!!  It's kind of the same in the kitchen.  She did some nice updates, but couldn't pick which finish she really wanted, so I'm trying to figure out how to make the house a little more cohesive without breaking the budget and just buying all new fixtures, knobs, etc. 

 

So it's a work in progress, and with three little ones, a growing garden and the handful of chickens... I'm sure it will all take time!  But that's the fun of it, right? :)

Embrace it and Rejoice! (Caroline is one month old!)

One month old!

 

So I visualized buying those adorable baby month stickers off of Etsy to use for little Caroline, and then I realized that she was a month old and I had not bought them. 

So Plan B:  Hire Isabel to make one for me!  As you see from above, she cut out a circle (sort of) ;) and put a number 1 on it, like I asked.  Then she proceeded to decorate it with animal stickers.  Hah!  Not what I had in mind, but probably more custom than I could get off etsy anyway! LOL!  :)

Mounted to the chair with a piece of scotch tape.  It doesn't get more homemade than that! ;)  I'm going to stick with the Isabel-for-hire plan for the remainder of Caroline's first year of monthly pictures...just precious to know that Big Sister was such an eager participant.

So Caroline is one month old already and whew....she is much tougher than the other two were at this age.  She is pretty content during the day...but once the sun starts to go down, I've got a different baby on my hands.  We are dealing with a pretty excessive crier on the PURPLE Period of Crying scale.  So you know, they don't call colic colic anymore.  It's now the PURPLE period of crying- you can google it... but basically it's an acronym to describe the crying that is a part of normal infant development, and not just "colic".

The good news and bad news too, I guess:  this too will pass.  I mean of course I want the nighttime crying to pass and I know it will, but I don't want to wish this time away either, because she is only this small for such a short period of time.  So right now at month one, I've decided to just try to embrace it.  Yes, embrace the crying at night.  Sure I need to trade off staying up to soothe and hush her with my husband....I'm not saying I can do it alone!  But instead of complaining about the crying and the lack of sleep, I'm going to try to rejoice!  Maybe I'm taking this a little too far, I mean can I really rejoice after a full day of kids and then the littlest one just begins her nighttime screamfest? 

I'm hoping to! 

Rejoicing in the fact that I have three little ones here! 
Rejoicing in the fact that she is healthy and CAN scream! 
Rejoicing that this is part of normal development for an infant! 
Rejoicing in those moments when I DO get to lay my own head down and sleep!
Rejoicing in that morning cup of coffee!
Rejoicing that I have a husband who will help me in the middle of the night!