More Glorious Spring!

It is still very much spring around here, and my soul is rejoicing in it. Rain showers and sunny days are taking turns coming out to play and it's leaving the earth fresh and new and green and alive. It has become my habit right after lunch, while my kids are in quiet time, to make my rounds outside in the yard. I check on each tree, each vegetable, each chicken, to see how it's doing and celebrate it's growth. I get my hands in the earth, in the grass, in tree leaves. I pull weeds, twine vines, straighten branches, smell flowers. I connect. These one-on-ones with nature each day rejuvenate me, they fill me back up. The other day Adelia said to me, "Mom, our backyard is a magical place! Isn't it?!" I couldn't agree more.

The grapes come back every year.

I found the very first lilac bloom on a bush I planted two year ago.

At a nearby park the kids and I were able to peek at a nest of duck eggs before the Mama Duck came back.

Life is beautiful. And new life is a miracle.

Ollie was playing ring-around-the-rosy with one of my Linden trees a couple weeks ago and it snapped. I almost cried. Not because I was mad at him, but because I thought we'd have to buy another tiny tree and start the growing process all over again. Aaron tried to fix it by propping it up and wrapping the broken part in layers of wet paper towel, plastic wrap, and tape. I thought the tree was a goner, but to my amazement the leaves continued to bud. Just when I started to think it would live after all, a huge wind storm came through and knocked the tree flat to the ground again. It wasn't strong enough to fight it's own battle yet. Lincoln convinced me to give the tree one more chance. We took all the wrappings off and re-wrapped it. Then we took a large bamboo stick and buried the end of it in the ground right next to the tree, then we carefully tied the tree to the bamboo stick. So far so good. The tree still looks healthy, it's trunk is springy, and the leaves are full and green. I think it will live.

And we have chicks. I've been doing some reading about raising chickens, and came across a method for maximizing egg production that I wanted to try. Basically, chickens produce the most eggs in the first two years of their lives. They can lay eggs for around five years, but after the second year production goes way down. With this idea I've read about, what you do it add a couple new chicks to your flock every year. That way you always have some that are laying a lot, and some that are still laying but getting older. And instead of all of your chickens dying at once because they all get old at the same time, you stagger it a bit, so you never have a time when you have to go without eggs while you raise new chicks.

Aaron and I (mostly me, be he gave me the go ahead) really wanted to try this out. So I took the kids to Cal Ranch and we picked out four new Barred Rock chicks. The seven chickens I have are all in their third year, so this year I got four new ones. Next year I'll only get two. Another idea I read about was each year buying a different breed, and rotating through the breeds, that way you always know how old which chickens are. People are geniuses. :) And so we welcome Zebra, Bandito, Belle, and Oreo Dragon into our chicken fam. They are living in a box in the garage until they get a little bigger.

We took the chicks to Adelia's Kindergarten for show-and-tell.