Happy Birthday Ava!

Our grand-daughter Ava turns one year old today. 

 

Sarah and Craig had her birthday party Sunday at their house.  She had such a pretty dress on. But she hated it because she couldn't crawl!

Ava  had lots of aunts, uncles and grandparents there to help celebrate.  I was so busy taking pictures of Ava that most of the other pictures I have of everyone else didn't turn out too good. Sorry guys!

And of course, there's Joe being Joe:

 

Matt couldn't wait until the presents were all opened so that he could put the toys together.

Ava had tons of presents to open, and for each one she pretty much had the same expression, which was funny. She was just taking it all in I suppose.

Aunt Amy (great Aunt!) gave her an AC/DC t-shirt. I don't think her mom and dad thought it was great, but I did. I almost bought one for her the other day!  Might as well teach her early, right?

Of course, she had cake. What would a one year old birthday party be without the mess of the cake?

Do you want a piece?

I found Sarah & Joe's first birthday cake pictures. For the life of me I cannot find Matt's, I must be a bad mom! Hard to believe that this was 26 years ago.

Sarah:

And Joe:

Life happens....

Chickens don't like raccoons. Raccoons like chickens.

That is something that we learned this weekend. When we made the chicken coop last year, Al buried the wire below the wood so nothing would dig into the pen, we put chicken wire on the top and all sides of the outside pen. We put wire on the inside of the windows and pretty much made it so that nothing could get in.

Everything works fine if you leave them in the coop. But they are healthier if they roam the yard, so every morning we let them out, and by dusk they return to the coop on their own and we just shut the doors.  And do it again the next day. And the next day.

Which makes it not so great is when we want to go away for the weekend. We have to leave them in the coop or find someone to let them out and put them back in in the evening, which is a pain. Thankfully we have many generous friends that do this without hesitation. 

To make a very long story short, we went away for the weekend and asked a friend to put them away (for the first time) but didn't tell him every thing we should have as far as the doors and latches go. The next morning he came down with his 3 year old son to let the chickens out for the day and found that something had gotten in during the night and killed 10 of the 14 chickens. It was a mess. There were feathers and pieces everywhere. He called us to tell us what had happened, and I know he felt so bad. He even had his mom checking on the internet to see if he could find replacements!  But he shouldn't feel so bad, I can't even count how many times Al and I have forgotten to even shut the doors at all until late at night. It's really surprising that it hadn't happened yet. It's just too bad that it had to happen when someone else was watching them, and I'm sorry for that.

But you know what? They are just chickens. I'm a bit sad just because this bunch would come running as soon as you came out of the house and they were used to us, but the next bunch will learn to do the same.  They aren't pets, although I do enjoy them.

We no longer have a Tai chicken.

BUT we also no longer have a mean rooster that chases me back to the house, so it's not all bad!

We have 4 that made it through the melee (including the two that lay the blue/green eggs), and we will go back to swap meet next spring and start with new chicks again.  

We had assumed it had to be either a raccoon or a mink. When Al came back Saturday night to work for a few hours he found a sow raccoon in the coop checking to see if there were more chickens for dinner. As far as what happened after that I'm not supposed to tell, so I will just say that the raccoon and 4 young adults will no longer be feasting on my chickens.

The "Flip Me" Book

Matt made his book into a little video so that I could post it. It's really cute. He made it for Joe & Lauren (Joe had a yellow Super Beetle).

4th of July

Matt says no more biology lessons. That's pretty hard when you live where in the middle of a wildlife sanctuary, though. That's what I see everyday, but I will try to not do it as much. Part of the problem is the last few times we have been together, the pictures I have taken haven't turned out great. But then again, even though they aren't technically great, I guess it does show what's going on, right?

We went to Joe & Lauren's for 4th of July. And as has been most of the time lately, it rained. And rained some more. It was still fun to be with everyone, and Ava got to see her first fireworks.

Sarah & Craig made Lauren an official Aunt, which she loved. (not that she wasn't already Aunt Lauren, but you get the idea)

For some reason, Ava just appears in almost every picture that I took that night. She is kind of the center of attention lately.

And here are the rest of the pics. See, this is why I don't post them all!

I wish I knew how to do this so that you would see the whole thing, because it was pretty cool, but this will have to do. Matt made a "flip me" book out of a Post It pad about a stick figure that is walking along and gets run over by a VW Bug. A little morbid perhaps, but cute.

 

A little of this...A little of that

I have been slacking lately, so this is just a bit of everything that has happened lately.

1) We were headed up to the campground last night to see some friends and as I was pulling out of the garage, I saw a painted turtle laying eggs right on the edge of the driveway. I'm a bit confused as to why she chose that spot, it had to be pretty hard to dig through the gravel, but she liked it for some reason I guess.

 

It was pretty fascinating to see. We looked up the incubation time and it is between 72-80 days. It would be neat to see them hatch and head back to the pond, and I'm thinking we should put a little fence around the nest. But the big problem is, it's right on the edge of the driveway. I can just imagine that pulling the camper out, it will crush them all. I guess we will see what happens.

2) I was weeding some of the gardens the other evening and I heard a buzzing noise that made me jump. It was a Cicada.

So far this year their noise hasn't been too bad, although some years you can hardly talk over their buzzing noise in the evening.  We put him (it?) on a leaf so that the chickens wouldn't get it and I went back to weeding and I found a hole in the flower bed.

And then I found his old skin:

From what I could find out, this is a periodical cicada that comes out every year as opposed to some that only come out from 3 to 17 years (which is really hard to imagine that a bug can live under the ground for 17 years and come out for just one year to breed). Just thought it was kind of interesting to see the whole thing.

3) IT'S MONDAY! I worked from home today, and I had to move some of Al's things out of the way so that I could get my work stuff out.  I evidentially thought we really needed to spend some more money before the wedding because I dropped a quart of wood stain on the carpet. And of course it didn't just land on it's bottom, the lid came off and the entire can emptied onto the floor of the the porch.

I immediately ran to the kitchen to get some water, because I thought that would at least dilute it somewhat, and grabbed some towels, and called Al in a panic to please come help. Unknown to me though, it was oil based stain which doesn't clean up with water. I tried some carpet cleaner and used towels  to try to at least get some of it up, but none of it worked.  Al said that we could try paint thinner, but it would probably just burn the carpet which wouldn't be any better.  The larger stain is about 2 feet around! There is no way to hide it or fix it, and it's not in a spot where we can just put a rug over it. Damn! I didn't have new carpeting in my summer budget plans.

4) And lastly, just in case you forgot who the park rangers were: