Rather anecdotal

Just a few minutes ago I got ready to make lunch and this is what I found. No, we do not have mice, its just that Nate decided he would like some bread and so he helped himself. He is quite proficient and finding the stool and pushing it up to the counter and helping himself to whatever is there. Unfortunately, with the stool he can reach the knives, which hasn't caused any injuries, but I have found him wielding a knife before.
He also likes to get into the pantry and feed himself. We use a superpail to hold the bread flour and he has found that he can climb on top and get to 3 or 4 shelves and all the food items on them. You would think this would be a motivation to keep the pantry door closed, but with 6 independent people in our house, the door is rarely closed for long.
Nate figured out a couple of days ago how to open doors. This shouldn't be much of a problem except he is fiercely independent, and so I have already found him out front walking around once. Time for a kiddie lock on the door.

The other day I took the kids to go look at couches at the furniture store. (It was spring break and there was supposedly a 4 day sale). Anyway, they were acting like all young children do when there are a ton of couches sitting around...not so good. The salesman looked at me and asked if they were all mine. I answered yes, but I really wanted to tell him that I thought it would be fun to bring 4 kids to a furniture store, so on the way over I stopped and picked another one up. He then proceeded to tell me that I have been busy. Really? I can't decide if this is a general comment about my life, or a comment on my sex life, but either way it wasn't helping the man to sell me a couch.

Ellie can Ride Without Training Wheels

The last few times we have walked to the park, Ellie has ridden her bike with training wheels and complained the whole way. I decided that since we didn't have plans today and it was a beautiful day, that it was the perfect time to teach Ellie to ride without training wheels. (I could tell from watching her ride her other bike that she was ready.)
We started the day with her never having tried to ride a bike without training wheels before, and you can see by the video- she is quite proficient now!

What the video doesn't show is that she can even start on her own now too, it just takes her a few extra seconds to do so. We are so proud of her!

We had several of the kids friends over today, and there were a couple of girls that were the boys friends, one in kindergarten and one in first grade who didn't know how to ride their bikes when their mom's dropped them off. When they saw Ellie riding, they decided to try and before you know it, they were both riding a bike quite well. (Apparently the younger one used to ride her little bike well, but she would never dare to ride a bigger bike, but she mastered that today!)

So, after one day, one bag of Cadbury mini-eggs, one sore back, one sunburn and 3 broken nails, I was able to teach 3 girls to ride their bikes today!!! (Now I'm going to go veg in front of the TV).

Aunt Jayne and Uncle Ken's visit

For the first time in the six and a half years that we have lived here, Jayne and Ken and their family came to visit us. We had a great visit packed with many activities.
On the first day that we were here, we went out to our lake property to spend the day. We had a lot of fun. The kids rode the four wheelers (and Jayne a few times).
Joe and Ken worked with the tractor clearing a few more spaces of underbrush. Jayne said she didn't think the fact that Joe let Ken use his tractor helped much in their ongoing discussion about Ken getting a tractor.
In fact, when you get two men like Joe and Ken together, they start thinking of creative ways to use the tractor: (cutting the lower limbs off of a magnolia tree that is next to our "cottage" up there. They were blocking the view of the lake.)
Jayne, Koni and I took the kids over to the island to feed the goats. The goats were happy to see us and really enjoyed eating the food out of the kids hands.

Megan, Jayne's daughter and Nate.

Emma and Lily

The girl cousins, Lily, Emma, Megan, Ellie

Just Megan and Emma

Tyler (Jayne's son) and Michael. Michael was determined to ruin the picture

All three of us women and ALL of the kids except for Adam rode in the boat you see below in one load. Incidentally, it still rode higher in the water than when the men took it out. I think they forgot that the weight needs to go in the back, what do you think?

Even Nate and Will liked to ride, or pretend to ride on the four wheelers and go karts.
That evening, we invited some of our friends up to celebrate Austin's birthday and Jayne visiting. Joe decided it would be a great idea to cook them dutch oven dinner. That worked great until we started inviting people...before we knew it, we had about 85 people there! (Can you believe that many people like us enough to come to our property?) Everyone seemed to have a good time, the kids rode four wheelers and ran around like crazy. Then Joe lit a massive bonfire and the kids all ran up to watch it burn. It was a great excuse to burn all of the underbrush he had been collecting for the past few months.
Our family (and Jayne's and Austin's) all camped out that night. On Sunday, we just relaxed and enjoyed the fantastic weather.

Monday we went to "Pump it Up" in the morning (an indoor place that has inflatable play structures). We got a babysitter that night to play bouncer to our children who were all upstairs while we played games downstairs. That was very enjoyable.

Tuesday we went to the Health Museum in the morning and then Incredible Pizza Company in the evening. The Health Museum only had about 3 large exhibits, but they were all well done and we got tired after seeing the three of them. Here the kids are sitting on some giant teeth:


Now Jayne's family has all gone home and we are feeling the need to rest and take it easy for the rest of Spring Break!

By the Way, Joe is a Realtor

I was talking with a friend the other day who frequents my blog (you know who you are) and she was telling me how they were just buying their first home. She was talking about going around with a realtor. I mentioned that Joe was a realtor (on the side) and she said that she had no idea, so I thought I should make a little plug for him here.

Joe is a realtor. In fact, he is a full-service realtor, he has the supra key that gets you into any house that is listed, and he has memberships with all of the realty organizations. For him it is just a side business, not a full time business, so he can afford to give his "clients" a great rate on buying and selling houses. If you are buying a house, he gives you back 2% of the commission from the house you buy. That turns out to be $3000 if it is a $150,000 house, or $4000 if it is a $200,000 house. Usually this just comes off at closing, basically making it so that you have little or no closing costs, but sometimes you get a check a few days after closing. If you are selling your house, the selling commission is only 4% instead of 6%. (You still have to pay the buyer's realtor 3% or they won't bring any clients to your house). He can list your house on HAR and he has several SUPRA lock boxes that he can put on your house so all Realtors can access your house. So, if you are thinking about buying or selling your house, think about using my husband, it really is a lot of money you could save.

Joe's "Mini-Me"

Our Nate is a dead ringer for his daddy. I hear it all the time..."how are you...haven't seen you in a while...oh my goodness...your baby looks EXACTLY like Joe!" It's true, he is very much like his daddy, including his funny walk and his cute smile!

Nate just turned 21 months. We finally took him to his 18 month check up today. We found that he is 33 1/2" tall, which is 50%. He weighs in at 29.6 pounds which is 75%. That is unusual for our family, usually the kids are taller percentile than weight, so I was a little worried about that, but then I remembered that at this age all of my children had suddenly become extremely picky eaters. Nate, however, is not picky. He is a fantastic eater. He loves meat, zucchini, broccoli, raw carrots, all fruits (except watermelon), and salad. The other night we went out to dinner and the waiter brought my dinner salad early. Nate got so excited and started pulling lettuce and tomatoes off my plate. It was a battle between him and I to see who could eat faster so that I could get any of the salad for myself. When my steak came out, it was the same story. He, however, doesn't really care for bread, except to lick the jelly off of it.
He is quite a joy of a kid, always going a hundred miles an hour. He loves tractors, he has found all the tractors in our house and prefers to play with those. His favorite activity is playing in the water at our bathtub...he turns the water on and then finds things in the house and gets them wet and throws them in the tub. So far nothing expensive has gotten ruined, but it is only a matter of time.

He's finally okay to go to nursery. He was very upset about the whole thing for a couple of months, but he goes more or less willingly now.

He's a very independent child. When we are at our property, if we are not watching him carefully, he will walk off, out of our sight trying to find someone. With him, it only takes a couple of seconds...so we have to watch him very carefully.

His vocabulary is really starting to take off. He says all sorts of things now, my favorite is "eee-aa" for clean up. In fact, he sings it as he starts to clean things up. His newest word is "mine" and its not pretty when he chooses to say it.

He has a happy demeanor, when he runs now he has a little half skip he does as he skips. If he's in a real hurry i.e. trying to run away from me, it is an all out run, but most of the time it is a little skip.

We've had the hardest time with his hair. He has a couple of cowlicks in the back, and his hair is super fine, so many times we will comb his hair down with gel and we can't get it to stay down. We are trying a new hair style with him and trying to let the top grow out, we will see how it goes.

We sure love this boy, I think we'll keep him!

Got Rabbits?

We do! One of the things that I love and love to hate about my husband is that when he gets excited about something he gets involved 150%. Rabbits for us are the perfect example. If you've been reading my blog for a while, you will remember we got our first rabbit last Easter. Joe wanted to learn how to raise rabbits because he learned that they are a great (great is used relatively here) protein source if you ever have to live off the land. He researched and found that the breed Californians are great for meat, so we got one.

Shortly after that, we got a couple more. We kept them through the summer. Last fall, things started to get a little heated up. Before I knew it, we had a whole slew of rabbits. Some lived, some died, he kept trying to get them pregnant...one even had a litter but then died shortly thereafter. (we bottle fed the 6 babies for 5 days until they eventually died too). We are now at full capacity. We currently have 9 full grown rabbits and 15 babies. Joe has assured me that after these babies grow up, we will get rid of some rabbits and slow it all down. (Maybe now that I have it on here, he will actually do that). The babies will be ready to be weaned about Easter time, so we are taking orders now ;)

We have learned a lot about rabbits in the past year, and Joe has made a ton of cages for them. Quite often, in the evening he will disappear for a while and I will find him in the garage making a new cage. That isn't always good news...often it means we are adding more rabbits to our warren. Here are some pictures of the birth and growth process. The night before a bunny is going to have babies she pulls out a lot of hair from her tummy and lines the nest with it. This is a new nest that has two babies in it (tiny and in the back).

They come out looking like little rats. These are the babies you will see farther down, they are currently 3 weeks old.
This baby is about 2 weeks old. As you can see, Nate loves to hold them, and he isn't always as gentle as he could be.He are the cages that Joe has been making. He started with the three that you see against the fence and then had to add an "apartment" on the side (the one with the slanted roof).

He actually had the two cages here on the left made, they are bigger than the others so that the rabbits could have babies and have enough room in them. He added the one on the right with the black rabbit in it later so that he could house more rabbits. The nice thing about these cages is that the rabbit droppings drop down below onto the ground. Rabbit dung is perfectly ready to be used in a planter or garden to fertilize it. (I don't really know what you do when you have more dung than you have uses for...maybe Joe will figure a way to market it).

This next cage is Joe's favorite. It is called a rabbit tractor. It is movable. You move it across the grass and let the rabbits eat the grass through the cage. They then fertilize the grass under their cage with their droppings. Every few days you move it. It has been winter since he has built this, so we haven't seen how well the grass will grow where it has been fertilized. We are a little afraid that we will have a patchy lawn. He started with the cage being for one rabbit, but he recently had to split it to accommodate the two rabbits by putting a fence "septum" in the middle and a second house on the side.

The kids like holding the rabbits, especially the baby ones...and I have to admit they are awful cute.
Joe especially loves his rabbits. He thinks about them and how to improve his set-up all the time. I guess its good to have a hobby.