Yesterday, we took the girls to a friend of Erik's to meet some animals. There were two fainting goats, Nell (with the horns) and Mojo, two llamas, four horses, two donkeys, two peacocks, a good forty chickens of unusal varieties, about 10 pheasants, including the colorful varieties you typically only see on Animal Planet, and one lonely duck.


The girls really liked the goats, and as you can see, the feeling was mutual. Nell and Mojo ate out of the girls hands and ran with them all around their little pen.


This chicken is very friendly and will let you hold her for awhile. About 15 minutes was her limit, which is an awful lot longer than I've ever held a chicken.

Perhaps the most exciting part, we were sent home with a dozen of these beauties. None of them are white, they are all shades of cream and brown, except for the pale green one just left of Gretchen's hand. She kept trying to have the green one and the small cream one in the corner switch places, apparently the colors were off balance or something.

While we were there, three of the eggs were freshly laid and Gretchen kept trying to put them back in the laying boxes. She was awfully worried that they would hatch at home. A couple of them will be made into banana bread in a little while, I'm sure she'll be relieved.

Hello Spring!

What a beautiful, beautiful day! We hit 73 degrees today and I was very tempted to remove the plastic from the windows but have decided to be patient and wait it out a few more weeks. The park behind our house has been hopping. There have been school age children out on spring break and now disc-golf crowd is beginning to arrive. Tomorrow is supposed to be even better, I hope the meteorologists are 50% correct today!

We have had a busy few days around our house. Today I stayed home with the girls and my niece and nephew -- enjoying the first day of spring break. We had a windy picnic and then went ice-skating, indoors of course on such nice day.

Over the weekend, one of our hamsters escaped, she was found late last night. We (read: he) put in a new water heater. Erik put a second coat of paint on the high ceiling at his parent house and repaired the ice maker at my parents house. We did plenty of running here, there and everywhere. I have become quite good at handing tools upon request. Feels like I am a surgical nurse except it's 'wrench', (me handing it over) 'wrench.'

As I had more than 20 mintues to whip together dinner, I'm off to put together three pizzas for the spring break crowd. It'll be one pepperoni, one bbq chicken and one 1/2 cheese, 1/2 italian sausage. And, strawberry shortcake for dessert. Hello, spring! I sure hope you stick around for good!

Rain = Bake

At our house, if it's raining, you bake something.

My sweet seven year old Katie made blueberry muffins, mostly by herself. She handled measuring the milk and oil, cracking eggs and the stirring. I handled the oven and gave a lesson on the fine art of folding berries into batter.



Carefully spooning the batter into the cupcake papers

And, now the finished product. They were really yummy warm. While Katie likes hers plain, I like mine split in half with a little butter spread on each side. She informed me 'that's gross.'