not exactly the healthiest way to eat them…but look at that gorgeous orange yolk! our first eggs. many more to come (i promise not to post pictures of every egg dish prepared by our girls’ eggs).
6 eggs this morning! what will we do when all 15 of the hens are laying? free brown and turquoise eggs, anyone?
back in july, i wrote about
our day at the beekeepers association annual picnic. while we were
there, we met a couple who we discovered were our neighbors (meaning:
they live 4.5 miles from us). Buzz and Aleda keep several hives in
their back yard – their house is near a busier intersection, so this
proves that if you have a little bit of land, keeping bees isn’t all
that difficult. they gave us their card (they sell their award-winning
“BuzzAleda Honey”) and told us to come over anytime we wanted to “hang
out with the bees.”
tuesday was the perfect day. it wasn’t
humid, nor raining. kenny gave them a call and of course, Buzz was
excited to have an excuse to open up the hives up and show a new
beekeeper the ins and outs of the honeybee hive. Buzz and Aleda are
grandparents, so the boys were entertained by lots of running around
and jungle-gym climbing, and sand-digging (and two popsicles EACH!)
while kenny met a few thousand bees.
i was able to grab a few
photos of kenny suited-up with bees in-hand, but you’ll have to excuse
the window screen in the picture. i was holding adam and taking the
shots (while the boys played about 3/4 of an acre behind the hives),
and we weren’t suited up. and although kenny said they were the most
docile bees he’s ever “met,” we weren’t chancing it to take a photo
without a screen in between!
before you open a hive, you “smoke” the bees with a smoker.
the idea behind a smoker is to make the bees easy to manage. when they
sense smoke entering the hive, they engorge themselves on honey
thinking that they need to stock up on honey, leave the hive and
survive until the “fire” is gone. a bee engorged on honey is a very
relaxed, docile bee, so it’s easier to manage the open hive with
friendly bees. kenny holding one of the frames:
if you look closely, in the center of the cluster of bees you’ll
see a yellowish dot on the back of the queen. Beekeepers sometimes put
the dots on the queen so they can identify them quickly. there is one
queen per hive of up to 50,000 bees! the queen lays all the eggs in the
hive which produce either a drone (male) or a worker bee (female). the
honeybee lives for up to 3 or 4 weeks while the queen lives for however
long the workers deem necessary.
the setting sun on a hive of bees and their honey combs.
i never would have thought beekeeping was fascinating until kenny
mentioned he wanted to keep bees one day. even then i wasn’t
interested. i kept referring to it as “his hobby.” but now i am just as
excited to receive and keep a hive ourselves.
you can’t get a
hive until spring, and if you order it through a catalog, you have to
order in the dead of winter (january). you can also get a swarm from
another beekeepers, but you still have to order a queen to keep the
hive a-hummin’.
there is so much to know and learn about (and
benefit from!) the honeybee. if you need or want proof of the One True
Creator, study the intricacies of the intelligent honeybee. Intricacy
and intelligence are God’s specialty.
isn’t it amazing that the littlest feet in the family are the busiest ones? the ones that keep the mama bigger feet busier than ever? i snapped a few photos lately of adam’s feet because i recently came across his newborn footprints. babies have long, skinny feet when they’re born, and padded and rounded when they’re about to walk or crawl.
adam is a fierce spirit in our home: he controls his mama’s moods the most. maybe i was just too busy with a 4-week-old sawyer when rowan was 15 months old to notice his busy-ness. or tired with 12-week-in-utero adam when sawyer was 15 months old…but i don’t remember 15 months being a big challenge. or perhaps like every child, adam comes with his very own set of blessings and challenges. fortunately, he’s just too adorable for me to stay frustrated with him. he’s got a smile that will melt you in an instant, and he’s a snuggly boy. he’s very attached to his mama (which i have to admit to loving) but cuddles into kenny’s neck anytime of the day as well.
and look at those feet. how can you resist a toddling “baby” with rounded feet like that? his little “pitter-patter” can be heard throughout the first floor in our home. rowan and sawyer hear it and yell, “ooooh! here comes the monster!” and adam knows that it’s time to chase them. and they love a good “monster chase” with adam. soon, he’ll be as fast as his older brothers, using their language to communicate. and his feet will be wearing hard-soled shoes, not the soft, leathery kinds that fit him so well now.
and i won’t be able to hold him on my lap and rub the bottoms of his feet while he slowly wakes from a nap. i guess this is what it means when they say that these days might be long, but the years are short. soon, no baby feet will pitter-patter through our kitchen, into our living room. and that will be sooner than i probably want.
this weekend our beloved pool closed. we hadn’t been in over a month due to traveling and cold days, so we spent a good two hours there on friday evening soaking up that 90-degree weather and sunshine. today, we met friends at the local lake beach for picnicing and swimming. the air was comfortable when the sun went behind the clouds, hot when the clouds disappeared, but perfect for sitting in the sand with toddlers and babies. kenny always swims with the older two while i frolic with adam in the sand and ankle-deep water. today it worked out nicely since i was able to chat with my friend jill who we met at the beach.
jill and i are friends (roommates, in fact!) from college, and two summers ago, she and her husband and then 2-year-old son, noah, moved from st. louis to a small college town about an hour away from us. we’ve gotten together several times since they moved here and it’s fun to see our boys play together. since they arrived, adam was born, and they have a daughter now, ellie, who is 9 months. jill married joel, who i also went to college with. when we get together, i’m sure kenny tires of our “michigan” and “calvin college” conversations. but he’s a good sport about it.
although tomorrow’s high is 85, tonight’s low is 55. this makes for chilly mornings and evenings. as i type, i’m sitting near our enclosed back porch (which leads to the deck) with a heavy, hooded sweatshirt (grey, not red, for you adam sandler fans) on and i’m still cold. i sense we’re nearing to the winding-down part of summer. schools start back up this week, and summer adventures are done. we’ll use up the warmth out of every day as best we can, and then i’ll be ready to dive right into my most favorite season of all (although summer is soonly becoming my most favorite season…watch out october!). i will want to be indoors more, which might lead to more sewing. i have several projects lined up for fall…after i finish my first quilt (pictures after it’s finished and after it’s gifted).
on the chicken-egg front…the chickens escaped their pen today, so kenny secured it even more this evening after we returned home from the beach. we did find two fresh eggs in the pen and in one of the nesting boxes in the coop, so they’ve been washed and refrigerated (did you know you don’t have to refrigerate eggs if you never wash them? unfortunately, the two we found were also quite near a bunch of chicken excrement, so we washed them and they’re in our fridge). we also found another nest of about 11 eggs on the opposite side of our house. so more than two chickens, at least, are laying. we’ll see how they do tomorrow!
so. we headed out to lowe’s this afternoon, picked up some chicken wire fencing, netting, and small lumber and kenny is working feverishly to build a chicken run off their side entrance to the coop. they have nest boxes in their coop, but they’re free-range chickens (so free-range, in fact, that our neighbors find them in their yards at times), so they’ll lay wherever they want. for a little while, we’ll be keeping them “cooped up” in 15×15 outdoor chicken “yard” attached to their coop so they learn to lay in their nest boxes. with our fingers crossed!
i’m eager for the araucanas to begin laying their blue-green eggs.
it looks as though the rebellious age is spreading throughout our chicken brood.
we have 15 chickens. last night, kenny found their hiding place: roosting in branches about 15-20 feet above the coop. we realize our roost in the coop isn’t adequate for them, and we realize these chickens need to roost at night. it’s in their chicken blood. but what will they do when the branches are ice-covered? or snow-covered? or there is a windy storm overnight?
tonight, we only counted 10 chickens in the coop…which means another chicken has joined the rebellion. we could only find two in the tree. so three chickens are unaccounted for.
i don’t think they realize yet that bear and raccoons can climb trees. perhaps this means they haven’t encountered one yet. that’s good news.
the bad news is…we might have to clip their wings from keeping them from roosting so high up. and if clipping their wings is anything like bathing a cat or cutting the hair of a toddler boy [whose name (rowan) i will withhold for (rowan) the sake of his (rowan) privacy], we’re in for it.
you know how some dreams stick with you for hours after waking, and it feels as though they were so very real?
last night, i dreamt that kenny and i were tight friends with the steelers head coach mike tomlin and his wife. we were so close, in fact, that we had their teenage daughter babysit for us while we attended the first steeler home game on their invitation. this morning, i feel like calling them up and telling them we had a great time at the game, and their daughter did a great job putting our boys to bed.
in reality, i think his kids are nowhere near babysitting age.
it must be all the heavy rain we’re getting here that makes us all stir-crazy. or perhaps it was the saline drops i used last night to stop my sneezing. or perhaps i just have really vivid dreams every night.
the highlight of the trip for me was seeing my grandparents. they made us lunch, gave the boys coloring books, and took us to a merry-go-round. it’s so great seeing your kids with your very own grandparents (grammy, i’ll print these pictures for you!)
we’re back from a short trip out east where we had hoped to visit a few more people, but couldn’t since:
a/ traveling in the car for more than an hour and a half at a time doesn’t make three boys very happy.
b/ traveling in the car with a very sick little baby doesn’t do a mama’s nerves good.
we did, however, get to visit with kenny’s parents, sail on their sailboat, visit with my grandparents, and ride a merry-go-round (which always makes the boys HAPPY!). and adam is feeling MUCH better as of this morning (i still kept him home from church as he needs his morning nap today, and he usually misses it on sundays).
more to come…
dirt and clay, all dug away.
last night, after all the digging and excavating and grading and loud trucks left, we walked over to “nana and pop-pop’s house.” rowan and sawyer decided to help dig…with their own hands (this is the basement):
