it's the spring/summer edition of smithical. after several technical difficulties over the weekend, i believe we're finally re-launched! we still have a few minor kinks to work out, but they really are minor, so we're back...minor glitches and all.

more later, but we enjoyed some spring thunderstorms driving home in the car from a pig roast last night. yes, that's what they do here in the country for big parties...pig roasts and corn mazes. okay, we didn't have a corn maze, but the pig roast was fantastic. the boys enjoyed looking at the pig roasting (rowan: "i saw his teeth!") and they even enjoyed the shredded pork (sawyer: "i ate pig tonight!").

thanks to the tip from jack in the comments section way back on this post, i was well aware of the fact that i was missing out on a live performance by martin sexton. but we had a great time celebrating the 40th birthday of a good friend. one of these days i will drag kenny to see martin sexton.

enjoy this day of rest.

i don't know what it is about the evenings that kenny isn't here for the kids' bedtime...but they pretty much suck the big one.

today, however, was fabulous. kenny sent me out first thing in the morning to "do whatever i wanted" so i discovered new roads as i drove, listening to my favorite radio station. then i happened upon the best nursery i've ever been to. rows and rows of perennials, annuals, HUGE hanging baskets, herbs, and vegetable plants (heirloom!). if our garden hadn't already been planted, i'd have walked away with a lot more than i did. i only walked away with $19 worth of annuals - ivy, petunias, impatiens, and a GORGEOUS begonia plant that i just kept potted in our hallway. i want to look upon its glory every single morning as i stumble downstairs for my first cup of coffee.

we had a great rest of the day (except for the fact that we're in the thick of the really big, bad whining stage with the two older boys. perhaps this is subject for a different post altogether, but kenny and i are so over the whineys. when do kids grow out of it? and please, no smart remarks like, "liz, you're 34 and you're still whiney!" i already know that.) and then kenny headed off to bible study. at which point, momma is alone against three boys.

tonight, the two older boys decided that they were dying of thirst. just two minutes after they each had a cup of milk. they were so thirsty that rowan told me, "i'm so sad that you won't give me a drink." i told him that if he didn't whine about it for five minutes, i'd get him a cup of water before i turned out the lights. he succeeded, and he had his water. then he told me that the water made him even thirstier. when i said, "no more water, rowan" he told me that he was sick. and then sawyer said that his back hurt. and then adam decided it was his turn to cry. i gathered them altogether and brought them downstairs. i changed adam's diaper (he was...um...smelly), and told the boys to put on their rain boots. so we all traipsed outside to feed and water the chickens for the night.

at least the chickens have learned that bedtime means bedtime. we headed out to the coop with 15 chickens following us (waddling! they waddle like ducks!) to the squeals of joy from the boys. i put their food and water in the coop and half of them hopped up in. the rest followed us back to the house.

"take two" of boys' bedtime. the older two were alseep within minutes of me leaving the room for the second time but adam wasn't going to have any part of this sleeping thing. and he let me know by his wails. so i did what dr. ferber teaches parents NOT to do...i went and picked him up and brought him downstairs. we sat on the front stoop and chatted for a while with the chickens. then i sang him a few songs, and after 15 minutes, put him back in his crib. he protested all of 2 minutes and was asleep soon after.

at this point, it is about an hour and a half AFTER the boys' normal bedtime. i go outside to check the chickens and they're all huddled in the corner of their coop like good little girls. i lock them in for the night and head back to the house for a relaxing evening hour before my own bedtime.

five minutes pass, and sawyer starts to cry. i go to him, find him alseep and rolling about in bed. i tuck him under his sheet, give him a kiss, reassure him of our love for him (even when they sleep, i tell them i love them...can't hurt, right?) and come back downstairs. five minutes later, another sawyer episode. fifteen minutes later, another one, but this time, he's awake and telling me he needs a drink. i rub his back and he's asleep in minutes.

that was five minutes ago. i'm just waiting for yet another cry from the room. maybe we should skip the soft serve ice cream after dinner from now on?

as i predicted, the warm air and sunnier skies have kept me (and the entire family) outside instead of inside reading and writing. and i find myself having a hard time finding something to blog about. so...do i leave the blog alone for a while and let it grow cobwebs until the cooler air returns, or do i just write about what has been keeping us busy? because what has been keeping us busy is basically what i've been blogging about for...oh...the past five entries.

are you sick of hearing about the gardens and the chickens and my boys? if you are, you are invited to read the next highlighted blog in your bloglines account. because this entry will be no different than the past few. if you're still around, i'm flattered.

last friday afternoon, friends of ours from pittsburgh took time out of their busy lives to come to our home and help us figure out just what we have growing in our gardens. the perennial gardens just have us perplexed. our friends gave us amazing advice on how to treat and relish and enjoy our bushes, gardens, and trees, and identified many of the gorgeous flowers growing in our beds. we feel so much more confident in our ability to keep our grounds watered, fed, and beautiful in the years to come now that we know what we're housing in our soil.

several colors of foxglove, purple miniature iris, white iris, lupin, poppy, and jack-in-the-pulpits are our strongest plants, and are becoming my favorites. i'm waiting for the poppy to break open its bloom...but everything else is opening up. i honestly don't remember half of these flowers in the garden last year.

and our row of peonies? there are literally hundreds of bulbs bending their stems over to the ground, covered in ants. i read that you can cut them when their bloom is full, but not-yet-opened, so i cut and brought a few inside (after is hook out all the ants). they smell incredible. and they are slowly opening up now that they're in a vase.

i want to highlight this so that everyone can read this comment that was left in yesterday's entry by my friend bonnie who leads the women's bible study at my old church:

We actually prayed for you and your chickens today in bible study! During our pray time, you just came into Beth's heart and she prayed for you and your family and the chickens :) Maybe it was her prayer that led the baby robin to safety!  We hope you are all doing well! We miss you!

ahhhh...how i miss my regular, weekly contact with my circle of friends. this particular womens bible study was extremely supportive, loving, encouraging, funny, and had a deep love for God (they still are...and i only speak of it in past tense because i am no longer a regular attender). it was great to know that every tuesday morning, i'd be encouraged and loved by this group of women...encouraged to go deeper in my faith, and encouraged to be a better wife, mom and all around better person. if they can pray for me and my chickens, they can (and will!) pray for whatever you need prayer for.

so if you're not already a part of a book group or bible study (i strongly recommend the latter as there is something powerful about groups of people that pray with and for each other), get into one. you'll be strengthened.

what an exciting day at the homestead.

it's a little earlier than we had hoped, but due to circumstances out of our control, our 5-week-old chickens are now free range. after rounding them up for the 27th time on sunday and yesterday, we just decided to let them have at it. their little makeshift pen wasn't doing it for them anymore, and since they've now got tail feathers, they're about twice as big as they were last week...they need the extra room.

and they love it. they wander around and around and under the coop, eating grass, pecking at bugs. they go hide when rowan and sawyer come running, but come when the adults find them with hands full of food. eventually, rowan and sawyer will treat them with respect, right?

also this morning, our baby robins were dumped out of their nest. at first we thought it was an accident, but my mom, who was visiting, assured us that this is what mama robins do with thei babies, and it's completely natural. BUT THEY'RE ONLY ONE WEEK OLD!!! apparently, she was right. we found two of the three babies hopping around the garden (i held off on watering for about half an hour until they were out of the garden) and mama and papa hopping around the yard chirping at them to follow them into the woods across the street (and at us to stay the heck away from their babies!). i guess papa robin spent the past two weeks looking for their new home, since this is the first i've seen him.

at one point, one of the babies was stuck in the middle of the road. you can imagine that at one week old, they're not walking very fast. kenny actually stopped traffic (all of the one car that past our house in that half hour period) to keep the baby robin safe. we think the other robin made it across the road since there is no evidence on the road of its demise, and it is not in our yard any more.

then we looked up and saw two hawks flying overhead. for the first time since fall. we ran over to the chicken coop and left the boys there to play with the chickens. perhaps hawks won't swoop where there are children at play.

as i was walking back i happened to look down under the grapevine where the original robin's nest was and noticed a black coiled stripey "rope" that happened to be a snake. i ran in the house, pulled kenny away from his work yet again to tell him about it. i knew he want to show the boys. he tried to grab it, but it slithered away into some tall grass. or our peonies.

we're wondering if the garter snake is the reason behind the mysterious absence of the third baby robin. does anyone know for sure if garters eat baby birds?

hawks, snakes, and wild cars on the road...the real culprits of small farm animal deaths.

we must be bored, because we are undertaking yet another project.

just off of our enclosed back porch is a 3.5"x8 foot stoop made of wood (a mini-deck, really) with 4 steps down to the yard. underneath the current deck is a railroad-tie holding wall, collapsing and pulling the current deck down with it.

well okay, it's not that bad...we still use that door to get in and out of the house especially in the summer, but it needs some propping up, and/or tearing down, and our preference is toward the latter. especially when it involves putting up a deck that can hold more than one folding chair.

so...we've been pouring over books on building decks from the library...looking through magazines and web sites for inspiration.

you need to help us...because i want to do something like this and this. and THIS! but we only have the space, time, and resources for a more standard, rectangular deck.

but it's a deck, nonetheless, and we've been talking about it since moving in (after we painting all the rooms in the house, which hasn't happened except for the bathroom which is a lovely dark blue but because of its shade and need for 4 coats, it is the sole reason i'm not painting for a long, long time).

but still, we need your help. do you have a deck? i want to see pictures of them! either send them to me in email (you can find my email address on the right, under the categories list), or give me a link to pictures of your very own deck in the comments.

i'm dreaming of the day we can have a deck party with 257 of our closest friends, so send me some inspiration!

it's all about veggies.

we've had a long few weeks of warm, sunny weather and our arms and faces carry the tanned shadows of our full days outside. the boys were so happy to be outside, and they all slept the whole night long, so tired from running, climbing, digging, and playing..

we planted our garden over the weekend. here's what we're hoping to harvest through the late summer, into early fall:


it doesn't seem like a whole lot when you're out looking at the garden, but looking at that list - wow - it seems as though we're setting up our very own garden stand.

here's the garden, chock-full of plants and seeds, waiting for the rain to come (it did a few hours after this picture was taken):

right behind the garden (where the boys are standing in the photo above) is a huge grapevine that yields lots of sour grapes. but this season, we found a robin nest inside:

mama sat dutifully on her eggs until they hatched yesterday morning (mama has since returned to the nest after i took these pictures):

and she's there all the time now that the weather has turned cooler. what a good mama robin. fortunately, mama robin picked prime location in the grapevine as our garden is right next to her nest, and she has first dibs on all morning worms. smart woman.

also, since the weather has been cooler, kenny had to hook up an extension cord from the barn into the chicken coop to put a light on them last night. by the winter, they'll be fully feathered-out, but they still have those bald spots on their necks and heads, so we don't know how warm they actually are. it's supposed to warm up in a few days.

the chickens turned a whole month old on monday. to celebrate, we moved them out of their brooder in the laundry room to their brand new coop in the yard. i couldn't be more thankful. they're SO BIG now, that they were kicking up dust from their bedding and it was EVERYWHERE in the laundry room. i spent the entire day (between diaper-changes, meals, naps, playing, and reading) wiping down the room and cleaning it two times over. remember these cute little fuzz-balls?

they are now not so cute. they're turning into chickens, and have scrawny necks with patches of bald waiting for their feathers. their feet are awkwardly too big for their bodies (just like in the 7th grade!). however, where their feathers are fully grown in, the patterns are beautiful, and there are glimpses of their full-grown beauty when they stretch out their wings. i am sure that in no time at all, they will be beauties.

here are our girls, all happy in their new digs:


a golden buff (front) and a buff orpington (rear) checking out the ramp:


feeding time:


three silver-laced wyandottes and a buff orpington:




did i mention how happy i am to have them out of our house? don't get me wrong, i love the girlies, but they really do stink. in ways you didn't think possible. and not like "dirty farm smell," it's more like something died in our laundry room on top of the dirty farm smell.

the chickens are still confined until our neighbor's dog is trained to stay inside his brand new invisible fence. how nice of our neighbor to set up an expensive system to keep her big pure-bred pointer dog from eating all 15 of the chickens.  i think the plans for the fence were already in the works, but when she heard our chickens were living in their coop soon, she got the fence buried and began training her dog.

if only we can figure out a way to keep hawks, foxes, and raccoons from preying on them.

the chicken-hobby is a big project, but one that we're enjoying. we have to keep the boys away from them most of the time "but they're my friends, mommy!" is rowan's excuse for wanting to hang out with them all day long, and what he repeats to us when we tell him it's time to leave them alone.

what do you do when you take your empty grocery cart back to the cart station in the grocery store parking lot and find an empty cart there with three full, (still cold!) gallons of 2% milk?

• do you leave it there hoping that the person who left it will come back soon and find it? (like i was going to do)

• do you walk into the customer service desk and tell them that someone left it hoping that the original purchaser will come to the desk and get it back? (like the man who asked me if it was mine as i was walking out of the cart station was going to do on his way into the store)

• or do you pull into a closby parking spot, start walking past it on your way into the story, and take them without a second thought and put them in your car and continue to head into the grocery store for your shopping (minus the milk on your list since hey - score! free milk in the parking lot!)? (like the man who pulled into the spot next to mine as i was beginning to leave)
  

three free gallons of milk is tempting, but i do believe in a form of good karma, and once i left a full box of diapers in a cart in the parking lot and it wasn't there when i returned 10 minutes later, nor did the customer service desk know anything about an abandoned box of diapers. and i was so sad about it for days.

i'm not tooting my own horn, but seriously...please tell me you wouldn't choose the third option (even though i agree, it's most tempting!).

i am enjoying a rare moment...a cup of HOT black coffee first thing in the morning.

because of a long and exhausting (but oh-so-much-fun) day the boys had visiting with their grandma and grandpa at a local state park yesterday, all three of them are still sleeping. it's 7:22 a.m., and there is not a peep from their room.

i tried to get a cute "mother's day family picture" taken at the end of our time at the park, and i guess we're at the "sticking out my tongue 24-hours a day" stage with the boys. so this was the best of the lot:

happy mother's day to my mom, grammy, and all my fellow mommy readers and bloggers.

i was blessed to share homemade crepes (ala kenny) with my boys this morning. and i was gifted with THE NEW MARTIN SEXTON CD!  ahhh...black coffee, lovely crepes, and martin playing all day long!! the perfect day!

and here are my reasons for truly celebrating today...
 

I finished my second fiction book in the Spring Reading Thing  earlier this week and think it's worthy of a review.

If you are not one to enjoy a slow-moving book, don't read this book. If you want short, succinct sentences to lull you to sleep at night, don't read this book. If you don't find comfort in reading about simple pleasures, this book is a waste of your time. I can't think of any other metaphor/simile for a book like Housekeeping but this: this book is like a conversation over a cup of tea on a warm, firefly-filled summer night; the cool grass tickling your feet while the words from your conversation will tangle lightly through your hair as you fall deeper into the chair like dead weight and slowly. fall. to. sleep.

That's probably why it took me so long to read. I can really only read now in the 20 minutes before falling asleep at night (since we've had such amazing weather, and when it's sunny outside, you work outside) and the writing in this book is so rich and intricate that it feels like i was reading a lullabye. In a good way.

Not that this book is boring at all. The story moves along comfortably, but it's enough to keep you reading and wanting to know what happens next. It's a gentle book with a big story. A sad story. A story that doesn't end with the last page.

I wanted to include a short excerpt of Robinson's writing. This is from the end of the book, and it won't give anything away, except the author's writing style:

Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it. God Himself was pulled after us into the vortex we made when we fell, or so the story goes. And while He was on earth He mended families. He gave Lazarus back to his mother, and to the centurion he gave his daughter again. He even restored the severed ear of the soldier who came to arrest Him - a fact that allows us to hope the resurrection will reflect a considerable attention to detail. Yet this was no more than tinkering. Being man He felt the pull of death, and being God He must have wondered more than we do what it would be like. He is known to have walked upon water, but He was not born to drown. And when He did die it was sad - such a young man, so full of promise, and His mother wept and His friends could not believe the loss, and the story spread everywhere and the mourning would not be comforted, until He was so sharply lacked and so powerfully remembered that his friends felt Him beside them as they walked along the road, and saw someone cooking fish on the shore and knew it to be Him, and sat down to supper with Him, all wounded as he was. There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word however chance, wirtten in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair wthl dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.