Photo update!

Didn't intend to take a vacation from blogging, but it happened and it was not my fault. It was my laptop's fault. It went on strike, and is still on strike, and will forever more be on strike. That and with the sad demise of my laptop I also lost the ability to upload pictures from my camera...and blogging with no pictures is just no fun at all. Now I am writing from our new desktop computer, and using pictures that I now have the ability to take from my shiny new phone.

So here are some photo updates!

1. First of all, I want to give a chicken update since I haven't written much about them since that first egg was so gallantly laid. We started getting 4-5 a day, and now we're down to 1-2 a day because of winter's fading light. I never figured out who that mystery egg came from since she didn't do a follow up until a few weeks later, but now everyone's eggs are represented. The last to lay was my older Ameraucana. We never did fortify the the fence much, but let the hens free range in the back yard. They can get through the back fence, but so far they haven't traveled more than a few feet beyond.

2. Baby update! As you may expect, Baby Lillian is pretty much taking over my uterus and is preparing for her grande debut in February. She's already head down and waiting expectantly. I feel her moving every day, but it's not constant. She seems to be a lazy baby, so I expect she won't be leaving her comfy little nest until well after her due date. We'll see if she's always late, just like her daddy and his brothers.

I have been working on Baby Lillian's room, but I've already had a baby shower so it's a disaster in there!

I am way more excited that I should be about my growing stash of cloth diapers:

So far I have 2 BumGenius all-in-one diapers, 4 Flip one-size covers, and 3 Thirsties size one covers. Since I am quitting my job soon the idea is to save money by cloth diapering. I plan on using mostly prefolds and covers, but I got those BumGenius for only $13 apiece (normally $18) so I thought I'd try them out. I still haven't bought the prefolds.

As for crafting, I have made a crib skirt and put some art on the wall:

I'm loving how the crib skirt came out. The fabric came from a set of those vintage sheets I had laying around.

Yes, that is an exercise ball in the crib. Supposedly sitting on them helps with your posture, and having good posture helps ensure that the baby can turn and be in the proper position for birth. The ball must be caged to keep it away from pesky feline shenanigans. I can't have anything nice. See below for more evidence.

L for Lillian Clare!

This is a poster I got at the Texas Library Association conference that I went to a couple years ago. I picked it up at the time because it was cute and I thought, "maybe some day I will have a baby girl and I can hang this in her room." Amazing foresight, huh? The poster was an irregular size, so I just got a $10 poster frame which was too big and applied wood-looking contact paper to the backing to cover up the ugly particle board.

This little baby was left in the room by the previous owners! Looks like the horse theme was meant to be!

I still need to make a changing pad cover and nursing cover. Oh, and finish the little quilt I started making for her.

4. This is why I can't have anything nice:

This cat is a total mischief maker. She destroyed our old "leather" couches by sharpening her claws on them. She refuses to use the litter box and will gladly use either the carpet, a rug or the tile floor immediately next to the litter box. She quite often has diarrhea. For the longest time I couldn't let her be outside at the same time as the chickens because she would chase them and cause them to panic and end up in the neighbors' yards. Ollie repeatedly laments, "Let's get rid of this cat! She's a nuisance!" But I luff her, and I know Ollie is secretly attached to her as well.

Some progress

Aw man, I looooove being a cheapskate! The crib set I wanted was recently featured on Craigslist for $125 and now resides in a few different rooms of my house. That's a crib, crib mattress, changing table, changing table pad. The crib alone on Amazon on sale was $160. The cheapest mattress was $40. Changing table on Amazon was on sale for $75. The changing pad I'd registered for at Target was $27. That woulda been about $300!

I would feature a picture of the set but I had to take the crib apart to bring it through the doorway. Will update when the room is prettified. What's funny is that I'm getting all worked up making the room perfect when I know the baby doesn't care what the room looks like. She just wants me to eat some nutritious food, take my vitamins and maybe sing to her every now and then. It's also funny that I'm bound to forget something. When I planned my wedding I was most excited about the appearance and feel of the event. I had tons of flowers, I painstakingly tracked down some sage green tablecloths, I chose the perfect invitations, I found a pretty old-fashioned church even though I didn't give a hoot about God. But when the day came, there was no one to cut the freaking cake! Some friends had to step in and do it. Yeah...I'm bound to forget something that's actually important.

Anyway, it does feel good fixing up the room because I just want to do stuff for her. I don't yet feel her consistently, I feel a kick about once or twice a day, very subtle. But I want to act positively on her behalf, the first tiny sacrifices in a life of self-sacrificial love.

Looking forward to my February baby, but I'll settle for this just this cool weather for now :)

Making Room for Baby

Above lies the contents of my stretchy uterus at 18 weeks! We found out our little one is a girl! Ever since this revelation I've been thinking about how to fix her up a little bedroom. Here is the room as it stands now, with all my little tools in it.

Recall that this house was built in the 1970s and seemed to contain every building trend of that decade. The walls are hollow paneling and the doors (were) dark, flat wood with golden knobs. The previous owners had done some work attempting to update the house, and I've continued that legacy. They sprayed texture over most of the paneling so that it looks like drywall at first glance. The room is painted blue and the trim is/was painted a weird brown color. I intend to finish painting the doors white (in the hallway too) and repaint the trim and light switch/plug panels to match. The paint can also use a little freshening up. Every time I walk into this room I get a little overwhelmed and don't know where to start. As you can see, I already painted some of the trim, but there is still a good bit to be done. It still looks really crappy right now, but I'm trying not to get discouraged.

This is what I'm dealing with. Apparently when texture was sprayed on the walls, no effort was taken to spare the trim. This makes it difficult to paint it to look really straight and clean. You can see the old brown which extends beyond the trim onto the wall. It seems like I'm going to have to come along with a tiny brush and paint blue over this poopy line which was sloppily painted before. I have packing tape protecting the carpet from getting paint on it, so that messiness at the bottom is going to soon disappear. I'm afraid it's still going to look weird because of that texture, though. Needs another coat. So do the doors. What's so funny is that I HATE PAINTING SO MUCH, and yet I've done so much of it this year....I just look ahead to the final product. This brown trim is ALL OVER THE HOUSE, so there will still be lots of painting left for me to do!

Sigh.....I just want to get this tedious stuff done so I can play with decorations, curtains, crib, making crib sheets and otherwise filling this room with adorable cuteness. My inspiration is this sheet I found at a thrift store.

I love, love, love the pattern on this fabric. I bought this a couple of months ago thinking that maybe if I have a girl I will get to use it for curtains in the blue room. The shade of blue in the flowers looks really nice with the blue that's on the wall and those yellows, pinks and greens really girlify the room. I especially love all these colors because I'm not a huge fan of pink and purple. I got some other sheets at the thrift store that I'm planning to use as well. I'm pretty sure one of these will become a crib skirt and the other will become a crib sheet.

My finger is really itching to press "add to cart" on my crib of choice. It's taking all willpower to keep from doing it! I can't wait until this room starts looking like a baby's room!

New egg

Mystery egg on the left, Mrs. Kravitz's egg on the right.

The hubs found a brown egg yesterday out between the our two empty garden beds, sitting innocently on the ground. I think you can tell the color difference in the photo above, Mrs. Kravitz's eggs are darker and a little more rusty looking. I don't know who laid this light colored egg outside the nest box, but I intend to watch them today and find out!

Meanwhile, I've been trying to eat eggs more often. This is actually an awesome time for the chickies to start laying because my midwife said I need to eat lots of protein for breakfast! The past few days I've been rockin' the potato and egg breakfast taco. Now I realize that to anyone not in Texas, the thought of eating a taco for breakfast seems a little foreign. You're missing out. I even made my own tortillas following my husband's experimental recipe which he concocted in a vain attempt to approximate the heavenly deliciousness of his mom's tortillas which are made from unmeasured ingredients.

Flour Tortillas

1 c. flour

1 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

1 T. vegetable oil

1/3-1/2 c. hot water

1. Mix the dry ingredients, then add the oil and mix in until the flour is crumbly.

2. Add some of the water and stir, add more water if needed. The dough needs to be soft but not sticky.

3. Separate into about 4 pieces and form them into balls and then squash them down a little. I like to let this sit for a few minutes.

4. Roll out into tortillas. My mother in law rolls the rolling pin forward and backward over the dough quickly, then turn about 1/8 turn and do it again. Keep doing that in a circular fashion until the tortilla is the size you want, probably about 7-8 inches across.

5. Cook them on a hot cast iron skillet or griddle (about medium-high heat) about 30 seconds on each side. If you set the hot tortillas between the folds of a kitchen towel they will soften up a little more and be even better. Done!

For the potato and egg part of the taco, today I just took a smallish red potato, peeled it and chopped it into little chunks. I boiled them until soft, then drained and dumped them into a skillet on medium heat. While the potatoes were boiling I scrambled three eggs and set them aside. Once the potatoes are in the skillet, add the raw scrambled eggs on top of the potatoes. Add salt and pepper on top of that. Stir until eggs are cooked. The tricky thing is that you want about equal parts egg and potato. I thought my breakfast might be a little too egg heavy this morning, but it turned out really good.

Sometimes I cook the potatoes by sauteing them in a skillet with oil and onions until soft, and this is the way my husband prefers it. I like the potatoes either way. It gives a little different flavor depending on how you cook the potatoes, but I've already eaten potato and egg tacos cooked the other way this week so I switched it up this morning!

Straight from the chicken's butt!

The first egg!

I am pleased to announce that one of my hens has started laying! Several days ago I noticed that when I would reach my hand down to Mrs. Kravitz the hen she would crouch down and be still. This behavior confused me as all of my hens usually just run away. I started thinking that the chicken had just become inordinately scared of me because she has so much trouble with my cat targeting and chasing her, including one instance in which the cat scared her so much she shoved herself through the fence into the neighbor's dog yard where we had to rescue her. I looked up my question on Google and turned up info about the squatting behavior.

I said to myself, "oh shit!" I didn't even have a nest box in my coop yet, and I keep all the chickens separate from the coop during the day anyway. I didn't want them to start laying just anywhere. I read that free range chickens will usually go back to their coop to lay.

Right away I opened up the coop, found a five gallon bucket to serve as a nest box, shoved a little hay into it, stabilized the bucket with some rocks and bricks. All this time, Mrs. Kravitz was in the coop watching me and looking impatient. When I finally got things settled she went right in there and started rearranging hay before she just sat down and stayed for about an hour and a half. At the end of that time I went out to find that pretty brown speckled egg above! Seems like I got that settled just in the nick of time!

Since that first egg I've been leaving the chickens to roam the yard during the day so that they have access to the coop. Every day since Tuesday there's been another egg. I ate the first one, but there are currently three waiting in the refrigerator. Here's the beauty I found today.

In the nest!

In the hand!

 Mrs. Kravitz is a red sex link, so I think she has some Rhode Island Red in her. I hear that this breed matures quickly, so maybe that's why she's the first to lay. So far each egg has been really consistent: all brown with tiny white speckles and weighing 53 grams.

Mrs. Kravitz

Four gals.

Ginger the buff orp.

I can't wait until the Ameraucanas start laying. I'm ready to see some blue or green. This weekend the hubs and I are planning to fortify the back fence and a few spots on the side fence so that the ladies can be more securely contained in our yard.

Goodbye, sea of brown.

Since we moved into this 1970s house, I have been battling the neverending brown and darkness. You may recall my first attempts adding color with curtains, here. I also completed a little painting project which I never got around to blogging about--painting the long-dark-road-stripe-yellow-hallway-white.

Here is the before pic. I should've turned on the light in that hallway so the yellow could be better seen, but essentially the previous owners painted that hallway to try and match the wood in the kitchen and living room. Unfortunately, they did a pretty good job of that and the hallway just continues the monochromatic feel of the entire living room and kitchen, given that the walls, floors, blinds, and kitchen cabinets are nearly the same color! To break up that feel, I just gave the hallway a new coat of off-white, kind of tan paint. I'm still not quite sure I like the color completely, but I do like it a whole lot more than the yellow.


I adore the differentiation between the wood and the painted wall afterward, and I never, ever thought that I would find a white wall a relief, as usually I can't wait to apply some color to white walls! One of the next de-browning and de-1970ing projects I'm wanting to complete is to make the hallway doors appear to be panelled and painted white. Once those doors are white I may decide that the hallway needs a nice blue or green! I want to get these things done before I get too pregnant to climb up ladders, bend and such.

Here are a couple more pictures of the living room to remind you exactly what I am wrestling with. Ignore the ghost orb and evil cat. You can see several future projects in this first pic: painting that closet door next to the ghost orb white, and possibly painting the front door a fun color. Green maybe? We'll see what I can convince the hubs to do, as he is leery about painted front doors.

My project for today will hopefully involve getting some white faux wood blinds for the front living room window, the side window, and the kitchen window. Let's have some more white to break up that brown! A plus to this project is that these "semi-private" (what's the use of that?!?!) brown bamboo blinds are going to be replaced by real PRIVATE blinds. Once the new blinds are up I will make a curtain to top the side window there.

You can see yet another future project in this second pic: replace that cheapo folding tray that we use as a side table.

As for my outdoor projects that I mentioned before....it's still too hot for them in my opinion!

Yard Planning

As you may recall, earlier this year we built a chicken coop in our yard.

You can probably tell that the coop is in the middle of the yard. Yes, smack dab in the middle. When we built it we thought that we would let the chickens free range in our yard, but we've since noticed that a good portion of the back yard would have to have new fencing to contain the littler cluckers, which would be expensive. So now we have a new plan which includes moving this heavy coop about 10 yards to sit up next to the shed in this area:

We could then use the wall of the shed as one side of a chicken run, and fence in the three other sides. I think it would be really nice to have chickens moved back there so the coop can be in an out-of-the-way location in an area that's shady all day. I'd like to border the enclosure with some kind of fruit trees, in my mind fig trees. There would still be room back there  to create another enclosure if I ever wanted to get a dairy goat or some crazy business like that in the future.

The chickens need to get situated because Egg Watch 2012 is on. These biddies are nearing about 20 weeks old, so who knows when those eggs will start coming. As it stands now, I herd the chickens into my garden area to spend the day (we don't have anything planted yet) and I really don't want to have to set up any kind of nest box in there because it's always been just a temporary solution.

I have also been holding on to these awesome T posts for my clothesline that my dad welded for me.

I've been trying to figure out where to place these babies in the yard. The right hand side of the yard is iffy because I don't want to accidentally dig into the septic tank, and getting too close to the fence may put drying clothes in danger of snagging on barbed wire. I'm thinking now that it may be a good idea to get the chicken run built, trees planted, and position the clothesline a little in front of this.

So to start this whole thing off, I suppose we need a few strong men's arms.