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.