A Flock of Feathers

May 3, 2019 | Allison

Hello, dears!

On Easter weekend, we finally did it. We brought back seven hens to start a little flock at our farm. We’ve been enjoying our break from the poultry houses we owned at our old farm, but we decided seven chickens wouldn’t be that much work, and we go through about three dozen eggs a week, so… yeah, they will come in handy. 😉

All the hens are pretty young, some in the pullet stage and some almost ready to lay, so we haven’t gotten any eggs yet. But it’s been fun taming them and watching them… and taking pictures. 😉 They’re so much prettier and nicer than the boring old broiler-breeders we had at our poultry houses, ha ha!

I hope you enjoy meeting our new “pets,” my friends!

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O Christmas Tree…

December 4, 2017 | Allison

We got our Christmas tree Saturday! YAYYYYY! I actually almost forgot my camera, but Mom brought it for me because she wanted me to document this year especially (for a reason I will post about later). Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, I got pictures. Unfortunately most of them are “content over quality,” but hey, the content is good. 😉 Enjoy your virtual trip to the Christmas tree farm!

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On the way there I finally and triumphantly closed a debate my siblings and I have had for a long time: whether this strange white statue thingy you can barely see from the road is a dinosaur or a swan. Take a guess.

My camera will tell no lies (although things do get blurry sometimes). IT IS A DINOSAUR. JUST AS I SUSPECTED. I know this is an terribly awful and horrible picture (I cropped it a lot) BUT IT IS PROOF.

Ahem. Let’s move along now… the first thing I took a picture of at the tree farm was a chicken. Because I have never seen a chicken before. Or something. (The 27,000 chickens a few hundred feet from our house clearly don’t count…?) But in my defense, I don’t think I’ve seen a grown chicken without a comb. O.o

Wait, why am I talking about chickens and dinosaurs in a Christmas tree post? I suppose I just missed the trees for the forest… SORRY THAT WAS BAD, I KNOW. Okay, Allison, settle down. Trees. Show the people the tree pictures. Ahem.

This tree farm has a special “candy cane tree” for kids. Let me tell you now, it is LOADED.

After meandering around practically the whole place, as usual, we finally picked out pretty much the tallest one there was. Which unfortunately wasn’t very tall. We usually like to get a 7-8 foot one, but this was barely 6 once we cut it down. Oh well. There didn’t seem to be many tall trees at the other Christmas tree farms either, from what I heard, so I guess we’ll just have to settle with the one we have. 😉

“Timberrrrr!”

Some people used sleds to carry their trees back, but eh, we have boys. 😉

Me: “WHAT ON EARTH is Megan doing in this picture?! Ah yes, she’s sucking a candy cane.”

The poor little tree was so… well, little, that we had to prop up the stand with thick blocks of wood. XD It really helped, though. It looked a bit sketchy at first, but much better after we put the lights and ornaments on.

It was so much fun to listen to Christmas music and take out the ornaments one by one, telling their stories or making jokes about them, especially the terrible foam kindergarten ornaments. XD Three angels in particular induced a lot of laughter…

#1: The Terror-Inducing Angel: In the sermon on Sunday, our pastor was discussing angels and how they are probably not blonde-haired, blue-eyed, effeminate-looking men wearing long dresses like they are on Christmas cards (BAHAHAHA), because they’re always terrifying and awe-inspiring to people in the Bible. Anyway, Logan thought this angel he made a while ago was a terror-inducing angel because of his rather pronounced humpback and scraggly appearance (a little hard to see in the photo). HA HA IT WAS SO FUNNY.

#2: The Ninja Angel: UGH why is this picture out of focus in just the wrong place?? *Sigh* Anyway, we thought this angel looked like she was karate-chopping something. XD

#3: The Gift Angel: This one wasn’t so much funny as neat. Dad said they stopped and helped a lady fix a flat tire or some such thing on their anniversary trip, and she got their address and sent them this ornament later to the “angels” who helped her. Isn’t that so sweet?

Behind the scenes: Jeff reading a random book which happens to be The Daring Book for Girls. HA HA. Also, strangely enough, we somehow have Santa hats even though we don’t do anything else Santa-related? *shrugs* Hey, it goes great with oversized rocket pajamas, right? 😛

Another Santa hat? Actually, though, I really like this picture. 🙂

HA HA. Megan (referring to our cats): “Who votes that Jinx is better than Tom? ME!” Carmen, in a scandalized voice: “WHAT?!”

After the decorating was finished, Carmen and Mom made us some hot chocolate and we sat around the tree drinking it and talking and listening to Christmas music. It was lovely.

Well, mostly lovely… For some reason Megan and Jeff were compiling a list of synonyms for… let us say, “to toss one’s cookies.” *rolls eyes* That was gross. Oh dear, that’s siblings for you. 😛

Heh heh, so that’s the story of our Christmas tree this year! I hope you enjoyed it, despite the strange detours. 😉 Getting a Christmas tree and decorating it is one of my favorite holiday traditions. What’s yours?

***Allison***

P. S. Oh, and guys! My blogging friend (and fellow farm girl), Hayley, has started a YouTube channel! Her photography and videography are beautiful, and I always love her posts. ♥ So definitely check out her blog and channel and maybe even follow them both. 🙂

A Day in the Life of Me + News

March 19, 2016March 20, 2016 | Allison

Hello, dear readers! I thought you guys might enjoy a “Day in the Life of…” post, so here it is!

Wait! First, here’s a wordcloud I made for this post. 🙂 Click here to make one yourself!

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Since today is Saturday, I slept in for a nice long time and woke up somewhere between 8 and 9. 😀 I lazily stayed in bed and read a chapter or so of Rainbow Valley (I’m re-reading the Anne of Green Gables series and I love it! Have you ever read Anne of Green Gables?). Then I got up, and dressed in jeans and a short sleeve t-shirt, which may not have been a good idea because right now it’s 34 degrees outside. XD (And IT SNOWED today! It’s nearly Easter and it snowed! But it didn’t really amount to anything.) Then I did my morning chores, ate a bowl of Honeycomb cereal, and got the daily pitcher of milk from the dairy.

Since I’m guessing many of you have not gotten milk from a dairy before, I will kindly explain how I did it. 😛 First I drove down to the dairy (which is just across the road) on our four-wheeler. Then I whipped out my pitcher, screwed off the cap of the 7,000 gallon milk tank (yes it is 7,000 gallons!), pressed the lever, filled the pitcher, sprayed all the extra milk down the drain, and drove up to the house, satisfied that my dangerous mission was completed. XD XD Nah. Sorry to disappoint you, but it actually wasn’t a dangerous mission. XD

Next I did a chapter of Logic with my mom because I hadn’t finished it from Friday’s schoolwork. (Oops! 😉 )

I practiced piano for about half an hour.

I vacuumed my room. Wow, isn’t this exciting so far? XD XD

Then I ate lunch and did the lunch dishes with my siblings.

After lunch I worked with polymer clay a bit and read Rainbow Valley some more until it was time to gather eggs.

I will also kindly describe gathering eggs. 😀 It was my brother’s and my turn to help gather eggs today.

Today I gathered at the first chicken house. I pulled the cart out from the egg room. (The cart is like a metal shelf on wheels where we put the flats full of eggs. Flats are yellow or white plastic crates which we put the good eggs in.) The eggs come on a conveyor belt which runs under the nests where the chickens lay their eggs, and you pick them up and put them into flats. You have to put all of the eggs pointy side down in the flat, and sort them: good eggs go in the yellow plastic flats, cracked or super-dirty eggs in the gray cardboard cull flat, and weird-shaped eggs in the green flats. (Click here to see a post I made about some of the weird eggs.)

We also have to clean the dirty eggs. We scrape off the dirt, then wipe the eggs with Clorox wipes. I got 25 flats in a little over a half an hour. Eh. But it sounds more impressive if you count by eggs instead of flats: a flat holds 54 eggs, and I gathered 25 flats, so I gathered 1,350 eggs! That sounds more impressive, doesn’t it? XD Once I gathered 5,400 eggs in one day! (You get a bonus point if you figure out how many flats that was. 😀 ) Usually we get between 4,000 and 7,000 eggs per house, and we have three chicken houses. That’s a lot of eggs!

After I came back from doing eggs I worked on editing the WordCrafters story. I’m editing a copy of the story to correct any errors and make it flow more smoothly. I might even make it into a book sometime! That would be so fun. 🙂

I worked on this post until supper. Saturdays are family movie nights with homemade pizza on the menu! (Regular and cheeseburger pizza. Have you ever tasted cheeseburger pizza?) After much speculation, we decided to watch Yours, Mine, Ours. It’s about a widow and widower who marry and learn to live as parents to 18 kids – the dad had 10 kids before he married again and the mom had 8! The movie was pretty good. I didn’t like the first part very much, but after they were married it was really funny. 🙂 Have you ever watched it?

So now I’m writing this post. 🙂 I hope you enjoyed a peek into “a day in my life!”

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Now for the news: WordCrafters will start again in June. I’ll do a post with all the juicy details and sign-ups before it starts. 😀 Are you excited about doing WordCrafters again? I am! It was so much fun last time, and you all did a great job!

Also, I added a ‘Guestbook’ page to my blog. It’s located just under the header where the rest of the pages are. You can comment on the page with your name (or online name), and just say “___ was here.” That way, years later, I will still be able to see who visited my blog!

Lastly, this is my 200th post! Yippee!

G’bye for now, dear readers!

***Allison***

The Amazing Chicken Egg

August 31, 2015February 14, 2016 | Allison

School starts for us this week, only it didn’t really start: we don’t have much time for school, because we have to gather eggs. 😦 We recently got a new flock of chickens for our chicken houses, and we have to weigh almost every egg they lay. And there are thousands of eggs per day. I’m not kidding. We have about 24,000 chickens right now and we have to gather about 16,000 eggs a day. That’s A LOT OF EGGS! And it takes A VERY LONG TIME to pick them each off of the conveyor belt, weigh the ones that might be too heavy or too light, and put them in egg flats. Thankfully our family only has to do it for about 3 hours a day, because we aren’t the only ones working there. (Speaking of family, my sister Megan made a post about the actual chicken houses and chickens over on her blog. See it here.)

Anyway… during all those hours we find some pretty strange chicken eggs. I’ll bet you never even knew that chickens could lay eggs like the ones I’m gonna show you, but I assure you, they do. All of these eggs were found in one of our 3 chicken houses, from the same breed of boring ‘ol white chickens. Shall we begin the science lesson for today?

Let’s start with size. There are big eggs, and there are small eggs. And then there are HUGE eggs and tiny eggs. Here are the two latter sizes together for comparison.

The big ‘ol guy weighed in at a hefty 4 oz. (The eggs you buy at the store are about 2 oz.) The tiny egg is only 0.2 oz.!

Now for shape. Some eggs are almost round, some are pointy. Some eggs are short, and some are long. Here’s a long one.

Eggshells are also different textures. There are a few wrinkly ones, a few warty ones, but mainly smooth ones. There are mostly hard-shelled eggs, but once in awhile we get a softshell one (or two).

Another strange one:

Not only are the eggs strange on the outside, but they can also be strange on the inside. Remember the huge egg in the first picture? This is what was inside it:

two yolks and a tiny softshell egg! I have never seen this before. Two yolks are pretty common – we call eggs with two yolks “doubles,” and those are mostly the eggs we eat. (Sometimes this is problem, like when you make a recipe that calls for 3 eggs. Uhhh, one and a half doubles? ☺) But I have never seen an egg with two yolks AND a softshell!

Here is a picture of what’s inside a double.

Pretty boring, right? But here is an egg I found already cracked open on the belt:

A softshell with another softshell inside it!

And last but not least, we have the triple. A fairly rare egg that has – can you guess? – three yolks.

The list could go on and on, but those are the only kinds I took pictures of, so I guess I’ll stop there. 🙂

So are you surprised or what? It’s astounding what diversity there is in one kind of chicken egg, let alone in the whole world. What an amazing God it took to create everything!

***Allison***