Feathered Creatures and Speckled Eggs

April 30, 2017 | Allison

Spring is a great time to photograph birds, so I’ve gotten several neat pictures of both birds themselves and nests which I wanted to show you today. 🙂

The first subject is this ADORABLE little golden-crowned kinglet we found! It knocked into a window and we brought it inside while it recuperated. It was so sweet and tiny!

Ahh I love these pictures of Megan holding it in her hand! Don’t worry, she wasn’t squeezing it, even though it might look like that. 🙂

Well hello, cutie! I was so excited to be able to get pictures up close like this. The bird just kinda sat there calmly and posed. (It did finally fly away. 😉 )

Next up we have some geese which I saw one time when Megan and Carmen and I were down at the pond looking for the muskrat that lives there. Last year a pair of Canadian geese made a nest at our pond, but I don’t think they’re going to this year. 😦

And last but not least, we found two killdeer nests! In case you’re not familiar with killdeer, here’s a little information about them. 🙂 Killdeer are long-legged brown, black and white birds, and no, they do not kill deer. XD They’re named that because of their loud, screeching call which doesn’t actually sound much like “Kill deer” to me, but oh well… XD

I think the most amazing thing about killdeer is that they often lay their eggs right in the middle of the road! I’m serious! They just scrape a shallow hole in the gravel or grass, maybe toss in a few twigs, and lay 4-6 eggs right there on the ground. It’s amazing they ever survive… that is, until you try to find the eggs. They are so well camouflaged! Ugh, I know it is NOT a great picture, but I just wanted to get an overhead view to show you how well disguised the eggs are. They’re even more so in real life. 🙂

I think the speckled design is pretty neat looking, don’t you?

These next few pictures are of a nest we found in the grass in a pasture near the road.

Well there we are! Which was your favorite, the kinglet, the geese, or the eggs?

Before you leave, can I ask your honest opinion? Are you getting tired of photography posts all in a row like this, or do you like them? Photography is one of my favorites, if not my favorite thing to post, but I do like a bit of variety in the blogs I read. I have a lot more photography to post, but a lot more of other things too, so please tell me what you think. It certainly won’t hurt my feelings if you’d rather see something else now, and if you’re loving these, that’s great too!

Thanks for reading, my friends!

***Allison***

P. S. OH. MY. GOODNESS. LOOOOKEEEE! I cannot BELIEVE I have over 2,000 followers!! WOAH THANK YOUUUUU! I’m sure I’ll mention it again in my blogiversary post at the end of May, but for now, just thank you guys so incredibly much. ♥♥♥ I am much more excited than that sounded, but I don’t want to go on about it forever. XD

Making Easter Eggs

April 14, 2017 | Allison

Hello hello!

Are you excited for Easter? I am! Easter is a wonderful time of year to meet with friends and family, enjoy good food, but most of all to remember what an amazing, astounding, and incredible thing our Lord and Savior has done for us by being crucified for our sake to take away our sins. ♥ I’m going to do another Easter post with more about that on Sunday, but for today I wanted to post about a much less important but fun aspect of Easter: dying Easter eggs.

Our family does this almost every year. Easter eggs make lovely colorful decorations for an Easter table, and they’re also super fun to make! I found this great post on Pinterest with tons of different ways to decorate Easter eggs. Some of them are absolutely gorgeous and creative! Click here to read the post.

A good set-up really helps the process to go smoother. Make sure to cover your working space with newspaper or an old tablecloth, and wear old clothes or aprons. We used this recipe to mix up our dye from scratch. It only takes food coloring, vinegar, and water, and makes a brilliant dye.

I cut the tips off of an egg flat to serve as egg holders. Like so:

Here’s a great tip I found from the egg decorating post I linked to above: put your egg inside a large whisk to make dipping easier and cleaner!

We had so much fun experimenting with different techniques! These were some of our favorites:

Draw with white or colored crayon on a clean egg, then dip it into dye. The crayon will resist the dye and make a really neat design, especially with white crayon.
Dribble rubber cement over an egg and allow to dry. Dip egg, then peel off the rubber cement and you have a fun abstract design.
When your eggs are still warm, draw on them with crayons to make a neat melted effect.
Dye your egg a light blue or turquoise, then speckle it with gold paint.
Pretty much anything with gold paint and dye turns out neat. XD

If you want more detailed instructions for those techniques, again, you can click here. (Can you tell I love that post? XD )

Now that you’re done, how are you going to display your masterpieces? I shredded brown paper bags in a paper shredder, put some of in a round vase, and placed three or so eggs in the cute little “nest.” Ta-daa!

Do you like making Easter eggs? What is your favorite technique?

Happy Good Friday and thanks for reading! 😀

***Allison***

P. S. You guys have GOT to read Madi’s amazing Good Friday/Easter post here. It’s so interesting and well written and… and GREAT! 😀

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***