Speaking of Roses...

 And a peony :)

I Had Good Intentions...

...of keeping up my blog better. For my own sake, you know? I like the journaling aspect of it, and a little writing outlet never hurt me. But I've been struggling just to make it through each day in one piece. That's what it feels like anyway.

See, my adrenal glands took a nosedive after a seemingly mildly stressful happening. Just a life thing you know? But my fragile body couldn't take it apparently. I've spent a good 80% of the last 5.5 weeks on the couch. Lucky me. No bike riding (or racing!), hardly any driving (too dangerous in my extremely mentally fogged state), and a Very disgusting, dirty house!

I've got new marching orders from my doctor that include glandular extracts and an 8:30 bedtime. Yippee. Buut... If it works it's totally worth it, right? And what Mama couldn't use an early bedtime? Problem is, that's earlier than my boys go to sleep, and we're all still in the same room while Nate struggles to get the boys' bedroom finished in between bouts of homework, classes, and work. Not to mention helping his dad around the property and doing odd jobs for the neighbors. So, yeah.

We're still hoping to have it done by the end of summer term (Ha. I'll be glad when our life isn't measured in school terms ;-)  ). In the meantime we're asking the boys to tolerate a little earlier turning in and turning off of audio books. If I can get in bed at 8:30 and read while they finish listening to their story and have them turn it off at 9:00, we'll be doing good I think.

I'm also not supposed to exercise to fatigue, use the computer or do chores after dinner, need to get our house tested for mold, wean off of caffeine and eat Really healthy and mindfully (my eating schedules get whacked along with sleep when I'm having adrenal problems--i either don't eat enough or eat too much and don't eat at regular times etc.)

I had a couple weeks of pretty intense depression before I figured out exactly what was going on. I knew it was circumstantial though and not the old dark pit of "before". So I was able to muscle through it.

God has been so very faithful through it all, providing peace and putting up with my temper tantrums. My friends and family have been lovely and encouraging, providing shoulders to cry on and sound advice on the other end of the phone. I love you guys!!

New Chicks

In spite of our numerous misadventures with predators up here we've decided to try raising chickens yet again. We weren't going to, I think Nate and I had finally had enough. But a certain boy was deeply missing his pets. We've nicknamed him the Chicken Whisperer if that tells you anything ;) Nate was solicited separately by both Grandma Karen and Grandfather about getting new chickens, because they were feeling sad for their grandson. So, we've been fortifying the coop yet again; and purchased some eggs to hatch.

We let each of the boys pick a breed. Brannon wanted breeds that like human contact and are more tameable. After looking at several options he chose D'uccles. Joshua chose "roadrunners" --we have one rooster left up here who's been surviving "wild" since December. His name is Roadrunner.

We haven't had great luck with our eggs so far this year. Out of six Silver Spangled Hamburg eggs we only hatched one chick. Out of seventeen D'uccle eggs there are only three waiting to (hopefully) hatch at the end of this week. You never know when you get eggs in the mail if they're going to grow or not. Getting jostled around by the postal service is quite detrimental to their health, even though they haven't started growing yet. One year none of our mail-order eggs hatched and the next year they almost All hatched (but they were 3/4 roosters!)

Our one Silver Spangled Hamburg chick (roadrunner)

 Since lone chicks don't have a high survival rate we went out to the Grange to see if they had any bantam chicks for sale. Nate said every time he'd been there for birdseed lately they had only had pre-sold chicks. Much to our delight they had lots of chicks for sale, including assorted bantams. Between the boys and I we wanted to buy half the chicks in the bin, but we restrained ourselves and only brought home four :) (and seven red rangers to raise for meat).

The two grey fluffballs Joshua picked out love to nestle on his shoulders under his hair:

 Brannon picked out the tiniest chick there (of course). We are interested to see if it's a Japanese or a Serama or what :)

 Chicks are programmed to peck at anything that moves or looks different. In this case "different" was Brannon's teeth!

 Much hilarity ensued:

The chicks are all settled in their brooder in the kitchen/hallway/entry area and we are waiting to see if we'll get any more new additions later this week. Pretty soon the noise and smell will motivate the fellas (especially the big one ;-) ) to finish fixing the brooder area in the coop so we can move the birds outside. (With our new set-up we had before the bear we usually keep them inside for a week or two, depending one the weather, then move them to the outside brooder. Our 'shop' light that was out there was 'killed' by the bear, although the heat lamps seem to have survived.)

Beach Goers

We got to go to the beach for Mother's Day weekend. Here are a few of the pictures from our first day :)

We hadn't been on the beach two minutes when I got this fun shot:

 Nate and I had a great time searching for agates (we mostly only found teeny ones) and other neat pebbles

Brannon greatly enjoyed flying his kite (normally our kite flying consists of the boys [and sometimes cousins] running wildly up and down the driveway with their kites trailing behind them. B's kite had just come down in this pic but he had the greatest smile on his face:

 Resting between warrior-like activities

 He got very relaxed while flying his kite, a few moments later he was lying down :D