Our Mini Bookshelf from The PVC Pipe Book

Check out this quick and easy project that I made on one of the first shirtsleeves weather days this spring:



It's the Mini Bookshelf from The PVC Pipe Book (which I received for free from a publicist), and it came together in the time that I should have been spending cooking a decent, nourishing dinner for my family:

I'm pretty sure that we had sandwiches for dinner that night, but whatever. I built a little bookshelf from scratch, AND I painted it!

It's meant to be the latest foray in my neverending quest to make the big table that we use as the kids' school table during the school week (and which they're SUPPOSED to clean up so that we can use it for family stuff each weekend but they never do and I'm perennially too lazy to add it to my list of things to nag them about), but I think I might like it even better in its current set-up:

We're deep into a stretch of shirtsleeves weather days--yay!--that make school outside the perfect thing to get the kids a little more enthused about book work until that stops working and I have to think of something else. We are also on high alert, as yesterday, our whole family was sitting on the couch admiring the children's Easter baskets when we heard a chicken start fussing outside. I ran to the open deck door (because shirtsleeves weather!), saw something orange tumbling with one of our Brahma hens, took another step forward and saw that it was a genuine, BBC documentary real-live FOX trying manfully to snap my sweet baby's neck while she squawked and struggled and tossed feathers everywhere.

I, too, began hollering, ran out across the deck, slipped and almost broke my dang neck, bent down to grab Syd's Crocs (that she was supposed to have brought in last night, sigh...) so that I could start throwing stuff--my second choice was going to be my cell phone--but by the time I stood back up and readied my throwing arm the fox had completely disappeared and Brahma Hen #3 was booking it back to the flock where she was supposed to be in the first place. Will, who was part of the also-hollering idiot mob who ran out behind me with no idea of what was going on but clearly ready to do some brawling, claims that she saw a streak of orange disappear back into our woods.

Brahma Hen #3 is fine, thank goodness. She's so big and fluffy that it looks like the fox didn't even break the skin, although the amount of feathers she had flying at the time had me sure that the fox was something like four chickens deep by the time I ran out there. I'd say that I hoped the whole flock learned a lesson from her experience, but I'm sitting by an open door right this second and can clearly see our little blonde and brown hen, much less fluffy and definitely much smaller, just bopping around all by herself miles from the flock but painfully near lots of great hiding places for foxes. I swear, they cause me as much worry as the kids do sometimes!

So that's how we spent the less fun part of our Easter Sunday strengthening the chicken coop, researching foxes (Matt looked up from the computer at one point and said, "This website claims that the fox has probably been watching us for days and knows our routine!" so now we've got not just regular life but a high-key stalker to think about), and trotting Luna out to "keep watch" and "guard the chickens" for us. I have no idea if she's actually capable of these tasks, since the last time a chicken died on our property SHE was the reason I had to euthanize it, but still. She's bigger than a fox, at least.

And now we can spend our school days outside, not just enjoying the lovely weather and getting some fresh air, but keeping a weather eye on the goings-on of the backyard and the fool hens who are SUPPOSED to be staying with that rooster who I tolerate even though I have to take a stick every time I walk around my own property and turn around suddenly every few feet as I walk to catch him acting like he wasn't just about to jump me from behind BECAUSE HE'S SUPPOSED TO BE PROTECTING MY SWEET BABIES FROM FOXES.

How is YOUR week going?

P.S. If you've got the PVC to make this mini bookshelf, you should also have your kids make this PVC pipe bow and arrow set and PVC pipe sword. It'll help them in their battles against the foxes, don't you know?

Homeschool Science: The Chicken Egg Osmosis Experiment

When Syd and I played with gummy bear osmosis, I wanted her to observe water passing into the gummy bear and causing it to expand.

It did. It was cool!

With this chicken egg osmosis experiment, I wanted the kids to understand that osmosis can go both ways through a semi-permeable membrane. If the more concentrated solution is inside the cell, water goes there. But if the more concentrated solution is outside the cell, then that's where the water goes.

Bring on the naked egg!

You can dissolve the shell from an egg as a simple, hands-on demonstration with little ones, as an early elementary human biology lesson (and demonstration of why we brush our teeth!), and as one of the projects in an acids/bases unit of a chemistry study--we've done all of these, so it's old news but still always fun.

And if you have sensory-seeking kids, there's nothing like the feel of a chicken egg with its shell dissolved away:

And speaking of sensory-seeking kids...



I promise that, current evidence to the contrary, she is very intelligent. Just don't try this at home, okay?

Sigh...

So as you've gathered, before we violated every lab safety standard and Licked the Science, we soaked the eggs in vinegar for long enough to get them nice and bloated, as osmosis equalized the water inside the egg with the water outside it. The kids' challenge was to find a solution to soak the eggs in that would cause water to migrate FROM the egg TO that solution, thus shrinking the egg and lowering its mass.

The kids weighed their eggs in grams, labeled jars and put the eggs in--

Guess whose jar belongs to Syd?

--and then went in search of a solution with the proper characteristics. Will chose canola oil (spoiler alert: it worked); although I encouraged Syd to use her notes from the gummy bear osmosis experiment to inform her choice, her first idea was baking soda dissolved into water and dyed blue. This had the opposite of the desired effect, as you can see from the fact that her egg is now blue:

It looks really cool, though! It would perhaps be a fun continuation of this project, when done with small children, to dye the water a rainbow of colors.

I stopped photographing the eggs at this point because they were soooo gross (and Will did NOT lick one again), but you'll be pleased to learn that for Syd's second try, she chose dish soap. Success!

If you've got even more time to play, you can do this similar but more academically rigorous osmosis experiment with potatoes, instead. You can also watch this neat little animated model of a cell membrane in action.

Thirteen, and Eight

Thirteen sweet, gentle, funny chicks. Taken care of, spoiled, and doted on by their girl. Rewarding her with plenty of love of their own. Flocking around her wherever she was, roosting on her knees, laying in her lap like feathered little babies:

Sun

Marshmallow

Speckle

Early this week, as the kids and I were sitting in a hospital waiting room in Arkansas, waiting for my mother to come out of outpatient surgery, all 13 of Will's chicks were killed in their chicken yard. 

The chicken yard is well-secured, as is the chicken coop. There's a door between the two, however, that isn't well-secured. The chicken yard is meant to serve only as the chickens' range when we're out of town and the coop door is closed, but while the babies were too young to introduce to Fluffball and Arrow, they've been staying in the chicken yard, using our old, smaller coop, and Fluffball and Arrow, of course, free-range during the day, and are locked into their coop at night.

I knew that the little connecting door wasn't secure, and I knew that we have predators in our area, but that connecting coop door is only unsecured in the daytime, and raccoons and possums are primarily nocturnal predators.

Until they're not.

Poor Matt held onto the news of the chicks' deaths for a full day, not wanting to upset us while we were away, but on the way to visit my Pappa in the facility where he's rehabilitating from a broken hip I called him, and his response when I told him that the kids wanted to know how the chicks were caused me to immediately pull over and demand the story. Basically, he said, "Let's talk about it later." When someone says that to you, you obviously immediately stop what you're doing and demand to be told what's going on.

The kids were both devastated, of course, but Will... that kid's heart was broken, of course. She'd poured herself into those chicks. She carried a chick or two with her everywhere. She caught bugs for them. She sat with them and just watched them, for hours, all the time. They meant so much to her, and the knowledge that they'd all been killed was a hard blow for a little kid.

If anything, I'm just thankful that we were out of the state when it happened. We'd have been away that morning, anyway, at our weekly volunteer gig, and then we'd have come home to the wreckage, ourselves, and I never would have been able to keep the kids from seeing it. Matt, who was merely fond of the chicks, was himself terribly affected by the carnage--the babies that had hidden in their little nesting box in the coop and still been torn up, the feathers everywhere, the blood. It was awful.

If only chickens weren't so sweet, so gentle, so funny, and didn't have so much personality, so that one was able to not become attached to them.

The kids bravely carried on with our visit to Pappa--they even interviewed him about his experiences in World War 2, and did a masterful job of it--but while we were visiting Matt called me again, with more news. 

The hatchery where we'd mail-ordered those chicks? It's actually on our way home from Arkansas. Like, exactly on our way home. We pass right through the small Missouri town where it's located. And Matt had called them. And yes, they accepted walk-in orders.

I didn't know what Will was feeling, how her grief over her chicks was working with her sorrow over possibly not having chicks again until next spring, so I put her on the phone with Matt to hash it out. She walked back into the room after their conversation still very sad, but confident that yes, she wanted more chicks, and yes, we should go get them on the way home.

We had to change a lot of plans to make it happen, but the St. Louis Zoo will always be there, and with strict timing and very minimal pee breaks, we were able to screech up to the doors of Cackle Hatchery a full 30 minutes before they closed.

The clerk there was a freaking rock star who, once I'd explained the situation, totally took over. She suggested that we buy chicks that had been hatched that day, so that she could pack them up for the remaining six-hour drive just as she'd pack them to be mailed. She wrote down the list of breeds that Will wanted, came back with the ones that they had, then took out their catalog and showed Will similar alternatives to the ones that they didn't have, and let Will choose from those. I told her that we wanted one rooster, but only if there was a breed known to be gentle with people, and she said that there was, and she got him for us. He'll grow up big, too, so hopefully he can help us keep his flock safe, and give the kids some more chicks next spring.

We drove another six hours, listening to audiobooks and eating peanut butter sandwiches, with the kids watching my TomTom and switching whose lap the box of chicks got to sit on exactly every hour. We got home at 1 am to Matt, who had the brooder all warmed up and ready for us. We unpacked the babies, dipped their beaks in their warmed water, and then all sat around and admired them for another hour before we dragged ourselves to bed. 

We tried to be easy on ourselves the next day. We read, painted deck furniture, we loved our new chicks, and I did a LOT of cooking on account of I'm from the South and that's what we do when we're sad. We also bought a live animal trap, and we did this:

I was actually outside reading at about 6:30 am when I heard the trap spring, so this raccoon could definitely have been our daylight predator. When I heard the trap spring I tore around the side of the garage, loaded for bear, ready to kill whatever I found with my bare hands, until I actually stood over the trapped raccoon and saw its little paws covering its muzzle as it cowered, its big eyes looking up at me all scared. Raccoons are psychopaths when faced with captive chickens, but damn was it cute.

Matt drove it outside of town to live in the woods by a lake. It can make an honest living there without murdering anyone's pets.

So, here are our new babies:

I was a little surprised that Will deliberately chose only eight chicks this time. She loved her thirteen, but she also learns from experience, and it didn't take long to see that these eight chicks are much easier to care for than our thirteen were.

The chicks aren't really old enough to pose for their formal portraits yet--if you look closely, you can still see the egg tooth on some of their beaks!--but here are a few pics of them. I still think that the kids look sad in these photos, but not as sad as they'd be, I think, with empty hands not cradling feathery little puffs of fluff:

  

And yes, fine, I'm totally smitten, too, especially with this one. I named her Hedwig:

It's selfish of me, but I'm willing to admit that I don't want the kids to learn these lessons. I don't want to have to see their faces break when they're told that a loved one has died. I want them to live charmed lives, never feeling loss nor grief, never having to mourn.

But what would be the point of that? Never let them have chicks, because they might die? Never go visit far-flung family, because the children will miss them when we leave? It's too late for that, anyway, so let's just let this lesson be enough for now. Let's just let this flock of chicks grow up safe and healthy, doted on and loved by their girls. Let's let them be just as sweet and gentle and funny as the original thirteen were, let them learn tricks that are just as cute, let them love the kids just as much, follow them around just as faithfully, trust them to keep them safe and never have that trust betrayed.

We'll have another lesson sometime, I know, but let's take a break from these types of lessons for a good long while yet. Let's let these tender hearts heal and grow a little sturdier first.

Fifteen More Photos of Fifteen Chickens

If you managed to bravely slog your way through the first fifteen photos of our new chicks, then here, for your viewing pleasure (or, more likely, as another challenge for you to overcome), are the last--for now--fifteen photos.

I'm a little more dicey on the names of some of these chicks, as some of the breeds and the chicks within each breed look identical to me, and the kids are at sleepaway camp and so can't look at me like I'm a fool while they remind me, once again, of each individual chick's name. Anyway, I'll do my best!

We've got three of these. Syd named them Toast, Crisp, and Crunch, because they remind her of buttered toast.

This is Speckle. My aunt got to name her from afar, because she loves the Barred Plymouth Rock, which I *think* this one is.

We've got three of these mostly black ones with white accents. I can identify Spot, who I showed you yesterday, but we also have White Wing and Warrior, who I can't tell apart.

We've got three of these, which we call our "quail chicks," because their facial markings remind us of quail. One is Dan Quayle (you saw her yesterday), one of these is Featherbutt, and I don't remember the name of the third. Or maybe Featherbutt is one of the black chicks and Warrior is one of these?

Although the hatchery was great about refunding the chick that they shorted us (especially because when Matt called to inform them, the person to whom he was speaking said that she thought they'd actually put in an EXTRA chick for us!), they, of course, didn't send them labeled for our convenience, and so identifying which chick is which breed has proven very challenging, especially because we can't rely on how many of each breed Will ordered, since we don't know what breed the missing chick was!

If you'd like to play the home game of chick identification, here is Will's original order:

• 3 unsexed red sex-link (especially challenging, because I'm told by Will that males and females of this breed are different colors)
• 1 black australorp female
• 3 unsexed Easter eggers
• 1 barred Plymouth rock (I feel like I've successfully identified this as Speckle, above)
• 1 single-comb Rhode Island red
• 1 welsummer (Dang! I'd thought that Marshmallow and Hermione were welsummers, but Will only ordered one of these!)
• 3 black Jersey giants
• 2 speckled Sussex

Complications are as follows:

1. We don't know which chick is the missing one, so we can't go by numbers. Although Hermione and Marshmallow seem to be the same breed, for instance, we can't automatically identify them as our two speckled Sussex, because what if the missing chick was also of their breed, and they're actually Easter eggers, or Jersey giants?
2. Red sex-links apparently look different based on sex, so the one yellow chick that we have could be a red sex-link, or one of the breeds that Will only ordered a single chick from, OR the breed that Will ordered two of, along with the missing chick.
3. If the hatchery thinks that they added an extra chick to our order, it's also possible that they indeed threw in an extra of something, and in fact we're short by TWO of what we ordered. So we could potentially have an extra chick in any breed, and be missing two chicks from among any of the breeds that we ordered. 

So... yeah. This is apparently how we're all practicing our logical reasoning this summer.

Fifteen Photos of Fifteen Chickens

The human population of our home is now so well outnumbered as to leave no doubt about who/what is in charge, with the long-anticipated arrival of Will's chicks. You might recall that this is Will's own project--she proposed the idea and received permission, picked out exactly which breeds of which sexes from which hatchery she wanted to order (I am not personally comfortable with ordering chicks by mail, but I am not my child, alas), and is the final authority on their care (I wanted to start letting the chicks outside in our small coop, for instance, but was overruled--"The care sheet says four weeks," she decided). She has a lot of help, of course, especially in these early days, but there's plenty of time later to negotiate our roles and benefits as primary investors when her egg business gets going.

For now, however, we have thirteen (you may remember that we ordered fifteen chicks--our order was shorted by one, and one died the day after they arrived. This was super sad, but also a relief to the adult human population, as we needed seventeen chickens even less than we need fifteen chickens) beautiful, sweet, funny babies to adore.

Knowing us as you do, you will not be surprised to learn that we have spent the past week doing "chick portraits" every day. I have a truly shocking number of photographs of our chicks, and I am going to insist on showing you every single photo, on account of I am besotted by these babies, but in order to not stretch your patience too far, I'll confine myself to fifteen photos per post, in honor of our total flock number (can't forget our Fluffball and Arrow, now can we?). I'll also try to give you their names, although to be honest, only the kids can really tell them all apart, and I'm pretty sure that sometimes they're just making that up:

I'd like you to meet Featherbutt. 

This is Hermione. 

Here is Dan Quayle.

And this is Marshmallow.

I believe that this is Spot.

And here is Sun.

That's a few of our chicks. There are many more to come.

Why, you might ask, did I permit my child to buy thirteen more chickens, when there are only four people in our family? That is a fair question, Friends. Matt and I don't want fifteen chickens. Frankly, if these thirteen are as friendly and tame as the first two, I don't know how we're going to manage so much as walking unmolested in our yard, much less backing out of the driveway (I already have to station a kid outside the garage when I back out, to keep clueless chickens and carefree cats from wandering behind my wheels).

Seriously, fair questions all. And yet, the answer is also an easy one.

Why, you might ask? This is why:


The look on that kid's face? That kid who usually finds it such a struggle to get outside her own head, to let her tender heart show? That look is worth a lot more than just fifteen chickens.