Pacifier (chickens and eggs)

Our chickens finally started laying eggs this fall – eggs which our kids have enjoyed gathering. We like to notice the difference in sizes and colors, and I love to hear a 4-year-old’s take on things. One day when Avery was putting an egg in the refrigerator, she said, “This one has polka-dots.” Later she was calling them freckles. The dots were so small that I didn’t even notice them until I looked closely.

Another of our chickens lays eggs that are longer and thinner than the rest of them. The first time Avery found one of those, she said, “I bet that chicken had a hard time laying that one.”

Our chickens have had traumatic lives so far. The roaming neighborhood dogs have cut down on the numbers of laying hens, and being left without enough water over Thanksgiving seemed to cut down on the number of eggs that the remainder were laying.

Maybe.

Roger was checking them late Tuesday evening when he discovered a possum heading into the chicken house. (If you don’t believe in violence towards animals, skip to the next paragraph.) He found a murder weapon and attacked the ridiculous animal – who decided to play dead. Not the best method of defense when you’re being attacked by a vengeful chicken farmer. Although it did make it easier for Roger to finish him off.

When Roger was telling me the story later, I was startled when he told me what he had done with the possum – my mind works too fast. I had a firm mental image in my head before he completed the sentence. He said, “I put him in the garden. We’ll eat him next summer….. in our green beans.”

The next morning when Roger went out to collect eggs, there were a few more than he was expecting to find. Maybe temporary dehydration didn’t affect their laying as much as we’d thought…

Our family also got to experience hatching baby chicks together for the first time. We had borrowed an incubator from a friend down the road. My hopes for this process were not too high, as she had put a total of 84 eggs in the thing and “nary a one hatched.” I figured – with odds like that, the problem has got to be with the incubator and not the eggs.

Maybe it was their rooster. Because Roger put in 11 eggs, and we now have 7 cute little chicks.

I’ll go ahead and point out the lack of wisdom and planning here. Baby chicks are very, very cute – but it doesn’t last long. And before the cuteness wears off, the stink begins. And when that smell is located in your basement (because where else do you keep helpless chickens all winter???) you learn quickly that it’s not only heat that rises.

Okay. Enough complaining. This past spring there was a big box in my laundry room (just off my kitchen) full of stinky chickens. It was a definite relief to have them moved to the basement. I’m grateful that this  batch has started out their miserable lives down there. The smell really isn’t that bad unless we’re actually downstairs.

The amusing part of this story is that any of those chicks that happen to be roosters will also end their lives there in our basement – chilling in the freezer. Isn’t that a nice bookend for their life story?

shards

I could write a book about the mugs that have entered my life only to be tragically broken. It would be a short book, and not a very interesting one, but I could still write it. My mug memoirs….

After my paisley sister-in-law mug was broken this summer, I stopped feeling. I died inside.

Just kidding. (The lying drama queen took over for a second up there. Here’s what I really meant to write:) After my paisley sister-in-law mug was broken this summer, 3 different friends gave me a “replacement” mug. I’m happy to report that those three are still intact.

Today it was a tall, pale green ribbed mug that my friend Nikki gave me 10 years ago. She originally gave us a set of two – one blue, one green – and we loved using those things. I’ll miss wrapping my hands around it’s warmth and running my fingernails over the ridges….

Poor little Malin. She was sliding something over on the table, and the mug tipped and the handle broke off. She feels so sad and sorry in those moments. The day before yesterday, she scared me a little bit. She walked out of the bathroom in her green princess dress, crying and saying, “I’m really sorry, Mom!” A mother can imagine all kinds of horrible things in a moment like that. I was relieved to find that she had just dropped one of my necklaces down the heating vent in the floor.

I’m pretty sure it can be rescued.

In the Asheville Mall, there used to be a corner store, right across from Auntie Anne’s Pretzels that sold coffee and tea and shelf after shelf of beautiful mugs. I used to walk through on my way to who-knows-where just to breathe in the amazing air of the place. I wonder if that store is still there. I’d like to go check out the mug selection with my grown-up brain (and wallet) and appreciate the aroma with my coffee-drinking senses.

And I think I may hang on to the green mug. It will make a pretty container for cut flowers.

in solitude, little girls

Malin quickly picks up on what makes the people in her life happy. Last night, all 4 of our children went with Roger in the church van  when he left early to go pick up kids. Before Malin climbed in, she hollered up the hill at me like she was giving me a gift, “Mom, now you get to be all alone!”

And now, once again, here I sit alone at home, happily printing title pictures onto promotional DVDs while my husband is off on a date.

I helped his little date get ready for her time with him. I exchanged her shirt for a cute one that wasn’t smeared with brownie batter, and braided her hair with most of her curls hanging long and free at the ends. And they’re off to run errands and eat at McDonald’s. (Unless he persuades her that she really wants something else.)

About two weeks ago, Roger took Avery into town with him so I could finish up some baking with no interruptions. When we first asked if she wanted to go, she wanted to stay with her mommy. Then when I changed my wording and asked if she wanted to go on a date with daddy, her outlook changed completely and she couldn’t wait to go. She had a nice time with him and they even stopped at “the place with decorations” (her words) – a farm down the road that gets all dressed up for autumn and gives tours and hayrides and sells fall produce.

Then last Tuesday, Roger took me out for my birthday. A day or two later, Avery was lounging on my bed, chatting with me while I put away laundry. She asked me, “What did you and Daddy do on your date?” I started off, “We went out to eat…” but didn’t get any further. Her smile completely faded, she dropped her little head down and started to cry. “Mine wasn’t like a date! We didn’t go out to eat!!” (This wasn’t a spoiled brat cry; it was a tired and extremely disappointed little girl who had been duped into running errands with her daddy under the guise of it being a “date.”) It almost broke my heart.

I carried her off to bed, promising her that sometime after we got back from Oklahoma, her daddy would  have some errands to run in Jackson and this time, she could go along with him and he could take her out to lunch for a real date.

This morning, I asked her if this was the day she was going on a date with her daddy. I said, “Do you want to go in the study and ask him?” She just shook her head, then said with a smile and a 4-year-old’s confidence, “He’ll tell me.”

So they’re off enjoying french fries and the play place, and I’m making my way through a slab of cold meatloaf and telling myself that it probably is time to go to that website and pick out my microwave so Roger can call up Jackson Electric and order it. The only thing is….. was it whirlpool? Or am I going to waste my time browsing through the wrong website? One of the most frustrating things in my life is wasting time on the internet. (You don’t understand this feeling if you only use high-speed.)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Just as an inconsequential point of interest…. did you know that Presbyterians is an anagram of Britney Spears? Rearrange the letters yourself – it’s true. I know because I learned it from David Crowder.

windblown

Whenever we drive out west to Oklahoma, I realize just how still the air is in the protected hollers of our Kentucky home. There’s just no room around here for the wind to pick up speed and really blow. So when it does start whistling around the corners of the house and whipping tree branches all over the place, (like yesterday afternoon) we know we’re in for a storm.

I can’t even remember the last time the wind blew so hard here. Roger was in the church van taking kids home from Bible School when the storm started, and he said there were some pretty scared kids with him. I guess the van was blowing around and must have felt pretty unstable.

But we got a good (much-needed) rain out of it, and the worst that happened here at camp was a tree that blew over our bridge and which had to be cut up quickly.

This morning as I was putting a load of clothes into the dryer, I kept out a favorite t-shirt that I always air-dry. I put it on a hanger and carried it out to the little clothesline on our balcony…. where I noticed the absence of another of my favorite shirts that I had hung out yesterday morning.

It didn’t take long to put two and two together and to realize that, in this particular instance, 4 would equal the fact that my (green) shirt was now lying disconsolately somewhere among our green hills of Kentucky. (It must have been disconsolate at our separation – I know I was.) I walked down to the road and scanned the hillside below our house…. no green shirt. I looked up into the trees, half hoping to see the shirt stuck in a branch (it would make a great story) and half hoping not to (it could be hard to recover.)

I only had about an hour before I had to leave for lunch with my friends. I couldn’t go traipsing through wet leaves, so I took the second-best option (or maybe the better one) and told my kids that whoever found the shirt could choose a prize from the treasure chest.

Avery came out on the balcony while Wesley, Malin and I were on the road looking down toward the creek. (I was imagining my poor shirt rotting at the bottom in the mud.) When Avery found out what was going on, she ran inside to get dressed so she could help too. By the time she came back out, we were walking up the steps to our back yard. She ran around the side of the house, then in front of the balcony on her way to help us. Then the crazy girl stopped in front of the balcony (right where I had walked earlier) looked down at the ground and said casually, “Here’s a shirt.”

I basically accused her of lying. I said, “No it’s not,” and went over to look. Sure enough… as luck and a short person would have it, Avery stumbled over my favorite t-shirt and won a prize without even trying.

What kind of idiot walks right over top of her favorite shirt while searching desperately for it? I’m sure there’s an analogy here somewhere. But, in lieu of that, a quote:

…windblown trashbag does a roadside ghost dance…  -David Wilcox

Cleanliness…next to Godliness??

At breakfast this morning, the girls and I were looking at a beauty pageant winner on the back of the paper. Since they were commenting on how pretty the little girl was, I decided it was a good teachable moment for me to let them know how their daddy and I feel about beauty pageants. I ended it with the statement, “Beauty is not the most important thing in the world.”

Malin looked at me, shaking her finger for emphasis, and said, “No, God is the most important thing.”

And Avery, who has heard every late-night rant in our messy house, finalized the lesson with: “And cleaning up.”

rambling

As my life spirals out of control, I sit here at 11:03 typing…

That’s only assuming that my life was ever in control. My home has not been lived in this summer. The kitchen table has spent about 5 minutes of being cleared since camp started. I’ve got baskets of clean laundry waiting to be put away, and a desk full of papers to be taken care of. Mostly financial – personal and church. Blah. Why did I volunteer to be the church treasurer? Have I ever even been on top of our own finances for more than a week at a time?

No.

And I’m not complaining, but why did our van have to die in the middle of camp? We knew the end was close at hand, but seriously…. we don’t have time to shop for a new vehicle! Roger has been driving the church (15 passenger) van around. Blah again.

He drove it to visit the doctor yesterday. And then to the hospital to have some blood drawn for tests. Hopefully by Thursday we’ll have some clue what’s wrong with him. His stomach has been bothering him for 2 weeks now. He doesn’t have energy. Which interprets as: He’s not Roger. He’s lost that nice buffer of 10 pounds that I’ve always appreciated. At the doctor’s office, he weighed in at my exact weight. A few hours ago, when we both stepped on the scales, he was the lighter of the two of us. And since I’m not pregnant, that’s not good. We came to the conclusion that there are only two options here.

Either he must increase, or I must decrease.

Tell me if that sentence made you laugh. Maybe we have a weird sense of humor, or maybe it was too late when I said it, but he laughed until his stomach hurt. Which may not be saying much, considering…

There’s plenty of help in the kitchen this week, and it’s day camp, so the campers all leave at 3:00, and Judah and Wesley are campers. So…. this is my designated week to clean house, do laundry and take care of finances. But after these first two days, I’m not sure any of that will be looking much better than they do right now. During camp, I keep finding things to do away from the house… and in the evenings, well, it’s a whole lot more fun to hang out with the camp staff than to be in my lonely blah house doing exasperating blah work.

Except for green beans.

They’re ready this week, and they’re one of the highlights of summer for me.

Green beans make me happy.

 

ps- My life is not so out of control now. Obviously it was all mental, since sitting here and typing out this bit of whatever has put everything back in order for me. Thanks for reading (in case you made it this far.) I’m going to sleep.

 

atypical

One thing I love about my husband is his attention to detail. I don’t trust just anyone to do maintenance/handyman projects for me. But when one of those Voth boys does a job, you can count on it being done right.

Most of the time.

There is the occasional circumstance when that 3rd sentence is proved false. Like last night.

At 4:48 am, Roger and I were sleeping soundly, like any normal couple, when we were abruptly awakened by a crash, crash, BANG as our ceiling fan fell from our ceiling and onto the floor beside the bed.

I yelled (my husband likes to imitate this: ah, ah, aaahhhhh!) and Roger calmly flipped off the light switch as he said, “It doesn’t do any good to yell about it.”

What would you do if you were awakened from a hard, sound sleep by your ceiling fan crashing unexpectedly onto the floor?? I thought (and still do) that yelling was a perfectly normal reaction.

I was amazed at how calmly he could react to the situation.

After we assessed that there was no broken glass for little feet to step on, all we could do was laugh. (and I’m still laughing.) Then he said something like, “I should have installed that the right way.”

***definition***
fortuitous = we just happened to put in our window air conditioner last evening before we went to bed

 

another false alarm

Our friendly Radio Shack employees checked our power cords today, and let us know which ones were completely dead. They sent us home with a new cord for our Yamaha keyboard and the hope that if the keyboard had been turned off at the time of the power surge, then it was probably fine.

I brought it home, plugged it in and rejoiced as the screen lit up and I was able to play a song.

I don’t care about any of the rest of the stuff. We have our computer and our piano – that’s $2,000 that we won’t have to spend again. The power company is supposed to be in contact with us about the rest of it, but even if we fall through the cracks, I don’t think we’ll be too upset.

Thank you for all of your care and concern. That means a lot. The trials in our lives don’t just develop perseverance and faith - I think they also give us a chance to be reminded how much we’re loved.

And now it’s time for me to go do what I should have done a long time ago. Make CDs of the photos that we love and get them printed and put into albums. My kids are swimming in the creek with their daddy, and I have time to myself to think and sort.

something nice

I’m typing this on my laptop.

Which, after we pushed the power button this evening, seems to be absolutely fine.

I guess, basically, we made a mistake. When they realized something was going wrong with the electric in our house, Wendy unplugged the computer. The battery would have been completely drained by the time Roger came along and tried to turn it on. He pushed the power button and nothing happened. Then he plugged the cord back in and still nothing happened. So, we assumed (and it seemed pretty logical) that the computer had been hit with a huge jolt of electricity.

(Not that I really know anything about power surges – except that they can mess up your electronic equipment. And that they have something to do with a high something and a low something and only the high somethings got damaged. Or was that the low somethings?…)

Our printer is working just fine (or as fine as a 4-year-old well-used printer can work) and the computer and all of our pictures are safe. When we’re in town tomorrow, we’ll go to Radio Shack and see if we can find a new cord to try out on the keyboard. It may be okay too – it’s possible that the transformer on the cord was hit, and it never made it to the instrument. (Again, I don’t really know what I’m talking about. I’m just parrot-repeating…)

I’m very much looking forward to going to Lowe’s and picking out a microwave to install over our stove. We bought the stove before we moved in last August and when we were looking for a vent to put over it, Roger really wanted to buy a microwave vent combo. I basically told him that was a dumb idea, because I really liked our microwave (and we had gotten it – for free – off of FreeCycle.) So we’ve had nothing over our stove for the last 10 months except the cereal cupboard and a random sort of mural that Roger did as he was fixing some drywall and installing an electrical outlet.

I had two concerned and loving phone calls today from family who was worried about us and wondering how we’re doing.

We’re absolutely fine.

Although…. I was kind of hoping that the computer was dead. In my perfect world, the power company would have purchased a new computer for us and we would stick our perfectly intact hard drive into it and continued on as usual – but faster.  :-) 

On a different note…

This has been (maybe) the best camp week for me in the 9 years that we’ve been here. For eight summers I’ve had the ambiguous role of “camp director’s wife” which involves many different duties, but also give a lot of freedom to be a mom. That freedom was the killer for me. Much of the camp week -for me- was full of time that I wasn’t needed in any place where I wanted to be used. And when you have a nursing baby or a busy toddler, it’s hard to commit to a job that requires you to be punctual and/or dependable.

I loved those baby days, but I love my children’s growing state of independence.

This week, I had the title of cook. It may sound overdramatic, but Monday was like a little piece of heaven for me. I was in the kitchen getting supper ready all the way through registration. For eight miserable summers worth of Mondays, I’ve suffered through the torturous, stress-inducing and chaotic ordeal of registering campers. (Except for the Mondays that I could come up with an excuse plausible enough to pass the job off onto someone else – pregnancy sometimes worked…)

This time, Wendy was the woman in charge

If you ask her to describe registration, I don’t think she would use any of those adjectives. (…at times, she might agree with chaotic…)

It’s nice to work with someone whose gifts complement your own, isn’t it?

It’s also nice to be given a job that fits you to a T.

afterthoughts

I’ve thought about possessions a lot this past year. I’ve said on more than one occasion that I don’t want to be attached to the things I own. I want to be able to give any of them up at the drop of a hat. (In light of this past Saturday, I find that quite amusing.) It reminds me of being prayer partners with Angie when we were camp counselors together. As we were sharing prayer requests, we were talking about how we “shouldn’t pray for patience because we would get it” (in ways we didn’t want.) The rebel in me came out (which is not unusual – still) and I told her, okay…. go ahead… pray for patience for me.

I don’t remember any drastic effects of the prayers… and I didn’t pray this year for a willingness to give up my stuff, but….. I guess I got my wish.

The hat dropped, and it wasn’t my hand that pulled it off my head.

I do have a few things that are extremely precious to me. The bulkiest one would be the cedar chest my dad made as a wedding gift. It contains precious bundle #2 – the letters that he’s written me over the years. And in a musty smelling ammo box under our bed is #3 – the letters that Roger and I wrote each other during our North Carolina/Oklahoma “dating” relationship.  And pictures…. for the past 9 and a half years, I’ve had the opportunity of photographing the 4 most beautiful and amazing kids ever. Not that I’ve done justice to them with our photo albums. Most of those photos (almost all of Avery’s life) sits in the uncertain purgatory of my Dell Inspiron laptop. (Which I haven’t touched since Roger looked at me and said, “I think it might be gone.” which I responded to with, “If it is, I’m going to cry.” I didn’t quite believe myself. And I didn’t cry until after I pushed the power button on my piano and nothing happened. But I guess I got it all out of my system. And woke up the next morning feeling better than I have in weeks.)

So I’ve been thinking lots more about possessions.

I realized the other day that I’m not the kind of Christian who says, “There’s no such thing as coincidence.” or “Everything happens for a reason.” Things happen. Just because. Because God set this cycle of life in motion and gave us brains to think and create, and the freedom of choice and everything that goes along with that. And just because he has the power over those thoughts and creations and choices (and accidents) doesn’t mean he’s going to use it in every circumstance. And I really can’t finish that thought without sounding like a heretic (I’m not – but I’ve been reading Virginia Woolf, and I can feel her in my sentence structure tonight, weird, strange, odd.)

I am the kind of Christian who believes that we can learn a lesson from anything we choose.

My friends and I have been studying the book of James on Wednesday evenings. When we were talking about rejoicing in the midst of trials, I looked over my sheltered, happy life and realized that I don’t know the meaning of trials yet.

I’m still not sure I do.

I’d been considering packing away the TV for a few months, just to see 1- if we could do it, and 2- what kind of differences it would make in our family life. I had kind of decided against it just because we don’t have a lot of extra storage space in our basement. (But there’s plenty of room in the garbage dumpster!)

Judah asked me Sunday when we’re going to get a new TV, and I told him we might wait until the end of the summer, and explained why I’d like to. He didn’t seem to be bothered by the prospect. But the child’s mind works in (innocently – mostly) devious ways. He said, “If we can do it, can we…… (trying to come up with a really great reward for the sacrifice)…. go swimming at the Pavilion?” (the indoor pool in Hazard) Ha! Sure – why not? We’d probably take them swimming anyway, TV or no TV.

Oh, enough of that! I really just meant to explain what actually happened to the power line – I left that part out on Sunday. There was a tree branch that had fallen on the line, and had been sitting there for awhile, tugging it down… or stretching it out – thus the creation of the power surge.

 

in which we discover something new

Namely, that the ants which have been plaguing my culinary existance have value not only as entertainment, but nutritionally as well. If you managed to wade through that sentence, you’re probably wondering what recipe I’m going to throw your way this time. Never fear, Lily hasn’t been having insect tea-parties with my little girls – we’ve been feeding the ants to the 2 dozen fluffy little chicks that are maturing into egg-laying machines before our very eyes. Well, I hope they all make it to maturity. Today I have seen things….

Such as a chicken waltzing around my kitchen – in the joyous hands of Wesley.

And baby chicks so tired (also from irrepressable Wesley) that, when they were finally left alone, they were falling asleep on their feet! Seriously. One yellow chick was standing beside her two sleeping buddies. Her eyes would close, her head would droop… then she would startle and jerk upright with her eyes wide open. Then she’d relax and start over again. Eventually, when the silence lasted more than 30 seconds, she relaxed enough that her head slipped onto her friends’ backs, and eventually she flopped down like a bowl full of jello.

I’ve seen that in church, never in my laundry room.

[*edit* After rereading this, I thought I should clarify.... I've never seen the flopping part in church.]

I hope it was a she. I want to share her eggs with my friends and neighbors.

We got a big kick out of the ants. (Or maybe that was just me. You know what they say about small minds….) We’d catch an ant and throw it in the box, and those baby chicks, fresh out of their shells would chase it around, even squabble over it, before finishing it off. Someone had the brilliant idea of letting the chicks loose to really keep the ant problem under control. I don’t see that happening – most of the ants come from the ceiling and breathe their last breaths on the countertops.

I tried hard to avoid the phrase “baby chicks” in this post – but the words came out anyway. Repetitive redundancy. I’m sorry and I apologize.