Gabriel is 5!!

Yup, really. He's 5 years old! It's amazing how quickly they grow up. Not one to back away from a party, Rebecca came up with an amazing shark/aquarium themed one for him. 

We turned the side porch into an aquarium.

Rebecca made a watermelon cake that actually tasted like watermelon.

I carved a watermelon shark. Yep, I'm pretty proud of that.

She made chocolate cupcakes with shark fins on them.

She put together quite a spread.

To make it a full day event for him, we took him to the new aquarium at the Natural Science Center. What a neat place! They have penguins, otters, a touch tank where they can touch sea rays, some displays of other marine animals like a 14-foot anaconda, and a nice, big wall aquarium complete with sharks and moray eels.

Emma was in rare form. She is just like Olivia was at this age. She just loved watching the fish and trying to touch the sea rays.

She may not be walking, but she'll climb rocks with no problem.

The big tank was so neat. The kids just loved staring into it. I know I could have spent hours just watching the fish.

Ezra liked the green moray eels.

I think Gabe's favorite was the penguins.

They would actually respond to you and come up to the glass to look back at you.

The otters were also a favorite. Really, there wasn't anything we didn't like about the new aquarium.

For the party, we put together a "Wipeout"-style, shark-themed obstacle course.

Even the chickens had to come check it out.

Here's the course:

After crawling through two tunnels, you had to sit and pop a balloon with a shark drawn on it.

Then go over or under the two hurdles

Jump into a pool of shaving cream to find a little fish

that you then toss into the mouth of this shark

And finally slide down the Slip N Slide through the shark's mouth.

It certainly was entertaining to watch. (you can see the tunnels in the background. somehow I didn't get a picture of them...) 

All the kids had a blast and just kept going through the course over and over.

Cousin Rooney had a good time, too.

I love the look of pure joy on his face.

He was really excited about all of his gifts. He got 2 planes from Grandma and Grandpa, some games from Nana and Pop-pop, a spaceship from his friends and a rug with streets on it for matchbox cars from us.

Irene - 3 months



big beautiful eyes

she is quick to smile and becoming very interactive. she often has something to say these days.

finding her hands, they are so interesting

looking around for us. she reminds me so much of Gabe as a baby.

she likes to stand

she likes to fly

here she is chillin at the pool. she went with us this summer but mostly stayed on the side in her seat. she was NOT a fan of the water. she seems to really like being outdoors as she is just really calm and content.

 

Chicken Update

It's been a while since we posted about the chickens, so I figured I'd catch everyone up. 

Last time I mentioned them, I revealed that we had a rooster. Unfortunately, it's against city ordinance to have a rooster, so it was either give him away or eat him. I tried, albeit not too hard, to find someone to swap a hen for him, but no luck. In the end, he became dinner. It was my first experience slaughtering a chicken, and it wasn't really too tough. I learned that I need make the cut deep enough to bleed him out quickly and that I need a bigger scalding pot for plucking. Everything else went like clockwork.

We wound up roasting him for a Shabbat dinner with friends. We decided to compare our home-grown, free-range rooster to a Costco organic chicken. Ours was a Rhode Island Red, Costco's was a Cornish Cross. Ours was 16 weeks old, The Costco bird was 7 to 8 weeks old. Ours was left loose in the yard to eat bugs, grass, and whatever else it found along with having organic feed available to it. Costco's was likely (since it's not designated "free-range") raised in a mass chicken house on high-protein organic feed. The difference is glaring. Ours is the scrawny looking bird. See that bit of yellow peeking out on our bird? That's a bit of fat. The bright yellow comes from the carotene in the grass, a sure sign of a free-ranged/pastured chicken.

In truth, he didn't have much breast meat at all to him. His legs were longer and bigger, tho. Once cooked, there was a clear difference in the color of the meat. The Costco bird was very pale while ours was darker through the breast, almost the same color as the dark meat on the Costco bird. There was also a distinctly more "chickeny" flavor to ours. The Costco bird was almost bland by comparison. Now, because of our rooster's age, his meat was a bit tougher and reheating the leftovers made it nearly inedibly tough. So now what we need is a faster growing heritage breed chicken. Something we can harvest at 10-12 weeks...

In the meantime, we waited for our hens to start producing. The age varies greatly, anywhere from 18-30 weeks of age. Our chickens were 16 weeks when we took the rooster, so maybe we'd only have to wait 2 weeks...or not.

It was almost exactly at the 26-week mark that we got our first egg. It started with one, then two, then 4. At about the 29-week point, we had our first 5-egg day. They lay at all different times, not just in the morning. And some days we get 3, some 4 and occasionally 5. We're averaging 30 eggs a week, which is just enough for our family right now.

So now Olivia gets to harvest the eggs every day. She loves going to check.

The boys like to check with her sometimes.

During our long wait for eggs, I did some research and decided on Delaware chickens for meat birds. It's what the industry used before the introduction of the Cornish Cross. The biggest difference between the two is that you can raise Delawares and they'll breed. Cornish Crosses are dead at 10 weeks because they grow so fast their legs break and they die of thirst, so no true breeding. 

Ordering chicks requires a minimum of 25 from most hatcheries and that's just not doable in the city, so when our good friend, Drew, mentioned he was ordering 25, I asked him to tack 6 Delawares on. 

And here they are. We got them at about 2 weeks old on/about 8/22, so they're now about 5 weeks old; theoretically, halfway there... They are growing fast.

Meanwhile, the hens have gotten big a beautiful. They're very gentle and 3 of them will actually squat down when I come close and let me pet them or pick them up. They often follow me or Olivia when we're out in the yard. They even run alongside the lawnmower, pecking at the freshly cut grass and getting at the bugs that are suddenly exposed. It's really been a great experience having the chickens. Can't wait to see how the Delawares turn out.

Spray Park

Here's one that fell through the cracks. We went to a spray park back at the end of June and let the kids run around for a while. The kids always have fun in the water and this was no exception. Ezra took a few minutes to get warmed up to the place, but he wound up having a wonderful time, just like the rest of them. 

Even Emma found something to play with.

Emma

Emma turns 20 months old this week and she still isn't walking. We're actually not worried about it. She will walk as long as we hold her hand and we have seen her take a step or two on her own when we weren't looking. I think she's just going to decide to do it on her own one day soon.

She likes to feed herself, tho the mess often seems grater than the food we gave her.

She loves to talk! We have no idea what she's saying, but she will point and babble, often repeating sounds like she's made up a name for something.

She loves her little sister! Just today the two of them were babbling back and forth to each other.