Your Favorite Passion

Surprise! So, yeah, I haven't actually fallen off the face of the earth. I don't really have an excuse for not blogging lately (or in months, really). Let's just move on, shall we?

 Here's a quick overview of what's happened in the last 6 months. We started with 1 duck. This is Quackers. AKA Quackopotamus, Quackzilla and Quacky. She's a Swedish Blue that we got from a coworker of Gabe's back in November of 2011.

 Then in July another coworker gave us an A-frame chicken coop and we got these two little guys.

They are both Rhode Island Reds. The kids named them Lillyann and Little Feather. Then in August we got two more Rhode Island Red hens and another duck to keep Quacky company. Ducks like to flock so they do better in groups. Quacky was lonely until Penelope came. Penelope's a Rouen. Rouens have the same pattern as wild Mallard ducks. Now they are best duckie friends.

 That brought us to 2 ducks and 4 chickens.

Our first egg! 

MoMo also had a birthday. 8 years old!

She had a party at the skating rink. Here she is skating with her BFF. They could almost be twins...

Daddy got his hunting license and here's his first quail.

He got a few more quail and a Chukar, too, in later hunting excursions. And a couple of rabbits (made some delicious rabbit stew!).

Halloween monster cookies!

 And a ninja and a bee... and some jack o' lanterns. MoMo's jack o' lantern wasn't feeling too well!

Grandma and Papa came to visit at Thanksgiving but I, uh, didn't take any pictures. Sorry.

In December, Daddy took MoMo to the salon to get her hair done.

Then Christmas came. Christmas morning...

And it turns out that Lillyann and Little Feather were roosters! So they had to go. No one really liked hearing them crowing at 3am. Now they're on a farm breeding baby chicks. Speaking of baby chicks...

On Valentine's Day these 6 little cuties came home with us.

They don't have names, yet. But they are getting big! And getting their patterns...especially the black ones who will end up sort of black and white striped. They are Barred Rocks. Plus there are two white ones (Leghorns, maybe, or White Rocks? I just told her to give me 2 white ones because MoMo wanted white), a Buff Orpington, and a Blue Laced Red Wyandotte. So now we've got 8 chickens and 2 ducks and a generous supply of both chicken and duck eggs. We're going to have to start giving them away. And these little ones aren't even laying yet!

The weather's been pretty nice lately. I'm getting spring fever, ready to start planting in the garden. Yesterday the temperature got all the way up to 68! We opened up the windows in the house to air it all out and enjoy the warmer weather. Of course, tomorrow it will probably snow. We have crazy weather like that.

Also I'm pretty excited that I finally have an extra freezer in the garage! So now I can buy meat and things when it's on sale and have room to keep it frozen. I had so little freezer space before that it was ridiculous. And I definitely feel a little old to be so excited about an appliance! But in order to fit the freezer in the garage we had to do some cleaning and reorganizing. It's still a work in progress. But it's gonna be awesome when it's done! Then I can get my craft/sewing supplies and fabric organized. In the meantime I was moving around fabric in the garage and decided I needed to make some quilts with some of it pronto. Yesterday I cut up one of my very favorite lines of fabric, Sultry by Moda. And did some sewing. Hopefully in a day or two I'll have a new quilt top to share. Here's one final picture from yesterday. My little quilter...

She's working on her very own I-Spy quilt. More pics to come...