Chickens and Unschooling

Boy is sick. He missed gaming day, nerf, and two karates this week. Hopefully this clears out soon, so he can manage piano tomorrow and shooting sports on Sunday. Missing stuff is annoying.

H had to work Christmas Eve. As a result we had dinner very early and opened our one present very late. Most of us ended up opening a present which contained candy. It's fairly common in this family to do present shopping at the dollar store.

H had a secret santa thing at her work and ended up with a very nice knife. M thinks it is worth double the imposed money limit, but H is fairly sure her secret santa was her boss, so I figured he could break his own rules if he wanted to. Her knife makes a very satisfying snick sound, and H plans to bring it to show off at the next 4-H meeting.

I expected H to get home too late to look at lights, so S, C, M, and I went without her. Surprisingly (to her, too), she was already back from work when we got home and it was still early enough for me to take H out, just the two of us. We ran across my favorite light display of the evening, and had to snap a picture to share with the rest of the family.

S decided to come with H and C to 4-H shooting sports today. Our group is so chill, they let S join in.



S and C got ahead of H on the shooting challenges at the beginning, but eventually they all levelled out and got stuck at challenge five: one on the raccoon, and two on orange or better.


ETA: S was the only one to beat level 5 by the end of the meeting. C was very frustrated. He'd made some great shots, including 2 bullseyes and one in the red on one round, and several kill shots on the raccoon, but not in the right order for the challenges. H did some nice shooting, too, including scoring a 28 (two 10s and an 8) one round.

H and C had their 4-H Community Club meeting today.

They both got a certificate for completing their project books last year. C got a certificate for doing a good job at the junior level on his book.

Project talks - both spoke about shooting sports.

General business - C moved to do a canned food drive and a fabric collection fund raiser.

They celebrated the birthday of their shooting sports leader.

We stuck around for some of the small stock meeting after, and C got to practice some showmanship with a mutt chicken. He and H want to bring their chickens to the next meeting.

When I went to turn in H's and C's 4-H books to their leader last night, I found a very sleep deprived leader and this adorable pair in her house.



Three days old, bottle fed every four hours, because their mother rejected them, and very friendly.

Repeat after me, "I don't need goats, I don't need goats, I don't need goats."

We went to Ren Faire yesterday. It would have been nicer weather to go today, but H and C have 4-H shooting sports this afternoon.

One of S's goals for this Faire was to aquire a Gryphon puppet. She systematically saved every two weeks for almost an entire year to have the money ready. Her efforts were rewarded.

S.

Instead of buying him outright, she bought a dragon egg and played the chance game to see if she won a higher priced puppet. She didn't, but the way it works is you are guaranteed at least the price of puppet that matches the price of egg, which was the level of puppet she was planning to buy anyway.


Roll ball roll! (S and C)

The worker announced that Sarcastic Sage was playing their game, and when the ball reached a certain point we were all to chant "roll, ball, roll" to encourage it along.

It did take S about an hour to decide on her gryphon, but she was very pleased with him once the decision was made.

While waiting for S to choose, C had time to play the dragon egg game himself, for a much smaller price point (he got a dragon eye pendant). He also found the whip merchant to buy a whip - having to go back a second time after he Conraded himself into an extra 10 dollars. I was buying us lunch by the time S was done. M found the magic gryphon, one that wasn't even in the running at first, and H spent the time holding extra gryphons and just being generally helpful.

This year, C is finally old enough to join 4-h as a proper member, rather than just a Cloverbud. When we mentioned the opportunity to him last month, he wasn't sure he wanted to sign up. After yesterday's meeting, and three turns with the air-rifle, he was very pleased we'd talked him into giving it a trial go.

C.

H and C.

This is C's forth year in 4-h (he took one year off from being a Cloverbud last year). H also signed up for 4-h this year, that was basically a given, since she really enjoys hanging out with the folks in this 4-h group. This will be H's fifth year in 4-h and her fifth year doing shooting sports.

We got new ducklings in the mail yesterday. At first I didn't post about it, because I had to get up before 7:30am to pick them up (leaving me about 3 or 4 hours sleep shy of normal), then we were very busy with "Squeeee! Babies!", then normal daily routine (C had shuffleboard and karate, and I had a soup to prepare since we wouldn't be home at dinner time). Plus, we had to coordinate with the other two 4-H families taking a pair of ducks each (we went in on a 10 duckling shipment to make the price lower per bird, by reaching a minimum order value and the minimum bird order where you don't get charged extra to ship them).

For those keeping track, that means 10 minus 4 equals 6 ducklings left for us (the difference in price between 9 ducks and 10 was less than 4 dollars thanks to that aforementioned minimum bird order without extra charges thing, so we just went with the 10th, even though we really only wanted 5 - one for each family member).



Here are the five we ended up with by late last night. Yeah, five, thus the other reason I felt like putting off writing about this. One of the ducklings fell ill and died last night. We don't know what was wrong with her and all the others are fine, as far as we can tell.

When I came back from C's karate I notice one was looking a little off (a fawn and white runner duck I had been planning to give to one of the 4-h kids, good thing that didn't happen till after I came home). We swapped out the lethargic one for a perkier one to give to JD (I certainly didn't want to give him a broken bird). H got a heat pad out to try to warm up the sick one. That's when we realized she may be pooping blood. S took charge of the sick bird while H and I dropped the two extra fawn and white runner ducks off with the 4-H kid (all his siblings were there to greet us and they were all super excited to get ducklings, so H and I didn't feel too bad about leaving one of the ones we thought would be ours with them). When we got back, H took over holding the bird from S (and S had to change to get yet more bloody poop off of her pants), then within the hour the duckling died in H's arms. She didn't even have a name, since she wasn't originally going to be ours. The one that went to JD was going to be M's, instead he got the one I was going to call Lucifer, and he named her Fang.

As hard as that was, the Metzer folks were great. This morning I called and they refunded the price of the duckling and grow gel shipped with her (they would have replaced her if I preferred, but we never really wanted six birds to begin with and the thought of waiting two extra days for a single duckling, then trying to mix an extra bird into our little established flock, seemed way too stressful to me).

This whole post was long and sad, when it should have been full of squee inducing duckling pictures. Yesterday was hard.

H's end of year 4-H party was at a bowling place.

The last time the kids and I had gone bowling was about two years ago during a visit at Grandma and Grandpa's house - there was too much rain to make it to Lego-Land so Grandma took us bowling. It was fun bowling then, and it was fun yesterday. Programmable bumpers have to be one of the greatest inventions to improve the experience of taking kids bowling.

Back in the day, when I was a kid, I got a lot of gutter balls. Halfway back in the day (when my hubby and I were in college) there were inflatable bumpers for special events where they knew a lot of kids would be bowling.

Having bumpers that could go up for the kids and come back down for M and I, made it challenging and fun for everyone. I bowled my best game ever on the first game - 126. The second two games were more my normal 94 and 92. M bowled badly on his first game and got under 100. Then he rallied and got 125 on his second game and 159 (with his first ever Turkey bowled in the first 3 frames) on the third. S broke 80 on her first game and beat me by breaking 90 on her second. C did better on his first game score wise, but I think he hit the bumpers less often on his second (he came in 4th in both the games he bowled). We had the lane for a set length of time, so M and I played the third game just us, and sped through in 11 minutes - M's many strikes helped speed things along.

H bowled on a lane with some of the 4-H kids and she said she had an even better time than if it had just been the family. C kept asking me if he was doing good, and I was finally able to answer honestly in the positive when he bowled one ball that went straight down the lane, didn't hit a bumper, and knocked over 9 pins.

Except for the sticker shock on how much it actually costs these days to bowl, I am really looking forward to all of us going bowling again.

We keep doing stuff - and I'm not too bad when doing the stuff - and then afterwards I feel awful. It took me a week to recover from going to the Renaissance Festival this year. Yesterday we did County Fair. This morning I'm feeling dehydrated and head-achy. I can't imagine how bad someone would feel if they still partied at my age. Not that I partied when I was still young enough to recover from it.

I saw grandparents at the Fair with their cute little grand-babies. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to pull off something like that in 20 years. I'm not even sure we pulled off Fair this year (actually, it was fun while we were there, and the kiddos went on a ton of rides - I just found myself searching out benches a lot).

We started going to our County Fair because of 4-H. Three years ago, H and S submitted photo entries. This meant they got free passes. We had to go see their efforts hanging up at Fair. That is when we discovered (after a bit of sticker shock) that the wrist bands we could buy them would grant all access to the rides for the night. They easily made up the price of the bands five times over. Last night, since they are all bigger (except C was still too short for a few rides) and willing to go on just about every ride there (S was the only one to go on the Evolution, but H went on many more types of scary, going upside down, or spinning wildly about, rides this year), they easily made up the price of the wrist bands ten times over. Buying tickets is not the way to go at our County Fair.