The first thing I noticed was that their behavior was more aggressive. We got them at 3 months old and already they were fighting in the beak to beak style. They stick out their neck and make their neck feathers stand up like an open umbrella. Here is a picture of two mature roosters doing it:

It’s very obvious that those are males since they are full grown but i couldn’t find a pic of juvenile roosters doing it. When I saw them doing this I didn’t remember our other hens doing it but thought it was kind of cute and didn’t realize it was a male chicken behavior.

Their feather patterns can tell you a lot as they get older. Roosters have pointier neck feathers. Hens have neck feathers that have more rounded tips.

Saddle feathers – as roosters get older they begin to have more defined saddle feathers. in the picture above those adult roosters have really well defined saddle feathers, the feathers on their backs right before the tail starts, you can see how they sort of drape over the back like a saddle.

Here’s a pic of our three rooster at about 3 months. as you can see the saddle feathers are not particularly defined:

As roosters get older their tail feathers also change. in the above pic you see Flowers (the black one) just has a regular looking tail at 3 months but by 4 and a half months the tail started to change and had some longer feathers at the top that sort of looked separate and drooped over and down.

Another thing to look at is the base of the comb. Hens will have a more delicate and narrow comb base. Here’s a pic of all three roosters (kinda blurry) at 3 months old. Their combs are still pretty small.

I don’t have much to say about this except that combs vary quite a bit from breed to breed. If you’ve got two of the same breed and one has a wider comb base and is exhibiting some other signs then you might have a rooster.

One thing I remember from our hens when they were young is that around about 5 months old they started submitting if you hovered your hand over them. It’s a hen mating behavior. Their chest goes towards the ground and tail and haunches go up. Take the opportunity to rough them up a bit between the shoulder blades.

The most obvious sign of a rooster is the crowing. Only Eggy was crowing in the morning at 5 months old. He did the typical chest up and out, wings flapping and a nice loud oodle oodle oooooo! The day before we took them back to the farm Dizzy busted out with a pretty pathetic crow attempt.

When we got to the farm Dizzy was the only one that wasn’t obvious just by looking at it and he got to have a very undignified and intrusive upside down investigation. “Yep! No eggs in this pipe!” the dude declared.

There you have it! My first chicken sexing experience! Now we have three new hens a Delaware, a Black Star sex link, and a Barred Rock. All of them have brown eggs so I am a tiny bit disappointed about that but there will be other chickens eventually. They are all in-between 3-4 months old so we will have ot wait a bit for eggs from them.

Now we are all fighting about names for them. Jack wants to name them White-Black, Butterfly, and One of Three.

I want the black one to be named Xena and Vim wants the Barred Rock to be Mimi and the black one to be Homestar Chicken. These new chickens are already coming over to eat out of my hand and will allow themselves to be cuddled.

However, Mimi is sneezing and has some nasal discharge. GODDAMMIT.

What have I learned here? I think next time we will order baby chicks from a hatchery. Maybe all these will go in the pot in a year.

UPDATE:
I found a picture Vim took of them fighting. So this is an easter egger and an australorp fighting at about 4-5 months old.

hhshahahah it’s just so totally obvious now that I know even the tiniest thing about it.

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They are going back to the farm tomorrow. dammit. They were so cute too.

In other news I am having a nervous breakdown (i just accidentally typed beakdown…) that includes panic attacks while ordering coffee, excessive watching of Star Trek episodes, over eating of chocolate, and extreme irritability and self loathing. It’s really fucking awesome and fun.

I am attempting a new Pdoc and he is upping my wellbutrin intake. embarrassingly I thought wellbutrin was an SSRI and apparently it isn’t. wtf to i know, anyway? Later we will add in some prozac maybe. I just fell into the rabbit hole of reading about drugs online. I do not recommend this activity as the lists of side effects will instantly make even a healthy person have a panic attack.

Things are annoying me. Like all the douchey things people started saying when the Komen Foundation pulled money to planned parenthood. It was immediately assumed by everyone that it was a politically motivated pro-choice/anti-abortion move. and the douchey anti-abortion people felt all righteously vindicated like “fuck those poor underserved women and their constant abortions and birth control seeking behaviors, let ‘em get breast cancer too. they deserve it”. accept that it was couched much more nicely since surely no one would actually think or say that out loud. Some people started trotting out shit like CDC. HA really? give me a break. I can’t even bring myself to get into how utterly wrong it is to compare the two services. anyway, HUGE EYEROLL.

I’m just trying to think of a situation in which I would feel good about limiting crucial heath care to someone because of how i feel about some other thing. I can’t think of anything. although feel free to suggest things.

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My new book Designing California Native Gardens: The Plant Community Approach to Artful, Ecological Gardens. The plant community approach makes a lot of sense when designing a garden. My class last semester was very much about this idea. I finally ended up deciding to take the Spring version of that class this semester and i also signed up for a ground cover class that may get dropped for low enrollment, although i hope it doesn’t.

Futzing in the garden and chicken herding. The weather has been really, really nice, perfect gardening weather so I have been out in the backyard everyday working on the embankment slide. It involves a lot of digging. And that involves a lot of jack waving the hose around and making rivers and oceans in the trenches I am digging. today, I made him a perfect round little island to sit on.

We are trying to integrate the two chicken flocks. the big ones are NOT happy about it and they cluck threateningly and fluff themselves up very big and then rush the little ones. Last night we snuck the little ones into the big coop. Tonight i put the littles to bed in their old coop but we will switch them in the dead of night again. It’s a great excuse to pet them since the littles are not friendly enough with us yet to cuddle them normally. Yes, they are outrageously soft and adorable.

Sketching and researching natural playscapes. I’m sketching (very roughly) ideas for a natural playscape for a park in east oakland and it is super fun to come up with ideas and figure out where they would work in the space. I’ll probably do some more posts about this and my progress with the playscape in my own backyard.

embankment slide in progress:

Phineas and Ferb. Jack has been watching this show recently since it is on netflicks streaming. He really likes it and I don’t mind watching it either. I like Perry the platypus.

Pintrest. Pintrest continues to be great. I do wish it had some kind of collage tool. here’s a link to my playscapes board.

my By Nieves bath products. They smell sooooo good! the perfect skin serum is my favorite.

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next year i swear I wont let our christmas tree be so sad. even if it means spending a stupid amount of money on ornaments. matching lights that work. tree skirt. some kind of matching ball ornaments. damnit. MOAR bird ornaments. more cute kid made ornaments.

Learn how to mix my own drinks.

after like 3 weeks of everyone being on vacation, AKA at home all the time, i am about to fucking scream every time i see the kitchen in a not clean state. I swear I will try to clean the kitchen every night before bed and run the dishwasher and then empty the damn dishwasher in the morning. that way dishes wont pile up during the day and there will be no excuse for a messy kitchen. jack goes to bed, then kitchen gets cleaned then i can collapse into bed and/or make myself a drink.

play more board games with jack.

shit. i had another one but now i can’t remember it. oh yeah, GET THERAPY.

also, go to ocean beach/sutro baths more!

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Here are a few parts of it:

roguish trader
red shirt
intrepid captain
space hussy
backstabbing traitor
giant space amoeba
dastardly doctor
robot war lord
formless entity
insane scientist

rival species
maroon
genocide
damaged spacecraft
weird genitalia
technobabble
red alert
intruder
doppelganger
space race
right of passage

item:
star saber
space rifle
mind control bug
data jack
antlers
knife of honor
universal translator
tail
recording device
intoxicating substance

place:
space port
captains quarters
bridge
bordello
alien city
nebula
enemy vessel
alternate universe
wormhole
desolate planet

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I don’t like having a million people I don’t know add me. I see how this can be great for people, i really do but it sucks for me. I don’t like strangers and I don’t really WANT to meet new people via that sort of social network, it’s just not useful for me in any way. I feel like I am on the verge of rejecting the internet completely and am feeling oddly violated by strangers looking at my google profile.

Then, there’s this that just happened:

so… WTF? I love Elisa! But do I care that she “shared” (whatever that means) a link to the wikipedia article about echinacae in 2005? DO I CARE? might I care in some other situation? maybe? Like maybe I could reach out to her and have in depth discussion about echinacae that would lead to future world peace! Or fucking NOT. How about I get to look some shit up on the internet without having to know which of my other friends have also looked it up or ever spoken about it on the internet going back to 1994. How about Google let me handle my own personal life?

I just might start a link farm blog that links to every heinous thing someone i know might look up on the internet and then my name will ALWAYS pop up when you google ANAL POLYPS.

Bing search engine here i come….

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speaking of horrible. do you pronounce that WHOREIBLE or HARABLE? I say HARABLE and Vim says it the other way and I sometimes now find myself saying it his way and I hate myself for it.

I got some excellent christmas gifts. 2 sewing books – the new Colette patterns one and the new burdastyle one. MOST EXCELLENT cat years from liz. And one of those across the bathtub holder things. I’ve always wanted one and it is as awesome as i imagined it to be! plus, a kickass pasta/stock pot form my parents that is really pretty and awesome.

Christmas day was so mellow and nice. The weather was gorgeous and we spent an hour or two playing outside. We put the big chickens in their yard tractor and I weeded tons of grass, dandelions and oxalis to feed to them. In the evening Liz and D and A came over and we ate steak tacos at a kitchen table covered in Legos and books.

Back to New Year’s resolutions though… I have TONS of things I would like to get done, or improve or start just a little bit this year. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks now and I need to get some of them down on paper so that I don’t forget.

one weekend day hike/outing a month in some awesome gorgeous CA spot. some examples: mt. Diablo, muir woods, mt. Tam, somewhere on skyline, Pt. reyes, stinson beach, suisun bay, etc.

basically I can just make a blanket – Craft MOAR in 2012 – type statement but I need some more specific goals.

use up my stash – i have a real problem with this as I am sure many of you can relate to… I’m not just talking about fabric but all that shit i have lurking up there in my craft cave.

sew more. finish converting vintage dress into a skirt w/patch pockets. sew a few more bathing suits and finish the hilarious polka dot one w/ ruffle. do some projects with the knits I bought this year – camisoles and underwear? a few summer dresses that don’t suck would be nice. a mini skirt of the cheerleader variety made from excess garden glove dot fabric.

screen printing – i have a few screen printing projects I would like to do this year.

House and yard – get backyard meadow planted and keep experimenting with natives. continue w/ veggie garden and work on planting stuff we will actually eat. take down side yard gate. integrate new chickens. front yard is a horrible wasteland of dirt – work on that. start taking down the shitty invasive ivy.

remodel the downstairs bathroom/laundry room. We are maybe gearing up for this. It could happen. Altso, we really should do our foundation but stocks everywhere tanked heinously and so there went all our money. here is my pintrest for the project. is there a polyvore type thing for house decorating related stuff? to make more of a collage? that would be a cool feature for pintrest – to let you take images from a board and collage them.

Get organized! – something might get organized and stay that way this year. i like to think it will happen.

School – Spring – survive spring natives class and attempt landscape eval class. Fall – no idea but hopefully some actual design classes.

We have a bunch of summer plans already. We’ll be on the East Coast for a couple of weeks in July and we are also thinking of going to Burningman one more time… with or without Jack remains to be seen. Maybe we’ll throw in fish or family camp too. I know I am going to start longing for Maui but I think we are skipping it this year.

One milestone happening this year is that Jack turns five in May and fall of 2012 he will start kindergarten. So fall of this coming year will be a big adjustment. It means we will all have to wake up early and be out of the house at 8am instead of 9am. I think jack will be fine with the transition to school ’til 3pm everyday. He has his first private school evaluation Jan 17th. i’m excited about it! For me it means I could go get a job or ramp up school to full or almost full time. I’m going to make a real effort to not freak out about that until I have to and jack is still so little i don’t want him to be in aftercare all day after school yet. So this fall doesn’t mean a one way ticket back to coding cubeland for me. If I thought it did I would def. be freaking out.

In other news, I love my lego knight bus.

I’m sure I am forgetting some stuff but this is a good start.

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yeah, 7 of 9 was a bid to add some sexy so that idiotic 20 year old misogynist male fans would stop bitching about every.single.thing about Janeway. Sad. I know. but 7 of 9 WAS sexy AND awesome so I thought it was a win win. The main annoying horrible characters on Voyager were Chakotay and horndog white guy Paris. Janeway was a pretty kickass Captain. I’m only like 6 episodes in so I cant remember exactly what happens later but i remember feeling a little annoyed later on with her because she started like, gazing up at Chakotay too much.

Anyway, can you imagine Kirk in Janeway’s situation? Hell no, there is no way he would have been smart enough in that first episode to realize that the only way to work it was to integrate the two crews. I mean, i guess it was pretty fortunate that the original first officer was killed but whatever! Harry Kim was fucking hot, the Doctor was awesome, Torres was pretty good, I hated Kes and Neelix was annoying but worked as a comedic foil to Tuvok.

After the complexity of Deep Space Nine Voyager was a tad disappointing but since it was sort of just a return to the TNG model it wasn’t a particular shock.

Any other trekkies out there? Which was your favorite incarnation of the Trekkie ‘Verse?

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welp! I’m back! *waves energetically but not in a perky fashion*
thanks to my sister, who kicks ass all over the place.

Here she is:

I am sitting here at noisebridge in SF. It’s very cool but only for visiting occasionally. for me. I am way too much of a hermit to be able to deal with this. there are people popping in and out, doing shit. I hate that. they might
a. see me
b. talk to me
c. wonder what i am doing
d. make noise
e. talk to each other
f. listen to music loudly on headphones that i will still be able to hear.
g. do stuff.

All things that are unacceptable to my cold black miserly heart.

I do like that it exists and that it is the kind of thing my sister likes. this means that i can come enjoy the benefits of it occasionally without having to explain myself. it’s called ‘riding on my sister’s coat tails” and i do it a lot. it’s a benefit of having an older sister of the extrovert variety.

speaking of coat tails. she needs to give me my tux tails back.

I’ve been doing some stuff.
I made a dress:

and i should be doing homework right now. I also have an asston of christmas presents to make.

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After:

I’m sure there is some philosophy about how workplace reorgs are a great thing. I’m not sure what those great things are but you can bet they were made up by a bunch of extroverts. I never liked that kind of reorg at work but i do like to endlessly reorganize cabinets for some reason.

This kitchen pantry organizing project was quite easy and didn’t take too long as it is a pretty small cabinet. Problems encountered were things like: i have 1/4 cup of elbow noodles left over that won’t fit in to the jar. that stressed me more than it should have for sure.

I still need to do the cabinet of baking stuff. we have a million tiny amounts of odd types of flours. this will have to wait until next year though.

I just spent a good HOUR being a princess who was out of ammunition who kept being attacked by a large octopus… my head has now exploded.

I am attempting to sew a dress! it has princess seams and I have never sewn princess seams before but it is clear from my muslin that the apex is in completely the wrong place.

I wish my dress form was in better working order. did I ever post about the dress form? hmmmm.

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Things have been slowly changing over the past however many years and i have been enjoying reading about nutrition and realizing more fully that food is meant to be delicious and nutritious. It doest seem too too long ago that my favorite breakfast was a diet coke, doritos and a cigarette… just typing that made me salivate a little. Yum! and GROSS!

Now I try to buy meat and produce from CA, I don’t buy a lot a of processed foods but certainly crackers and cookies sometimes. I like fancy cheese. I occasionally buy juice for Jack although I tend to only drink juice when I am sick. I buy a LOT of milk and cream, usually Strauss Farms but sometimes just whatever.

Sometimes I have my shit together and I make a weekly meal plan but really, that is not too often

I dashed across the street to the grocery store this morning and bought: cream, eggs (our chickens aren’t really laying right now), genoa salami, kalamata olives, an apple, my favorite Alvarado Street California protein bread, italian provolone, parmesan, sharp cheddar and.. that’s it, I think.

Sometimes I buy stuff in cans but mostly I try to make soups from scratch and buy dry beans instead of canned. Last week I made a crockpot chicken soup recipe that called for canned beans and I didn’t have any. So I soaked some dry beans over night and then added them to the crockpot… but I hadn’t COOKED them. So they came out crunchy. It was horrible. Resetting the crockpot to cook another 6 hours worked totally fine somehow and didn’t dry out the chicken or make it seem over cooked. major save! and that fed Vim and me for a whole week.

I make broth and soups and freeze them now that i have a crockpot. One of those tiny deep freezes would be super handy. I saw them at the store when we bought our fridge. They are cheap and when we have a basement someday I will get one. Then we can do that thing where you buy half a cow or whatever.

I also order food from Three Stone Hearth every week. This week I ordered Pastured Pork and White Beans with Greens, Beef Stew Osso Bucco Style and the Gremolata that goes with it plus more walnuts and their coconut date bars that are so damn good.

I grow some stuff. Just greens are growing now, I have kale, lettuces, bok choy and mustard greens ready to go. When I need some I just go out and pick it. All good for stir fry and soups.

What I ate today:
two egg omelet with olives, cheddar and walnuts.
two fish tacos from Rubio’s
curry lentil soup with yogurt cream
and like 3 cups of coffee
water
large spoonful of almond butter

That menu has a distinct lack of veggies in it, i guess the fish tacos had some…

What Jack ate today:
3 scrambled eggs with olives
cereal (some wheat flake kind) w/ milk
water
spanish rice and 1/2 a cheese quesedilla and a gross churro
some milk
2 strawberry mochi ice creams
2 bowls of beef stew with green beans and potatoes
1 small box of NERDS from his halloween stash

That’s more sweet stuff than he usually eats… oops. It was a holiday!

Here’s my fridge plus notes added with the app Skitch which is pretty awesome. Oh and if you like looking at people’s fridges, like I do, there is a whole flicker group for you to peruse here.

Today I embark on a pantry cabinet reorg inspired by Stitch and Boots, you can read her post on cleaning and organizing your shelves here. okay, wish me luck. I will blog about it hopefully today too.

oh and i wrote this on Friday but published it on saturday.

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Which was great and all but the scene utterly lacked all my classmates and teacher and since I was supposed to be meeting them I was on the verge of a panic attack. I finally got cell reception nd left my teacher a tearful message and then ran into a few other class mates who were equally flummoxed.

Unbelievably gorgeous november day, sans the rest of my class:

I drove all over effing Pt. Reyes and then, after a mini nervous breakdown, decided to take a nap on the beach and have lunch. After that I was on my way home when I saw a crap load of cars on the side of the road and it was… my class!

Turns out they never went to the place we were supposed to meet… (WHAT>!>WHY? OMFG) . instead, the teacher and assistant decided to stand on the side of the road and try to flag everyone down to go to north beach. But they missed about half the class. So, that blows.

I joined up with them and we drove around sort of frantically and pointlessly until i was almost out of gas and had to hitch a ride with classmates. It was a beautiful, highly annoying and pointless day. I almost wish I hadn’t seen them and joined up.

I was really looking forward to getting to walk around with someone very knowledgable about plants but there was no plant list, we didn’t spend much time or talk about anything in depth, it was basically impossible to listen, take pictures and take notes all at the same time so I just gave up.

We ended up here:

Sometimes I can’t believe I am lucky enough to live here.

I saw a bunch of tule elk and that was awesome. Also, happy California cows, they are adorable.

At least there is no homework this week!

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1. I continue to be upset about the gender balance of children’s toys and books. Lego mini figures for example. I’m upset about them. Why are there only 4 lady lego figures in the series 5 mini-figure packs? why do they all have red lips and boobs? The male mini figures don’t all have huge crotch bulges. the male figures are mostly just blank slates that could be either male or female if there weren’t these stupid boobed red lipped figures. so what fucking gives Lego and Play Mobile? I want to love you but I can’t.

Pink leotard boombox headband lady figure? RLY? PULEEESE fuck offfffff.

2. Flatware. We have, for some reason, only like 3 butter knives. I don’t know where all our knives went but I didn’t like them or the rest of our crappy flatware anyway. why is all modern flatware so HUGE? Every time I have to pick up a fork that is bigger than my arm I am pissed about it. I need to buy some vintage flatware but I am afraid Vim is going to kick and scream about it. I kind of want this mid century modern Interpur set or this Florenz flower Interpur set, or this Mexicaly Rose Interpur set. .

3. There’s another thing I am so unreasonably upset about that I don’t want to blog about for fear of exposing myself as even more of an asshole. It’s something that SHOULD be really awesome but that I fear is actual fucking stupid due to annoying fuckery. I want to complain about it SO BAD(ly) but I will show uncharacteristic restraint, for now anyway.

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I’m just bitter because I feel like a failure no matter what I do.

I sort of attempted to have a crafty business. My etsy shop was going strong for a while and i did well at craft shows but I wasn’t organized enough to keep it going and i couldn’t deal with shit like taxes.

The craft conference thing was too much work and we all burned out. We didn’t get paid enough and while people enjoyed it and it was a worthy cause no one wanted to pay for it and now Etsy has swooped in with it’s free events and lectures and conferences and shit. So much for small business…

School is kicking my ass because I don’t know why. Is it all in my head? Am I stressing about homework too much? no and yes. it’s total snowflake community college in which we aren’t even forced to actually KNOW anything. Besides which I have no idea where this is going. If it ends up meaning i have to have my own business than the whole idea is clearly pointless. I could go to Berkeley Extension for Landscape Architecture but that is expensive and what if it was ultimately pointless and the second i got my degree I discovered that actually i really need to go back to school for underwater basketweaving because that is my true true true calling? plus, when I told vim my secret hearts yearning five year plan he looked at me like I was an idiot and suggested that I learn a new programming language.

I DO want to learn a new language but when exactly will I have time to do that? I need to write a new form and back end voting system, I have about 6 months to do it. It’s on my list.

I am feeling extra sensitive. One of my friends told me that my “personality isn’t for everyone”. which…I don’t know. isn’t that true of EVERYONE’S personality? why point it out to me? wtf? also, why is this careless comment still rankling me?

I have a bunch of emails and phone calls that need to be made. This stresses me out unbelievably and I would rather burn myself with a cigarette than even think about it.

Also, I am having to fill out forms for kindergarten applications and it is making me nervous and avoidant. is that a word? it should be.

My period is making me insane lately. Like really, actually insane and freaking out crazy. so sorry if that personality trait isn’t for you. If you need to talk about how much my personality sucks please discuss it in a time wasting detail with someone else.

anyway, my kid is alive and fed and wearing clothing so I count that as at least one success AND I made him a really cute CRAFTY halloween costume and I will bog about it in excruciating self hating detail soon.

P.S. Happy Monday!!!!

P.P.S. Here is a picture of a crocigator beating the shit out of a unicorn.

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In this pic Jack is pretending to be a pogo zombie.

This game is killing me. fortunately, now a few weeks later, the obsession is waning. But for a week there all I did was play this game. I played it while I should have been studying for my mid-term and I played it while I should have been steering Jack to some sort of more productive activity.

we play analog plants vs zombies now. all the time. And Jack makes up new plants and zombies. Ninja zombie, double headed chomper, etc. He reminds me to tend my zen garden.

So I procrastinated on studying for my mid-term and then I did all this studying and then at about 5pm the day before the test I realized I had been studying the wrong shit. Anyway. During the test I got all flustered and I missed a bunch and then spent the next week worrying and feeling crappy about probably getting a shitty grade. I got a B+ so… that’s fine. I’m not sure why I bother stressing. The first quiz I thought I totally fucked up I actually got all of them right.

Here is my zen garden:

I’m never going to win the whack-a-zombie level mini-game and I’m pretty upset about it. Meanwhile, despite doing okay on my test the rest of the house has gone to shit. We have a horrid fruit fly problem in the kitchen right now. nothing is working to get rid of them! Where do they come from??! They are very gross.

Video games are evil, folks.

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I guess I’ve been thrown into some sort of hair identity crisis since growing out my natural color that is filled with gray. I don’t look like me and my nose got bigger. I don’t know what that has to do with anything but I am headed towards a nose job in my 40′s.

No shampoo! I actually have 2 large half full bottles of fancy shampoo and conditioner in my bathroom. I was going to use them up and then start the experiment but then decided that I couldn’t wait and should maybe keep those around for guests who don’t care to become smell hippies or something.

I looked on etsy for a shampoo bar, there are a lot all with different sorts of ingredients. I chose one that had the fewest ingredients. It was great. it smelled nice, had a great lather and now I know what squeaky clean means since my hair was actually squeaky AND clean. It was also soft, wavy and looked nice. So I used that like every 4 days and all was right with the world. Until it occurred to me that spending 6+ dollars to have someone from all the way across the country send me a shampoo bar was also pretty stupid.

My hair is still mostly wet and unbrushed in this picture but my cat is sooo cuuuuute (and huge)!

I may have to make my own. I could probably do it in a day and make a years worth of shampoo bars. Vim has made his own soap and says it was pretty easy and possibly even has some non food grade coconut oil left over somewhere.

This morning I finally tried out using a baking soda rinse in the shower. I have NOT tried apple sider vinegar (I don’t want to smell like apples, cider or vinegar, in any way.) nor have I tried egg yolks. As soon as we get more chickens I will though.

There are tons of sites out there that talk about why commercial shampoos are bad especially if you have dandruff or curly hair. Commercial shampoos are detergents that strip the hair of natural oils causing your scalp to then be too dry and then to speed up sebum production making your hair more oily. Basically.

Speaking of being manipulated by the beauty industry… I still might have to dye my hair again. I know it’s dumb. I can’t seem to help it. I can’t get used to my real hair. I wish it would just go tREALLY REALLY grey.

So, so far I like the results of no longer using commercial shampoo. Has anyone else out there tried this?

upcoming posts: new chicken coop! and Jack’s Halloween Crocigator costume! also, How Our Transition to Total Hippiedom Was Completed

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I found this picture of me when I was 3 to be strangely shocking, like it’s odd that Jack looks like me. Now where are the baby photos Vim’s mom sent me.

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Jack does not need any more toys and in fact I still have stuff left over from last christmas that I didn’t give him thinking I would bust them out so time when he was bored or I needed to give him a treat. That never happened somehow. He does want every Lego set ever made and routinely brings me the catalog so that he can discuss it with me. We already have too many legos… what to do?

Did I tell you that a few months ago Vim went to a church garage sale and bought a HUGE bin of legos for 100$. It is like thousands of dollars of legos in there. Mostly sets from the mid 90′s and include a lot of the Atlantis series. Did you know that you can look on a lego brick for a number and then online you can look up what set that brick is from? Well, you can. and then you can download the instructions to build. vim and Jack have been doing that nonstop for many months now.

Hi, my name is Minnie and I have a kid obsessed with Lego.

In other news, Jack has been moving back into a charming stage rather than a freak out and be horrible stage. Although it still seems to me that he cries an awful lot for a 4 year old. I was greatly comforted by googling “4.5 yr old tantrum” and rereading Louisa Ames Bates “Your 4 Year Old – Wild and Wonderful”.

I have noticed him lately making an active effort to say how he feels instead of freaking out. Although, what to do when your 4 yr old says, “it’s making me really mad right now that you want me to hurry up and put my shoes on so that we can go to the grocery store”?

I’ll leave you with this harbinger of future Lego insanity:

UPDATE: i spoke too soon. Mr Pants was heinous not he walk home from school and had a tantrum and i had to carry him thrashing and crying 2 blocks home.

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