Oh turkey day, oh turkey day, the malls are oh so busy!

Oh the great joys of turkey day! I am very blessed around this time of year as I get to spend it with my husbands family. Now I really mean this in the nicest possible way. This year we traveled to the twin cities area to eat lots of turkey and sit around with the family. We ate way to much and laughed way to hard. Thats the way thanksgiving day is supposed to be. I do wish that I could have seen my mom and dad who live in Vegas, but seeing that they went home 3 days before I won't whine to much about that.
Now spending the weekend with my in laws is always great fun. You never know whether you are going to laugh or cry. However, I will say I lucked out in the in law department, mine are alright. I don't have one of those crazy overbearing mother in laws. Now she maybe crazy, but it is a known fact in the family, and no one holds it against her. She is however a young mother and is still years away from 50 so that makes for getting along pretty easy. We both like to go shopping, and hang out. We can easily spend the weekend together with so much as one fight. That is nice. My father in law is also a pretty good guy, he only makes me cry about 2 times a year now days.
We also got to see my brother in law and sister in law. It was great because they came over and we sat down to a rousing game of poker. It is something we do at every holiday, and this year I did pretty well and kicked some butt!
Then around 12am me and hubby decided to go check out the lines at the big stores, and see if they were that bad for black friday. We were thinking about standing in line for a cheap lap top, kinda a romantic evening of hudling together on the cold concret. I couldn't think of any other way I would want to spend time with my significant other. The lines had already started, Best Buy had a line all the way around the store, with people in big tents. So there went any ideas I had in my head about my quite evening for two. It was crazy! I can't believe that people will wait in line that long for a good deal. So we gave up that bright idea for some sleep.
All in all I have a love/hate relationship with the holidays, simply put, sometimes I love them, sometimes I hate them....

Chickens!!! Oh My!

I thought since I had a few spare minutes before my test today I would post a few pictures of our beloved chickens. Cause who doesn't want to see chickens???
We came to have chickens on a whim. I made the mistake of leaving my husband and girls alone for the day. They ended up going to town and at the local L&M, picked up 35 chickens. For something to do. When I got home there they were in a rubbermaid box on my kitchen table. They stayed there for about a week. Then they were moved to our basement in a old horse trough. I think they were there for another 2-3 wks. At this time they were getting way to big for the trough, so my husband made a chicken coop for them. It is 6x6 and then they have a large fenced in area to run around in. We had a good assortment of chickens. We had 30 called cornish cross. They are fast growing meat birds. Yes, that means you butcher them. They are yellow at first then change to white. We had 5 feather footed bantes. They have feathers on their feet, very cute! These are egg laying birds. These 5 are named, Brownie, Braised, Blue, Star, and Stu. Stu however is not with us anymore. We had a freak accident where the door fell on him. It was very traumatic for my oldest daughter. So needless to say Stu has a shrine. Oh well. We also have 5 Americanas. These are a multicolored egg layers. They lay colored eggs, green and blue colored. They say that the green eggs have little cholesterol in them. We didn't really name these ones, but have also lost one due to the dog.
Even though I was not to happy with the dang chickens at first, I have grown to like them.
We did butcher in July 28 of the cornish crosses. We now have a freezer full of chicken to eat. We are getting 5-6 eggs a day. I never thought it would be so hard to use so many eggs at once.
Ok here are some pics of the chickens. The one to the right is Blue! He is a crabby rooster!


Below are some of there eggs. The larger ones are laid by the 2 cornish that we kept, the other ones are by the others.














So there are the dang ol dang ol chickens. That should explain a little more about me. LOL!

Oh my....

Well my parents are in town, they flew in from Vegas saturday. It is always an exciting time when they are in town. The last time they were here all my father did was complain about how things were done around the house. I mean, come on dad, I know I suck at housekeeping but everything? He even decided that he and my husband should get up at 8 in the morning and saw down trees. Now granted they probably did need to come down, but they have been there for 30 years. They did not need to come down that day. So needless to say we survived a very long 3 days before they left.
So before they came home this time, I made sure to set some ground rules for my dad. I know this may sound harsh, but 3 days of crying! Come on! I called him and told him that when he came this time there was to be no negative remarks, at all. Now maybe I didn't say it just like that, and he did hang up on me, but it was all good. One has to understand my father and I are very much alike. We are both hard headed, and very vocal. So this is nothing new for us. Anyways, they came home Saturday and instead of saying negative things, he decided to say nothing. He sat in his chair and dozed off and on. He spoke when spoken to and joked with the girls. But other than that, pretty much nothing. Now I am trying to figure out whether speaking or no speaking is better. Hmmm.... for some reason the no talking bothers me about as much as the negative talking. Oh well, he's my dad and he won't change for nothing. I gotta love him!

It is never ending!

So for the last week I have been dying. Well, not really, but I have walking pneumonia along with like 2 other things. It sucks. But on Friday I went to the doctor got more drugs, and headed to the cities with my girls. Daddy went hunting with Grandpa, so we decided to go hand with Grandma and Auntie.
It was really nice to get away from everything for awhile. We just hung out Friday night. Saturday we went shopping all day. Then Saturday night we all went to church with Joes(husband) grandma, and then to the great TURKEY BINGO! Good clean family fun! But this leads me to the things children say.
My little one is 6. She is very loud sometimes. So while sitting in this very formal Catholic service, a very quiet one at that, they passed the offering plate. Of course I only had a $5 so I threw it in. My 6 yr old took one look at it and said, " Take that out of there! Let's find something else, here put in this yellow paper!" And she tries to take the money out to replace it with paper. I could have died! And to try not and laugh, was so hard. Needless to say we left the money in and the yellow paper was taken away from her.
So if that wasn't enough out of her for the night, we went to play BINGO. Grandmas church has a priest that is from? Solmalia, or India. He is really great, but does have a heavy accent. So he is up talking, and Kay looks around then turns to me and says, " I don't speak Spanish, I can't understand a word he's saying!" At that moment I felt that we should just leave. I think we had enough church for one weekend!
Oh well, kids are fun! The rest of the weekend was very nice and quiet. We headed home on Monday, stopped at the cabin to see Dad and Grandpa. And headed home.
So onto home. We got here unpacked, and then I took the girls to a friends house so I could go to school. On the way to school, we passed 4 cops and a DNR truck with lights on. The first thing we(me and Jill) thought of was that someone was hurt in a hunting accident. No other thoughts of it. I dropped Jill off and went to get the kids. When I got there, the girls were getting ready to go, the phone rang. Jean got it and the person wanted to know if I had been there yet. She said I was still there. The person then proceeded to tell her, not to scare me, but someone was on the loose in my area, and was armed. Ok, scare me to death! So of course me being the curious being I am, I load my kids up and head home, with the understanding that if something didn't look right I would go back to my friends house. Well long story short, I didn't see any action around our house, so I took the kids and went in. Everything was fine.
And they caught the guy around 10:30pm. But it was scary there for awhile.
Alright enough of this. Algebra is calling...