{this moment}

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.

Amanda Soule

They Arrived!

Meet Chickie, Monster, Doo, and Rocker, named by (respectively) our 5 year old daughter, our four year old son, our 21 month old, and my husband.

We are head over heels for our new friends.  They arrived in a cheeping box on Tuesday and we have been enamoured ever since.  Given our very young (and somewhat clumsy) hands, I am not as sure that they are as glad to meet us, though!

They are warming under a (very bright) heat lamp and cheeping away in my husband's basement office.  I did order a dark red light/heat bulb to replace the one we have because it seems entirely too bright.  I read that chicks may peck at each other less and sleep better with this type of light.  We will see...

Right now, we are just happy that we have four healthy new additions to our house.  I can barely contain my excitement about our adventures to come with dear Chickie, Monster, Doo and Rocker.

Ithaca: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Our family headed to Upstate New York over the weekend while the outside of our house was being stripped and prepped for painting.  We had to leave and it was a good excuse to do some more exploring of the northeast in pursuit of our dreams of owning land.  Our last trip led us to Vermont; this trip we found ourselves in Ithaca, New York.

There is something about this little college town that has captured my imagination.  It is collegiate and grungy, pastoral and urban, crunchy and conservative, and has just enough variety to hold our attention.  What a place.  What a funny, quirky, scattered, together place.  I. love. it.

We took a driving tour of the Cornell campus, hiked the waterfalls, ate at the Moosewood Cafe.  It helped me edit and expand my dreams (do we want a family cow?! should we live by a lake?).

That's the good.  Now for the bad and the ugly.   My husband got a stomach bug, it rained half of the trip, our two oldest children each had a middle of the night tantrum that awoke the rest of the family (and kept us awake) on two separate nights.  No amount of bribing or threatening  (no pool time? no Milano cookies?) could help three sleep deprived kids (and two grumpy grown-ups acting like kids) keep their cool during the day.

But we made it home, only a little worse for the wear (I wonder for how long the words "hotel" and "car trip" will give me cold sweats).  We will venture out again, although when we do I hope the poor people staying next to us in the hotel do not recognize us.