Computer Savvy

Boy how different the generations can be. The first recollection I have of using a computer was an old Tandy (new at the time) that my father had set up near the kitchen. I was maybe 10 or 12 years old? My sister and I would fight over who got to play on it, eventually we had to use a timer and take turns. We acquired computer games to play on it and would spend hours entertaining ourselves (oh how I loved Kings Quest). Fast forward to today. My nearly three year old son can navigate around a computer with such accuracy that I'm no longer needed. I used to have to get the game running but now he just climbs on the computer and clicks his way to whatever game he wants. You see, he's found the wonders of PBSkids.org. This wonderful website is kid friendly and is full of educational interactive games for all ages (even 3 year olds). He's been doing this for about a month now and in the beginning he would ask me to get the game running and then I'd sit next to him and we'd play the game together. I'd click on the buttons that he told me to. Then about a week later he started wanting to move the mouse by himself, still needing help to click buttons and such. Then a week after that he was able to click buttons and click and drag objects. It was truly amazing to me to see such a little tiny guy pick up such accuracy so quickly. Growing up around technology, like our kids do, sure makes them savvy around it (and having Sean as your Dad doesn't hurt). :)

My Beauty

Yesterday I was in line at the grocery store and the woman behind me was making goo goo eyes at Greta who was sitting in the seat of the cart. The lady told me that Greta "was the most beautiful baby she'd seen in a very long time". And you know what? I'd have to agree (I might be slightly biased though).

The Chicken Hutch

There is good news and bad news. The good news is that the chicks are out of my house. They moved outside the beginning of the week. The bad news is that the chicken coop is still under construction so they are living in the rabbit hutch. I decided when we got back from our little trip that it was seriously time for them to leave my house....it smelled like a pet shop in here. And I'm so sick and tired of the chicken dander on everything. And I mean everything. I wiped down every flat surface in the house before we left on Friday and we returned home Sunday to a layer of dust/chicken dander on the tables. I could literally write my name in it. So I made the executive decision to make them live in the rabbit hutch. You might be wondering where the rabbit is? Well Nacho, the Holland Lop bunny, lived with us for about two months before going to live with her buddy, Pickles, over at Jessica's house. Jessica adopted Nacho and now is Nachos Mom. This was right around the time I gave birth and needed another animal around here about as much as I needed a kick in the head. Anyways, I've seemed to have veered off course, the chickens are loving their new house. Their new outside house. To be totally fair, they didn't want to be in my house anymore than I wanted them in my house. They are chickens after all. Animals that thrive on scratching the earth, taking dirt baths and pecking at grass and bugs. Animals that need to be out of doors.

So now every morning I wake up and go take them from the chicken hutch out to their little dog kennel that is on the grass (it's a dog crate with the bottom tray removed). They stay out there all day doing what chickens do and then go back at night to keep them safe from everything that wants to eat them. It works for now but they are quickly out growing the rabbit hutch.


Sean is making progress on the coop. Last week he took a few days off of work and started the outside run for the chickens. This is attached to the back of the shop and he'll cut a small chicken sized opening into the shop leading into their chicken house. This outside run will be the chicken equivelent to Fort Knox. I asked him to dig down and put at least one 2X6 into the ground to discourage digging predators. It will also have a top on it to keep animals from getting in that way. It's sure coming along.

Kansas City Trip Part 2

On Sunday we ventured to the Kansas City Zoo to fight the masses of people and heat to see wild animals. I've never been to the KC zoo and was impressed with the sheer vastness of it. It's a huge zoo with so much to see you can't even begin to see it all in one outing. We were there for three hours and maybe saw a quarter of it. We were there bright and early a little after they opened and left around lunch time when the heat became unbearable. Wesley enjoyed himself, although he was being pulled around in the wagon almost the entire time. I'm not entirely sure how much he actually got out of the zoo.



The tram ride was a hit. I enjoy sitting and letting someone pull me around to see the sights.



My parents on the suspension bridge, it sure got swaying pretty good (thanks to my father)..:).

Back at home, my Dad entertaining the babies.

Greta and Emery enjoying breakfast out on Father's Day. The kids did really well this trip, I was impressed. They might actually be nearing the age I can take them into restaurants without being utterly embarrassed. Yea right.


Wesley with a mischievous look on his face. He does love spraying stuff.

Kansas City Trip Part 1

Father's Day weekend last year we decided to start a tradition as a family to get together somewhere with my parents and my sister. Last year we went exploring several locations in Oklahoma and this year we decided to visit Kansas City and see all it had to offer. My sister lives in KC so it was convenient to have a tour guide that knew where to go. We decided to see a childrens farm called Deanna Rose and then the next day we went to the Kansas City Zoo (that will be tomorrows blog post, part 2....way too many pictures for one post).


With Wesley turning three next month we thought the childrens farm would be enjoyable for him, and it was! They had a dairy exhibit where he got to milk a cow (a plastic one that produced water).



He got to ride some cute little tractors. He hasn't quite figured out how to pedal yet, but he's starting to show an interest in learning.



Betsy, Blake and Emery joined us in the fun. Emery is super adorable and getting big fast, he already out weighs Greta!





The very best part of the farm was that in the middle of it they had a stocked pond and for three dollars you can rent a little cane pole and a little bucket of worms. Then you just dip the baited hook into the water and there are fish biting instantly. We pulled two perch out in about four minutes. Really cool experience for little kids with no attention spans. He really liked it.



The other part that was a hit was a little splash area with shallow water flowing down it. It took a little while to coax Wesley into it as he still has some strange phobia with water (doesn't like to get sprayed or go swimming). But once he got in we had to drag him out.



We were there for about two hours before some strong storms moved in and drove us out but it was super fun and we'll be sure to visit next time we visit...Greta will enjoy it when she gets older.





Hope everyone had a great Father's Day weekend! Happy belated Father's Day to all you wonderful dads out there!

Month Nine

Our little girl turned nine months old today. I love babies around this age. They are trying new things and starting to "talk" more. Their little personalities are really starting to emerge. Greta has started saying Mama constantly and I just love it. It makes me smile. I feel like I've made it through the crazy early months and am finally getting into the fun months. Phew, they were a rough eight months.

At nine months:

Greta is still waking up 1-2 times a night. Nursing gets her back to sleep quickly and I'd rather do that than hear her scream it out. That will probably change at some point.

She's starting to venture out of the baby food stage and is trying chunkier food and little chunks of fruits that she can pick up and smash into her mouth. Mealtime is starting to become a fun time for her (and us since she's not screaming).

She's also getting past her "only loves mama" phase. She'll let her Dad hold her while I leave the room without a total melt down. We are playing with the notion of leaving her and Wesley with my parents for a much needed night out. We so need a night out without the kids.

Going.....

....going.....

.....gone.

Confessions of a Farmville Addict

Yep, you read that title correctly. For the past month or so I've been rather obsessed with a certain Facebook game called Farmville. I am SO not the kind of person to become obsessed with a computer game, little own a cheesy farming game with a moving avatar and comical cows. It's slightly embarrassing to even admit this. But I am.

This is all Jessica's fault. She needed a farming neighbor so one day when she was over at my house she set up a quick farm for me so that I could become her neighbor. That was all it took, I started harvesting crops every 12 hours and moving up the levels of the game. If you're not familiar with the game, you have a plot of land and can plant certain crops. Some crops are four hour crops, some are four day crops and then there is everything in between. You come back when they are ready to harvest and by doing so are able to get a bigger farm and buy buildings such as barns and houses along with animals. It's really quite fun and addicting. It's a nice way to relax after the kids have gone to bed.

The funny thing is, is that the game is creeping into my real life. I harvested crop after crop of tomatillos one week and was always curious what a tomatillo was. When I was buying plants at the store last week I ran across some tomatillo plants and had to buy them and add them to the garden just to see what they produce.

As if all of this wasn't sad enough I've saved up my coins and finally purchased myself a dog for my farm. Every day for 14 days I have to come feed my dog at the same time every day or he'll run away. After 14 days he's mine (all mine) and will stay on my farm and run around. I have six days left to feed him and naturally we'll be out of town this weekend, possibly away from a computer. So I will be asking my trusty friend Jessica (who got me into this whole mess, so she owes me) to come feed all of my real animals along with my virtual Farmville dog. (smacking head against the desk) What has my life come down to?

Beheading Meal Worms

Variety is the spice of life, or so they say. I was thinking about the baby chickens and how they have to eat that boring old chick food all day long, they've got to be getting pretty sick of it. So I got online and found a very informative chicken forum (yes, there are forums devoted purely to raising chickens...who knew). There was a thread on the forum about snacks you can give chicks. Bingo, I thought! The three biggest treats that people recommended were: hard boiled egg, crickets and meal worms. Yea, the hard boiled egg kind of caught me off guard...isn't that sort of cannibalistic? Oh well, it was worth a try. But first I tried the crickets and meal worms. Sean works directly across the street from one of the major chain pet stores so I asked him nicely if he could go get some for me. He went in there expecting to just pick up a box of crickets and a tub of meal worms. Turns out they sold the crickets per cricket. Did you all know this? Ten cents a cricket, you just tell them how many you want and they bag em up. So he got 25, that seemed like enough. He got home and we dumped all of the crickets in there at once. At first the chicks didn't have a clue as to what to do. That is until one pecked one and got it in it's mouth. Then they all proceeded to run after this poor chick who was peeping madly and trying to keep it's prize all to itself. Then all it took was about 8 seconds for the rest of the crickets to get gobbled down. It was cool.

Then came the meal worms. Meal worms come in a little plastic tub in a refridgerated case in the pet stores. They are nasty little worms. The worst part about feeding meal worms to chicks is that I read you're supposed to cut off their little heads before prior to feeding them. Something about the worms being able to latch on to the chicks stomachs? I'm not real sure, but it was enough to scare me into getting a knife and cutting board out and beheading a pile of worms. Let's just say it's not something I plan to do again. Yuckers. It was a lot of work and the chicks didn't even really care about the worms.

Now, last was the hard boiled egg. Oh. My. Gosh. These chicks absolutely FREAK OUT over hard boiled eggs. I boil up five or six eggs a week and give them one almost every day. I just crumble it up on a dish and put it in their brooder. It takes about five seconds and a lot of bocking and the egg is history. It's so much fun to watch I added a short video.

New Name!

When I started this blog almost three years ago it was called "Mister Wesley's World". It was all about my life with a newborn baby boy. Then nine months ago it became "Mister Wesley and Miss Greta's World" with the birth of baby Greta. Lately I've been thinking it needed to change names again. This blog is diary of our lives, our lives as a family. I wanted a name that encased our household, not just the kids.

me·nag·er·ie:
1. A diverse or miscellaneous group.

For now I'm just changing the main title bar, not the actual web address. I might get around to that at some point. We'll see.

Firsts

This weekend was a weekend of firsts. We discovered that Miss Greta has her first tooth coming in. The spoon scraped something during dinner and sure enough she has a little tiny tooth popping through. Yeah Greta! She's going to need that tooth now that she's started feeding herself. I just spread little things like Cheerios and diced banana on her high chair tray and she goes to town getting it all in her mouth. It's made mealtimes much more enjoyable since I can now feed myself instead of the baby.

Another first: we have vegetables in the garden ready to eat! We were outside poking around the garden when I looked at the massive zucchini plants only to discover some ready to pluck. It was silly how excited I was to see them there. I gave them to Wesley to bring inside and he immediately asked if he could eat them. I told him we'd eat them for dinner. And eat them we did, I drizzled them with olive oil and salt and pepper and sauteed them up. They were so good. There were so many little tiny ones out there that I'm going to be swimming in zucchini. It's going to be a zucchini bread summer! Mmmmm.....zucchini bread.....drool.



The garden is getting big!


So is the little boy in the garden!


Wesley loves going through my box of seeds out in the shop. They are just left overs from the garden so I don't mind if he plays with them. He asked if he could plant them so I took a tray and filled it with compost and dirt and made little rows for him. He took the seeds and did the rest with a little instruction from me. That was a week ago and now he's got this cool little garden that he waters every day. Sometimes throughout the day I'll look over at him and he'll be crouched down in front of it just looking at it. He seems fascinated with growing things, that makes me happy. He planted sunflowers, beans, okra and cilantro. We'll transplant it all out of his tray soon.

Conversations with a three year old.

Wesley: "When Daddy gets home he'll play with me!" (Daddy is the parent that rough houses with him, you know....throws him in the air, turns him upside down and tickles him...etc.)

Me: "Yup, when Daddy gets home he'll play with you."

Wesley: "When Daddy gets home he'll PLAY with me!!!"

Me: "You got it."

Wesley: "But Daddy isn't home, he's at work. You're home."

....long pause.....

Wesley: "You're a monster."


Ahhh it just makes me feel all fuzzy and warm inside when my kid says stuff like this. Can you tell my little boy is in the "loves only Daddy" phase? I'm just the monster that makes him eat his veggies and wash his hands. Fun times!

Favorite Pictures

Here a few cute pictures from the last week. They sure love their wagon ride every day. Wesley is still my little trash collector. He's now upgraded to pointing out trash everywhere, not just our stretch of road....while he's riding in the car, while we're walking into stores. The down side is now he'll actually go pick it up and bring it to me where ever we happen to be. He did this with a cigarette butt the other day. Yuck!




One evening we enlisted Wesley's help with netting out the june bugs that accumulated in the horse tank. Well, now he does it all the time. He'll go in the shop and get his laundry basket and climb up there with his butterfly net to scoop out any poor bugs that find their way in there.



Greta has found that sucking out of a straw is great fun. I'll give her water in a cup and she'll suck it dry if given the opportunity. I really feel that weaning her directly from breast to a straw cup will go fairly easy. Here's hoping we don't even need the bottle stage.

Cherry Picking

The week before last the kids and I were over feeding my parents cats, since they were out of town, when we noticed the sheer amount of ripe cherries hanging off of their cherry trees. Not wanting them to go to waste, we called up my parents and asked if we could pick some of the ripe ones to make a pie or jam with. They said sure so we went over with bowls and went to town.

One of the trees was Wesley sized and he had a ball standing there with his little bowl picking cherries. I think more went in his mouth than in the bowl. It was cute. He really had fun, more so than I that he would. That was more than a week ago and he still tells us every night before he goes to bed "that was sure fun picking cherries!".

We got three bowls full and made one big pie and maybe enough frozen for another. Thanks Mom and Dad for sharing some with us!

Weekend

This is kind of an ADHD blog entry. A little of this, a little of that.
The chickens are getting big! I borrowed a cage from Jessica's Mom and put them outside all weekend during the day so they can get some fresh air and sunshine. I've decided their days in my house are limited. There is a fine layer of dust/dander that is forming on every surface, I find myself wiping down everything daily. They gotta go! I don't think chickens are meant to live in the house much past the cute, adorable fluffy chick stage. These gals are outta that stage!



So with that being said, Sean worked all weekend on the chicken house (bless him) and it's coming along wonderfully. He's doing a smashing job on it and it's exactly what I was hoping for. These gals will be living in style. The framing was done last weekend and this weekend he got the siding up. Next weekend is the door construction and adding the window screen and a thick coat of paint over everything. We kid that the first egg is now going to cost us around $350. :)



The garden is doing really well. I'm surprised and pleased. I feel drawn to it when I'm outside. I tend to walk back there and look at it several times a day. I'm usually wearing Greta and she and I pick a few weeds every time we visit. Things I don't really know: how will I know when carrots are ready to eat? Why do some of the corn stalks fall over? What am I going to do with all the squash??! I found some already started cantaloupe, water melon and acorn squash plants at Wally World so I added them this weekend so fill in some empty spots. I'm really having fun with the garden and am sad I didn't start one before this year.

He didn't need that ear anyways.

When I have a rather awful day (like today) all I have to do is look at this video and I just smile. These two little people are the light of my life. It is wonderful to watch them finally start to really interact with each other.

Inner Monkey

Yesterday morning I had just sat down at the computer with my breakfast when I heard a "THUD" followed by Wesley's door opening and his little voice saying "Is anyone down there?!"

This might not seem like anything special, but it is. Yesterday was the first time Wesley has ever climbed out of his crib. In almost three years of sleeping in his crib this was the first time he's brought out his inner monkey and climbed out of it. I was so proud. I actually gave him a high five. Seriously.

His toddler bed has been parked up in his room ever since I found it at a garage sale back in April but he's not been interested in sleeping in it. He LOVES his crib. I told myself that he'd move into his toddler bed by his third birthday or when he started climbing out of his crib. Whatever came first.

So last night he ventured into the world of the "Big Boys" and slept in his toddler bed. I was expecting problems, you know the constant waking and getting out of his bed. Exploring his new cribless freedom. Well he didn't wake up once, slept the whole night without getting out even once. In fact in the morning I heard him awake up there so I snuck up there and peered into his room to find him sitting on his bed playing with his toys. He did so well, we're so proud of him. It's nice to now be a one crib family.