snack time with chickies!

our chickies are not so little anymore! they are like full on teenagers, complete with feathers and the ability to fly. there they are eating watermelon with eggboy at two weeks old, and the photos with the cucumber were taken just last week, when they were a little over a month old. can you believe how quickly they've grown?! remember when they had just hatched??

here are some things that happened in month one:

-they took lots of little dirt baths

-they ate watermelon, cucumber, pulp from our juicer, and bugs

-we discovered that the free straight run exotic chick that came with our flock might actually be a rooster

-they got to meet mum (their grandma!) who said, on a very hot day, what happens when it gets too hot? do we get chicken nuggets?

-they accidentally got into rat poison that we didn't know was left in our garage from when egggrandma lived here and we freaked out completely and went to the vet who gave us little vitamin k shots to give to all of them and they're all ok now but it was scary.

-eggboy spent a lot of time and got very sweaty converting the old playhouse in our backyard into their coop

-one of them got a little wound so we tied a bandage on her leg and she spent the day inside with me. we split a cucumber. she's ok now.

being a chicken mama is hard work! but it's so worth it just to watch all of them waddle and run around and cuddle with each other and cock their heads all adorably to the side. it's so freaky to watch them grow so quickly and i thought that once they got past their newly hatched ball-of-fluff stage they wouldn't be as cute, but oh man, they're still so cute. they are feathery balls of glee that make me so darn happy i could spit. 

-yeh!

---

thank you so much to the american egg board for sponsoring this post!!! being a chicken mama has helped me gain a whole new appreciation for the farmers who are a part of this board. eggboy and i are seeing first hand how important it is to make sure our chickies get enough light, safe housing, and nutrients, and i can't even imagine what it would be like to have to care for tons more hens like the farmers on the egg board do. did you know that 208 million eggs are laid each day in america and most of those eggs are laid between 7am and 11am?? i can't wait to have a freshly laid omelette from my hens once they start laying :) to find out more about where eggs come from, check out incredibleegg.org!

meet our chickies!!!!!

ok, i get it. i get why all of you like posting pictures of your pets and offspring. i get it. you were right. it's all i want to do. 

because ohmygahhh i'm a chicken mama!!!!!!!!!!

these little ladies are the greatest. they were hatched just about a week ago and already they've grown so much! they're so fluffy and goofy. all day long they peck and waddle and scoop up water with their little beaks. and the poop! they poop so much.

at night they all pile on top of each other and sleep in a little mountain of chick, it is so cute i could cry. 

all of their names are macaroni for now. once we can tell all 15 of them apart, we'll give them grownup lady names, like curer bell and robert galbraith. 

hehe.

ok it's been a whole five minutes since i last checked on them, so i'm going to go do that.

bye!

-yeh!

a little tractor adventure

well, it was a big tractor, but a little adventure.

the tractor needed a new part, so eggboy had to drive it to the fix-it man.

junior cat was not allowed to come.

but i was! here is the view from the buddy seat as we drove down the highway and stopped traffic. tractors don't go very fast! eggboy was focused on not hitting any bunnies but he still smiled for my rearview mirror picture. what a guy.

(no cars ahead of us, they are all stuck behind us.)

we even drove across the bridge to north dakota.

past my favorite sign... 

and my other favorite sign... (look, the grain mill in the background!)

and then we arrived at the tractor fix-it place on the edge of town, where a row of combines welcomed us with glee.

eggdad picked us up in his pickup and gave us popcorn because you can get free popcorn at a lot of the farm shops in town. it was salty and tasty and perfect with eggboy's hat sweat. 

the end!

-yeh!

wedding photos

last weekend i came home to a full bottle of our wedding champagne sitting on the counter and it was covered in dirt. it had been hiding in a bush since our wedding and eggdad had just dug it out as if it were some three-month long super awesome afikoman. yeah, go eggdad! i wonder what other kind of surprises we'll find leftover from the wedding. a stash of sprinkles? a stray bouquet? a small sriracha chicken pie?

the champagne on our counter was a reminder that it had been almost an entire two days since i went through our wedding photos, and i decided that i should probably do it again, with ice cream and chocolate tahini. i thought i'd be able to condense them down to fit into one post, but i could probably do an entire post on conga line photos alone, so for this one, i'm focusing on our group photos and the ceremony. 

our ceremony was short and to-the-point. we chose music that we loved, had one hell of an officiant (brother-in-law john!), and decided to sign our contract during the ceremony so that by the time that we smooched and mazel tov-ed, it was all official. 

here are some fun details, if you like wedding-y things and stuff:

dress // here it is! i got it at the wedding shoppe in st. paul.

eggboy outfit // "it's a wooly thing from nordstrom," is all that eggboy remembers. i got him a tie at macy's. he bought his shoes a long time ago at a market in china. 

rings // they came from sunday owl, an etsy shop that's owned by the sweetest human ever.

jewelry // all vintage, from mum and grandma. the crab brooch was given to my grandma by her mom when she moved here from china!

bridesmaids' dresses // i told them our wedding colors were chocolate, crumb cookie, and rosemary, and that they should find something that vaguely matched those and sparklies are a plus. they rolled in looking like the snazzy beautiful badasses that they are. and shoutouts to eggsister for securing those fur shawls from a costume department.

ceremony venue // the ceremony took place in what we call "the old shop." it's the oldest building on our farm and until the wedding, it was used for storage. and soon it will be used for my cake house. we hung a zillion feet of garland, lit some candles, and let the natural light shine through the windows.

ceremony music // i walked down the aisle to the fugue from bach's c major partita, played brilliantly by our very good friend sam. (i don't think i'll ever again be able to listen to that without tearing up.) pops whipped out his clarinet for the processional, an arrangement of the second minuet from mozart's gran partita. i truly could not have asked for more. 

officiant // brother-in-law john got ordained on the internet and made everyone in the room cry, it was perfect. he even wore fur because i told him to look game of thrones chic.

flower girl // sister mia was not our flower girl, but our rosemary girl! i made her a felt crown because it's not a hipster wedding without a felt crown.

blankets // mum and i picked out blankets and leather labels and then eggmum sewed em all on. it was our peace offering to those guests who had flown to north dakota from california and other warmer places during the dead of winter.

huppa // eggboy made it using trees from our yard!

signs // eggsister painted them using wood from around the farm.

flowers // ok, we had the prettiest wildflowers in our garden last summer and we thought and thought about how we could build a greenhouse to grow flowers for our wedding and then make our bouquets. sometime between the fifth and sixth time that we "decided to elope," i stopped into all seasons to order some bouquets. my bouquet got some extra love when stoop gave me a piece of lace from her wedding dress to pin onto it.

boutonnieres // my bridesmaids made them with rosemary and burlap! and eggboy's got a snipping of our succulent. 

sprinkles // we handed out packets of rainbow sprinkles for guests to throw at us after we smooched, because why throw rice when you could throw sprinkles?????

-yeh!

---

all photos by chantell ziegler!