Trying to be Healthier

I'm trying something new today. I just put all the stuff in the pot for chicken stock. It now has to simmer for several hours, but the house already smells all warm and homey. I've never made my own stock before, but since we've started raising our own chickens, I feel like I should use them all up. It's partly the time and money investment, I suppose. It's also partly in our efforts to eat healthier. I've pretty much always just used bouillon cubes when I have had recipes that call for stock. But in the effort to help our family eat healthier, I've been trying to use less processed foods, and I guess those are as processed as you can get. Chicken broth isn't square!

So far, having our own chickens hasn't saved us a bit of money. We have fed them for seven months and have probably had about 2 dozen eggs off them and two chicken dinners. But we like knowing that we are eating healthy foods that have been ethically raised. My daughter loves going and collecting eggs. Actually we all do, but considering we only get two a day, it's whoever manages to visit the coop at the right time and most often, it's her!

We're doing a few other things to try to eat healthier. We planted some fruits trees at the end of last year. We've got a bunch of strawberry, blackberry and raspberry bushes ordered for the spring. My husband has been poring over the vegetable gardening books so we can make a second (and hopefully more productive) attempt at a garden this year. We need to cut WAY back on fast food--that's a big thing we have fallen under the convenience of. We don't buy soda for the house anymore. I've been trying to make more things from scratch and rely less on premade/prepackaged things.

So what have you done or do you plan to do to make your family healthier this year? I love reading about what other people are doing because it just gives me more ideas.

First Post of the Year

Should I spend my first post of the year complaining? Yes, I think I will...

I've got two sick kids for the new year (not to mention myself.) Finn only has a "fluffy" nose, and it doesn't seem to be slowing him down. Holly, on the other hand, seemed to wake up with the same thing Finn had, but she's either got something else or is just taking it much worse. She's been throwing up so much I feel like I'm getting buried in laundry. I even feel like I cheated today and popped her into disposable diapers since I didn't feel like keeping up with laundry on the diapers, too. She had me up for an hour in the night just holding her in the living room and trying to get her to sleep. I had a feeling she might be sick during the night, so I had lined the bed with a blanket so I didn't have to do sheets during the night. Turned out to be a good precaution. We took her to the doctor's this morning and she had a fever of 102.7. She felt cooler than she had during the night, but I hadn't taken her temp during the night. They did a strep test which came back clear and they wanted a urine test to see if she had a UTI, but we never managed to collect any urine. They stuck this funky thing in her diaper which closed up and didn't catch anything. They sent us home after we were there 2.5 hours. But we were supposed to bring back pee. Since the plastic catch thingy didn't work, I thought I'd just hold her on my lap without a diaper and catch some in the little sample cup they gave us. But it took so long, I wasn't paying attention and only wound up with a wet lap. I put in a call to the doctor's office to tell them I wasn't having any luck getting it, but I only got voice-mail and nobody called back until after the office was closed. They suggested I put some cotton balls in her diaper and wring them out into the cup. But since an antibiotic had already been called into the pharmacy, I wondered what the point of taking a urine sample in Monday would be, but she said to go ahead and do it. Frustrating...

Anyhow, at the moment, Holly is actually playing on the floor for the first time all day, I think. She had some baby Motrin and pretty good nap and wasn't so screamy when she woke up. Thank goodness. Out of my three kids, this girl has been the fussy one anyhow-even on a good day. Catch her when she is sick and she makes people want to remain childless! She actually tried to pry the nurse's fingers off this little instrument they wanted to measure her pulse with screaming madly all the while. They wound up giving up. She's only ten months old, where does this temper come from?

Okay, that's off my chest. I do have something less whiney. It's something I have been wanting for a while--we bought two rabbit cages the other night. I don't want to offend or gross anyone out, but these are going to be meat rabbits (ie. their offspring will be gracing our dinner table.) My hubby had this three-step plan for getting rabbits. First was that we had to taste rabbit and make sure we liked it. Fair enough--who wants to bother raising them if we won't eat them? So I found a place to order some rabbit meat online and had it shipped to us. We barbecued it and everyone in the family liked it. Step two was that he said we needed to get a rabbit and make sure we could go through with the deed. That's sort of where the plan hung up because I didn't actually know anyone with meat rabbits and I had this mental block about buying a rabbit from the store to do. But then, a couple weeks back, we sent our first roosters to freezer camp. My hubby had promised to dispatch if I would butcher. Let's just say it didn't go off quite as planned, and my husband wound up promising to build whatever else I wanted around here for animals. And I guess he was serious because when we saw some cages the other night that were a good price, he said to get them and I didn't even have to ask. We still need a couple more cages and to set up a spot to put them, but it's a start and now we can work on step three--getting rabbits!

Good grief...this post seems to have taken on book-like proportions. Well, if you managed to slog through this all, thanks for reading!

Green eggs and ...

Well, we don't have any ham, but we do have green eggs! Actually, we had a green egg very briefly...

School was on a two hour delay this morning for snow which allowed my daughter time to run up to the chicken coop to check for eggs. This is her new daily dose of excitement here in the country! I was feeding the goats and heard her start yelling for me. It's so slippery up by the chicken coop that I thought she must have fallen and needed help. But no, she was shouting at finding two eggs in the coop and her extreme delight was in finding one of them was green. Now I had hoped for green eggs when we got chickens, but since we got them free from a friend, I figured we would just take what we were given and maybe later pick up some green egg layers. And then when we got brown eggs earlier this week, I figured we would get all brown eggs. I mean all of our hens look just alike and they were all hatched out by the same mother. Go figure, I don't understand it. I'll be posting about this later on BackYard Chickens hoping somebody there will be able to educate me a little on green eggs. (Does Dr. Seuss post there?) So yes, I was excited to see a green egg, but I restrained myself (with effort) from the enthusiastic whoops issuing forth from my oldest offspring.

Where is the green egg now? In Ivy's stomach. That's right, she ate it and declared it delicious and much better than store bought eggs. She immediately wanted to wash it down with goat milk, but the only goat milk we have is in the freezer--leftover from bottle-feeding our babies when we got them. So she didn't get goat milk this morning. Kids...gotta love them.

Now I promise not to turn this into the daily egg chronicles, but it's just so darn exciting to finally get those chickens producing! I do have a story about Green Eggs and Ham if anyone is interested. My mom will just love me for sharing this with everyone.

When I was little, my favorite book was Green Eggs and Ham. I would check it out from the library whenever I could, but it was never available at the book store. Extremely popular and hard to find, I assumed in my small child mind. Years later do I get the whole story. My uncle who was ten years younger than my mom had the same favorite book. She had to read it to him repeatedly until she couldn't stand the book. You see where this is going? Next generation loves said book again, Mom can't stomach another round of Green Eggs and Ham, so it is "sold out" every time we would look for it. I'll leave you to pass your own judgments! Now to redeem herself, she did buy it for my kids, but notice that it wasn't one of the books she kept at her house. She sent it to our house--even for grandkids she couldn't take it! She used the excuse that she finally had bought it for me (in a vain hope that I would quit telling stories about my deprived childhood.)

Well, that was a long post. I've got to get ready now--I'm going to Joann's today! It just keeps getting better and better doesn't it. Green Eggs and Joann's! I succumbed and bought another Bit of Whimsy pattern last night. How could I not? She had an offer that you can have the purchase price of the pattern refunded if you stitch up two bears for a children's charity. So I get to support a nice cause and get a pattern that is adorable.

Sunny-side up!

Lookie lookie what we got!!!

Our first egg! We've been waiting since June on this and starting to think it would never happen. But Monday afternoon when I took food up to the chickens, there it was...A little brown egg laying all by itself in the nest box. And then again yesterday afternoon, another sweet little egg waiting to be collected. I saved the first egg to show Paul when he gets home, but this morning I fried that second one up and devoured it myself! One egg a day isn't going to quite cut it for this household, though. So hopefully that little hen will have a talk with the other gals up there and we can start collecting a couple more. We wound up with 4 hens out of 10 chicks, but we'll be putting the extra roosters to use soon hopefully.