Summer 2022

I’ll start with a couple funny things the girls have said and then try to remember some of the stories that have been happening around our house lately. Tille was trying to get me to take a picture of her posing and was coming up with bribes to entice me. She said she would serve me like a queen if I took her picture. I told her I didn’t need to be served like a queen, at which point Hattie piped in and said, ‘Yes you do, you’re old!’ One night we were having spaghetti for dinner. I made the mistake of using a spaghetti sauce that everybody liked the last time I had bought it, but this time around only I liked it. Tille asked me to take the sauce off her spaghetti and Hattie said, ‘That’s Imsaucible!’ We all had a good laugh. So punny, that one. We’ve always talked about how fun it would be to raise chickens, but we’ve never done anything about it. We always had enough going on without worrying about whatever you have to worry about when you have chickens in your backyard. But when avian flu/crazy inflation hit and eggs were suddenly $4/dozen (for the standard, white, nothing special variety), Matt brought up the idea of chickens again and I jumped on the bandwagon. We ordered a coop that week and started shopping around for chickens. All the livestock stores in our area were done selling chicks for the season by then, so we had to go online to find some. We ended up getting some from a farm in Missouri. They hatched on a Wednesday, shipped on Thursday, and got to our house on Friday. We had 5 tiny little fluffballs. One was a little dehydrated and needed some extra care (I won’t go into details, but we called her Crusty Butt for the first few days). Besides that, they’re all healthy. And now we can’t even tell who was Crusty Butt. We kept them in the basement in a brooder (basically a big circle cardboard box made specifically for chicks, with a heat lamp for a few weeks. Until one afternoon Matt went downstairs and found one of the chicks outside the brooder. They had learned to flap and hop just enough to hop on top of their feeder and then out of their brooder, but then they couldn’t get back in. We weren’t super excited about the prospect of finding chicken poop all over the basement, so that was the signal that they were ready to move outside. Now they spend their days scratching around the yard, eating bugs, and running away from little girls. Hattie and Tille love playing with them. They’ve gotten really good at catching the chickens and sometimes the chickens will even sit on their arms and be kind of calm. It’s kind of weird. It'll be a few more months before we start getting eggs, and by then we expect it to be too cold to get much production, but it’s been fun so far. It’s also fun to see the pecking order. There’s one chicken the girls have named Sweetie. She’s the biggest and her feathers came in fastest so she’s easiest to tell apart from the others. She’s the obvious alpha. The others run to her for protection, and she looks out for them. When they’re out in doing their thing and she hears us coming, she’ll run over to see what we’re doing and just watch us, like she’s standing guard between us and her sisters. On the other side though, if one of the chickens stands on a rock that she wants to be on, she’ll push them off. She’s in charge and nobody challenges her. Now some pictures A couple weeks ago we went to Roy Days and the girls got to play on some bounce houses For the first week of August I 'got' to go on a business trip to Chandler,Arizona. This picture is my hotel. There was a little canel outside and it was kind of pretty. I couldn't believe how humid it was though! Nobody ever told me Arizona was humid. It was around 103 degrees every day and about 50% humidity. Nutty! Besides that, it was 10-12 hours of meetings plus team dinners after every day. I was so glad when that trip was over. In July Matt and I went to a David Gray concert at the Sandy amphitheater. it was a lot of fun and Hattie and Tille got to have their first sleepover at Grandma and Grandpa's house. They did great! Fun weekend all around. This is what church usually looks like for us. The girls lay on our laps and demand back scratches. At least they're quiet. Here are a couple pictures of the chickens. One when they were brand new and one when they moved outside. They're much bigger now. We went to Lagoon in July. It was hot but not too crowded. We didn't have to wait more than a few minutes for any rides. I even went on the colossus and could have just stayed in my seat for the next ride; nobody was waiting to get on. But I would've been out of commission for the rest of the day so I didn't. One turn was enough for me. It was a really fun day and the girls loved it. I don't know if I included this in my last post, but here's a picture from the girls' preschool graduation. They're in the front row, towards the left. Here's a random picture of the girls dancing The library had an activity night at the beginning of summer, with animals and games Hattie and Tille like to put on Matt's suspenders and hats and act like him For youth conference we went out to the middle of nowhere a couple hours out of Heber. We took a horrible short cut that went on a dirt road that was barely big enough for one car. It was super steep and rocky. Going up, I could only see the sky in front of me; going down, I could see the whole valley that I would fall in if I hit a rock wrong or my brakes gave out or I didn't make the turn. Oh I forgot, it was really curvy. The pictures make it look long and straight and not very steep but that is very misleading. it was terrifying. Oh it was also dry, loose dirt. And I was in the back of the line. The front car stopped when he got to the top, which left me right at a bend at a very steep spot in very loose dirt in a manual transmission. He said if he'd known I was in a manual he never would've stopped there. It was horrible. And then we had to go down, up, and down again for various activities during the week. In general, youth conference was fun, but that drive was a bad idea. Oh, the best was on our way home, we got to the top of that road just as a truck was coming off it. I have no idea what you would do if you met a car on that road. Just live there I guess.