short and sweet

Not feeling very wordy today. See? That wasn't even a complete sentence. No subject at all. And that last sentence had no verb.

And in less than a month, I'll be teaching my kids grammar. Go figure!

I'm looking forward to school again this year but with some trepidation as R officially enters the Junior High years (how did little R become a Grade 7 kid?) and some gears shift. Her grammar exercises will be replaced with learning to write well and proofread her work; her straight Math lessons start leaning strongly towards Algebra, and she launches into some comparative novel studies. We're moving from facts to application, from taking in to expressing, from listening to critical thinking. No sweat, right?

Ha! Good one!

But we continue to enjoy the last month of summer vacation, especially with D at home this week (plant shutdown). He's taken each of the girls golfing with him (M and A at 9 holes each, while R lasted a whole 18). They've been walking the round with him and to see the girls doing with their dad what I so fondly recall doing with my dad just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

Let's see ... farm. The garden is lush and the tomatoes just waiting to ripen. The farmer's market has been a real success; we won't get rich off it but we're not in the red and all three of the girls are becoming adept at marketing and selling, knowing their product and chatting with the people who stop by our booth. Sometimes I laugh and realize that I can wander away and leave them in charge.

Just realized that I am, in fact, more wordy than I had thought. Well, it's nice to be surprised every now and then.

I weighed a chick the other night, much to his chagrin. Five pounds, as far as I could tell, as the scale wobbled and he squawked at me. So, given my Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens chart of live weight versus dressed weight (i.e., live chicken minus everything they remove to give you a tidy naked chicken on a styrofoam tray), that boy would give us about a three-pound roaster. Not too bad for a six-week-old chicken. We expanded the chicks' outside area to encourage them to move around more because frankly, some of them are becoming coop potatoes and making me think of the stats on childhood obesity. The new area plus some scattered feed does have them curious and scratching about. The camera I had with me got some of them pretty interested, too.

Their proportions are funny - their feet are about the same size as the hens', but their bodies are much smaller. Like puppies with big feet. They are still babyish in their peeps, though the squawking is getting more common.

Question of the day: how does one encourage a chicken to exercise? Minus 'let a fox in the run', of course.