Friday bullets, April 27, 2018

It's been a good week. Warm weather, sun, playing outside... ahhhhh.

• We realized Q.'s birthday was last Wednesday. She is now a year old. We were a little worried about our little quail for a few days this week. She wasn't acting like herself, and was limping a bit. I am relieved to say that she seems much better in the past two days. She is moving better and chirping more. She even started to bark with the dogs this afternoon. I wonder a little bit if she was oppressed by chickens, too.
• P. and TM have decided to learn Esperanto, so they can have a secret language. For those who don't know, Esperanto is a completely fabricated language which is totally regular. There are none of those pesky exceptions to the rules which so plague English. P. will come down and share little bits of random Esperanto trivia with me now. I can now say 'fork' in Esperanto, though I'm not quite sure about the usefulness of this particular piece of knowledge.
• D. is working diligently on learning French, and I'm pretty impressed with the amount of vocabulary he has learned already. This, I can help with. 
• I really, really love our new family practice that I found for our primary care doctors. I love finding a nurse practitioner whom I don't have to educate about trauma.
• The midweek programs with our church that K., G., L., and Y. were doing ended this week. Y. was a memorizing machine and earned every prize they offered.
• Our little street gang of ducks continues to maintain separate relations from the chickens. The ducks, unlike the chickens, do everything as a group. If one naps, they all nap. If one drinks, they all drink. They also stay in fairly close proximity to each other. The ducks like the chickens to give them a good foot of buffer, so it's as though the ducks move through the pen as if they are in a bubble. Pity the poor chicken who accidentally finds herself in the middle of the ducks. That chicken will run pretty fast out of the gang's territory. The ducks also don't like it when the chickens squabble, and I've seen a duck waddle over and break up the unhappy chickens. 
• The chickens, are all very independent and busy. They each do their own thing, running here, running there, going inside the coop, exiting the coop, busy, busy, busy. They also seem to have plans for executing the poultry version of The Great Escape, as there is much digging along the edges of the pen. When we were securing the edges, we were concerned with predators not being able to get in. It didn't occur to us that the chickens might also be trying to get out. They all have to spend several weeks just inside the coop and pen, and then we can start letting them out and allow them to roam about a bit more.
• I spoke at a local MOPs group last Friday. It went well, and I think everyone enjoyed it. If you need a speaker for your church, moms, or homeschooling group, take a look at my speaker page there at the top of my blog.
• My seedlings are still alive and growing. This is a personal record for me. Next on the home improvement to-do list is to rototill a garden so I have somewhere to plant all these little plants.
• Another sign we are not in the big city anymore. Everyone now has some sort of muck or waterproof boot, with rules about where you must wear them (inside the chicken pen) and where you may most certainly not wear them (inside the house).

Enjoy your weekend!