Terrific twos, tremendous twos, talented twos, tiny twos….anything but terrible twos!!! Our Peanut is now TWO-Years-Old!!!!

Generally, people use the term terrible twos to describe the stage in which toddlers begin to assert their independence and develop skills at a rapid speed – no longer a baby, not quite a kid yet! I hate to admit that with our older three children, this was my least favorite stage – I wasted those years being frustrated and discouraged – wishing I could fast forward to an age where there was better two-way communication! 🙂 What I wouldn’t give for a do-over to revisit and appreciate Sissy’s, Potato Boy’s, and Lulu’s “terrific twos”. Since there is no going back, I will never again refer to this stage as the terrible twos! We are so grateful for each and every time one of us has to chase Peanut down from running or climbing here and there…or see her morph into a screaming, kicking little ball of energy. I’d rather have a million days that challenge our patience, than not have her here at all. She mimics just about anything she sees or hears these days….which can be very entertaining, but it also keeps us all in check with our language/behavior!

Nowadays, Peanut is in the 24th percentile for weight, and 31st percentile for height on the growth chart – these are measurement for her REAL age, not adjusted/preemie age!!! She is on NO medications – aside from over the counter Imodium, and a few vitamin/mineral supplements. Her liver function levels remain normal! She EATS like crazy: limited simple sugars, lots of fiber, veggies, protein, and of course – she is still on the green bean/Pediasure Peptide shakes for extra calories and fiber. Her stools have thickened up and her frequency of stools is at an all time low – average of 5 stools a day. This is a HUGE improvement from 6 months ago (following her reconnection surgery). As you can imagine her “hiney” is no longer raw and sore. She is running, jumping, climbing, and TALKING A LOT – she can even say her ABC’s with a little prompting! Up next – potty training! So far, this is the extent of her interest….

We celebrated Peanut’s birthday last weekend with our amazing families and some special guests who have been there with Peanut through every step of these past two years! I love looking back at previous posts and seeing how much she has overcome – in case you need a reminder, here’s a link to last year’s re-cap!

Here are a few party pics, as well as some pics from throughout the past year:

I hinted last week that one of the items on the to-do-list pushed itself to the top of the list. It started while I was at work on Friday afternoon and got a call from the DW. She thought she blew the fuse to the microwave and wanted to know where to find the new fuses and which one in the box would need to be replaced. The call ended with her agreeing to wait for me to get home in a couple hours to look things over and switch out the fuse. That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. A little while later, the DW called back. She hadn’t touched the fuse, but the power was now back to the microwave – but, it didn’t run at full power. Additionally, some of the other outlets weren’t working right and lights were dimmer in some of the rooms.

We knew moving in that the fuse box was a bit of a mess. It’s actually a series of fuse boxes – instead of replacing the original box as the need for electricity grew in the house, a series of sub-boxes were added over time. Like I said; a bit of a mess, and more than what I wanted to dig into on my own. So after hunting for a loose neutral wire with my brother (the electrician) for several hours, he finally pegged the problem to somewhere inside one of the old fuse boxes.

Instead of adding another Band-Aid to an already pieced together system, I threw the contents of the refrigerator into a couple of coolers, plugged the deep freezer into a portable generator,and shut the power off to the house. The next morning, I woke up early on a shopping mission for everything we’d need to replace the old fuse box with a new breaker box. And by “we” I mean “my brother” while I assisted. There aren’t many home improvement projects I can’t handle, but I’m smart enough to know when I’m in over my head. Completely replacing the box in a couple hours was better left to someone that does that kind of work on a daily basis.

So, by the end of the weekend the lights were back on and we had marked item number 5 off of our 2014 Home Improvement Goals List. By adding the new breaker panel, we were able to remove the old main fuse panel and three sub-panels. It’s not everyday where an unexpected failure is actually what you were planning on replacing anyway.

I say it every year: black raspberry season is my favorite fruit season of the year. Now that we have our own plants established, I no longer have to trek through timber and brush fending of sparrow sized mosquitoes with one hand and carefully dodging the thorns of multi-flower rose bushes with the other while hunting for wild black raspberries – that is, unless I want to find just a few more.

In addition to the black raspberries this year, we’re also getting our first taste of something a little different – yellow raspberries. We landed two bare-root yellow raspberry plants as a gift from a mail-order nursery last year. They spent most of the year just putting down roots, so this is the first taste of the yellow berries we’ve had.

Our plants are the “Anne” variety of yellow raspberries that were developed from a strain of red raspberries. The color is caused by a missing pigmentation gene that would cause the berries to appear red. So, as you might imagine, the berries taste similar to a traditional red raspberry, though they are slightly larger and sweeter. Yellow raspberries are softer than red raspberries and don’t ship well, so don’t expect to find them in the grocery store.

Now that the plants are established, I’ll prune them the same as our red raspberries and we’ll only have one heavy crop of yellow berries in the fall. Since the kiddos typically manage to eat most of the red raspberries as soon as they ripen, I’m hoping these may find their way into a few jars of jelly or pie filling… a yellow raspberry pie – that should create a conversation over dessert.

Back in January, the DW and I set a goal of six projects we wanted to finish this year. Number six on the list was to remove the old Basswood trees in front of the house and replace them with new trees. We finished half the project in May when we cut down the old trees. That only left planting the new trees.

We decided to go with five new trees spaced evenly over about 150 feet of road frontage. There is one tree at each corner of the front of the house that will eventually provide shade from the afternoon sun while the other three will add some shade to the yard.

In order to save on cost, we went with three to four foot bare root trees from the Arbor Day Foundation. The trees are shipped dormant with no dirt around the roots, so it looks like nothing more than a bundle of sticks when you open the shipping box. No, they’re not as impressive as a six foot potted tree full of leaves from a nursery, but I’ll wager in a couple years no one will guess how they started out anyway.

The hardest part of the process for us was deciding on what type of tree to go with. We wanted something that wouldn’t lose a bunch of limbs every time the wind blows, would provide fall color, and get to be fairly big. We ended up going with Northern Red Oaks. They won’t grow as fast as a soft maple, but they should make a sturdy tree and, from what we’ve been told, grow fairly quickly compared to most oaks. As far as what that actually means – ask me in 20 years and I’ll have an answer. In the meantime, we’re down to five more home improvement projects to take off the list for this year.

Over the last few months, Lulu’s attention has turned to birds. The bright red Cardinals caught her attention this winter and she watched the early Robins hunt in the lawn from the living room window this spring. Since then she’s spotted Goldfinch, Red-winged Blackbirds, Orioles, and told everyone who would listen about a couple of turkey vultures she saw while riding in the car. So, I wasn’t surprised when she recently asked me for a name of a bird she saw out the window earlier that day. She told me it was a black bird with an orange beak.

I started with a picture of a Robin, figuring she had forgotten the bird’s name…

But, I was immediately set in my place with “No, Dad! That’s a Robin. This bird was all black with an orange beak.”

OK, she remembered the Robin. I should have known better than to guess my four year old couldn’t ID a bird. Next I pulled up a picture of a Starling…

The response: “Nope. The beak is orange, not yellow. And bigger!” The girl has a thing for detail. So, a quick search for a Common Blackbird and I pulled up this…

A blackbird with an orange beak. I had to be golden, right? Nope. “Well, yeah, it’s black with an orange beak… but, this one was bigger.” Bigger? At this point we were scrolling through Google images of “black birds with orange beaks” when Lulu points to this…

“That’s It!”

Before I could tell Lulu that Toucan’s didn’t live around here, she squealed with delight ran off to tell the DW that I had found the bird she had seen earlier. Honestly, I’m not sure if I should suspect she was dreaming, or if I should be watching the newspaper for a story of an escaped Toucan roaming Eastern Iowa. For some reason, I don’t think I’d be surprised to see the latter.

So rather than trying to explain why we haven’t posted anything in the last few weeks, here’s a peek of what will be posted in the upcoming days…

Update on Peanut – she had her first check-up in over 3 months last week. How much has she gained?

Planting Trees – we cut down 3 Basswood trees earlier this year. The replacements are in the ground. What did we finally decide on?

Lights Out – sometimes projects on the “to-do-list” manage to move themselves to the top.

What’s going on in the garden?

A $5 Find on Craigslist – Either I was horribly lucky, or I would have been further ahead shredding a $5 bill.

A tell-tale sign that spring has arrived….DANDELIONS!

Here’s our solution…

Just give them a bucket and let ’em go….hours of entertainment! If all else fails…mow them off – just not in front of the kids. We had a minor meltdown when “daddy cut off the rest of my yellow flowers!”

One of the goals for this year was to get rid of the three old trees in front of the house. Late last summer a storm took half of one the trees and we realized it was in much worse shape than we originally thought – it was hollow from top to bottom. We wanted to take down all three before the wind pushed one of them onto the house. I was able to cut down the smallest on my own earlier this spring, but the larger trees were more than I was comfortable with.

So I was able to line up a man and a saw with a lot of experience and the trees were coming down early Saturday morning. Only one problem: The safest way to cut down the trees were to lay them directly across the road. Most of the time this wouldn’t be a problem. We don’t live on a busy road. (Hence the name of the site.) But, this was a prime day in a narrow window for planting corn in our area – trucks with seed corn, tractors with over-sized planters, and buggies with fertilizer would be buzzing back and forth all day. I had visions of a line of traffic suddenly appearing the moment the first tree hit the ground.

With that in mind, the goal was to drop the tree and clear the road as quickly as possible. The tree trunk was cut into the largest size the skidloader could handle and quickly cleared to the side of the road.

The skidloader made quick work of opening things back up once the tree was cut down to size.

Being well prepared, and a little bit lucky, worked to our advantage. We had both trees cut down and the road cleared in less than 30 minutes without delaying a single vehicle. Unfortunately, that was the quick part.

I would work the rest of the day cutting things down into smaller pieces. The smaller sticks went onto a fire. The larger logs and branches went onto a pile for a neighbor who will take them to heat his house this winter. By the end of the day, this is all that was left:

Oh, and of course, my work was supervised from a distance most of the day.

Now all that remains is clearing out the old stumps before fall so we can plant a few new trees in the old ones’ place. (And just in case you’re wondering… no body yelled “Timber!” at any point during the day.)

400 eggs… somebody asked me the other day how many eggs I thought we’d gotten from our five hens since they started laying around the first of February so I sat down and penciled it out. In the beginning, we’d mark on the calendar how many eggs we’d get each day so we’d have a feeling of how many hens were laying – three eggs some days, four eggs on the others. That lasted until we started having three or four consecutive days of five eggs. Now, the five hens have been laying an egg each for several weeks. So, at an average of four eggs a day since the first of February – just shy of 100 days – it comes up to 400 eggs.

What do you do with 400 eggs? Well, not all of those eggs have made it to the house. There were a few days of training for the “egg collection crew” – luckily the learning curve was quick once they realized eggs really are fragile. We also lost a few to one of the hens that’s an egg eater – not all the time, but often enough that she keeps you collecting the eggs on time every morning. I tell the kiddos if I figure out which hen is eating eggs we’ll be having chicken soup for supper… they just laugh, they think I can’t tell the hens apart.

As for the eggs that make it in the house, you’d be surprised how many eggs you use when you have them – eggs for breakfast, eggs in muffins, egg bath for chicken breasts before rolling them in bread crumbs – it all adds up. (Giving away a dozen here or there also helps.)

I typically pack my own lunch for work – leftovers from the night before or a sandwich, a piece of fruit, nothing out of the ordinary. So I was a little surprised recently when I opened my lunch to find this…

Graham crackers and goldfish crackers aren’t typical fare.

I thought about it for a bit – stranger things have happened while I’ve been half-asleep early in the morning. Turns out Lulu had been up early that morning for some reason and was in the kitchen with me while I was packing my lunch. As I got leftovers out of the refrigerator, she was asking if there was “snack time” at work. Convinced there should be and that I hadn’t packed myself a proper snack, she took it upon herself to grab the crackers while I was out of the room and stash them with my lunch. Maybe “snack time” isn’t a bad idea.