When Daphne really likes something, she is inclined to ask that you do it “again” “again”. In fact, “again” is one of her favorite things to say.

I’ve taken up telling her that if she wants someone to mindlessly do what she wants over and over again that she needs to find a nanny.

She has a funny way of saying nanny. It’s pronounced NAN-EE in an inquisitive tone. Very hilarious.

Daphne woke up last night as I was getting into bed, so she came to snuggle with me. After a few mintues of sitting there she turned to me and said,

“I liiikkkke you mama.”

Yesterday while we were going through paperwork, I ran into some of the papers that I was given at the hospital when Daphne was born.

There was a sheet of paper that we got with photos of baby poop on it in the different stages after birth. It was supposed to be a guide to help make sure the baby was eating enough.

I gave it to Daphne and told her that it was photos of baby poop. She took the page and went and sat on Jared’s chair and looked at it for a good 20 minutes.

Apparently, it was a good source of entrainment for a 2 year old. Who would have known?

Yesterday Jared mentioned that he had some filing to do. As he was sorting through it, he asked me to put a few things away here and there.

Being pregnant, and on a serious organizational kick I started to look at what was in the files, and I got a serious urge to clean things out and organize them. We ended up spending the majority of the day going through files, cleaning out old junk and reorganizing everything. We moved on to Jared’s desk after that and got everything sorted out and put away.

We threw away 4 bags full of shredded stuff and several trips to the recycling of other random papers.

We also had a really great time going through all of our random “cords and computer crap” that we had stuffed in a box. I needed something from the box this week, and it literally exploded as I opened it. After going through it all, we got it to an organized sanity.

It seems so nice to have everything so well organized. I don’t think that Jared was expecting that much cleaning and organizing to come from a simple filing project.

We finally convinced Jared that this weekend was a good time to head out to the pool. He has been swimming with Daphne before, but the last time was mid July of 2008, so it’s been about 9 months. Way back then, Daphne would scream bloody murder if any part above her neck got even a drop of water on it, and she was not willing to swim on her own in any capacity.

Now that she is swimming the pool back and forth with wings and no assistance, Jared was very impressed. Daphne even spent some time going under the water, and was happy as can be to do it.

I think Jared is impressed about the progress Daphne has made in her swimming.

I had a very strange thing happen to me this week.

I walked out to feed the rabbits one day, and under one of the rabbit cages was an egg. This led me to the only possible conclusion, that the rabbit laid the egg right?

Oh. and it was a male rabbit!

After further investigation, one of the chickens had escaped and decided that the best place to roost was under the rabbit cages. But it made for a funny story right?

I finally completed the back up of my photos. I committed to making a complete online, off site backup of all of my photos that I have taken that are in the digital format. This represents almost 200 gigabytes of space. Slowly, after weeks and weeks of constant uploading, I now have a complete backup on my yellowcowphoto.smugmug.com page. I feel more organized and safe already.

Papa Bob got Daphne the Your Baby Can Read series for her birthday. It is a set of flashcards, DVD’s and books that are supposed to be used to teach early reading to your baby.

I have read some good things about it and some bad things about it. I agree with the good things. The critics say that it is just a TV show you put your kid in front of to watch and that they are simply memorizing the words. However, if you read all the literature and really get involved, you start to understand that that is not the case. You are coming up with many, many ways to get your kid involved in understanding the written language. It takes a lot of repetition and a lot of work. The people who are just showing DVD’s to their kids are doing it wrong, not wonder it seems so mundane. It is supposed to be set up so that you read the books with the baby and do flash card and come up with as many opportunities as possible for the baby to discover the world around them.

That said, you are supposed to watch the 20 minute DVD 1-2 times per day. I have been doing it for about 2 weeks with Daphne.

I was so impressed to see that Daphne can read the word “dog” and “arm”. She still can’t recognize them in every setting, but she definitely knows the words because she can see the word and say it without any additional help. It’s kind of a miracle to see my just turned 2 year old start to read words. I am excited about what her future holds. She loves books so much, and it’s such a gift to teach her how to read at such a young age.

I’ve been working on a batch of chicken stock for a while. It was clear that it was time to make some because I still had some necks and organs in the freezer from when I butchered chickens a while back. Also, we had chicken legs for dinner a few nights in a row, and I had a carcass left in the freezer from a while back.

Additionally, we were getting more vegetables from our CSA than I was able to eat so it was time to morph all this food into something that would be useful to me at a later date.

My favorite thing about having learned to can last summer was the fact that I have no reservations on canning my own foods. It makes it so wonderful to know that I can make 2 gallons of chicken stock and preserve it without having to think about using it all up. The trick is that you have to pressure can it, and that gets me a little bit nervous sometimes.

I got my pressure canner from a yard sale for 20 bucks, and I adore it. It is huge–20 quart capacity, so I can can about 2 gallons of things in one go. Pressure canners that were made recently are incredibly safe, but in the old days these things used to explode and cause all sorts of trouble.

I feel like I sit on pins and needles while I wait for the 25 mintues to be up. I’ve only got 5 more mintues to go on the batch I’m working on.

The positive side is that I will have freshly canned chicken stock to use at my will that can sit in my pantry waiting for me to come up with something to use it in!

I am surprised with how quickly I got tired of having chickens in the house, and they have officially been kicked out today.

The Cornish Cross breed is a breed of chicken that has been bred to mature super quickly. I am surprised that these chicks are only a week old, and they already seem so incredibly big to me. Additionally, the Chukar (a type of quailish bird) grow very quickly as well (full size in about 6 weeks). You can tell how fast the other birds are growing when you compare them to my laying hen that I bought. She is a week old, but she is SOOOOO much smaller than the Cornish Cross.

I had all 16 of the birds in the bathtub under a heat lamp, but when I got back from the store today there was a definite chicken smell in the house. Rather than continue to deal with it, I decided to kick them out.

I split up the chukar and the laying hen from the cornish cross, and I put them all out in the garage. The Cornish Cross are happily eating away pretending that nothing has happen, yet the Chukar are cold and sad to be away from their friends. The Chukar have a light on them, but they seem to feel that it’s necessary to all bunch up and act cold. If the light were any closer to them it would burn them, so I think we’re going to have to call it good enough for now.

As soon as I kicked them out I cleaned and sterilized the bathtub with bleach and then scrubbed the floor of the bathroom. You’d be hard pressed to see that I was running a chicken farm in it just a few hours ago.