A Tree Fort in Our Yard (minus the tree)

If I had a million dollars
I'd build a tree fort in our yard
If I had million dollars
You could help, it wouldn't be that hard
If I had million dollars
Maybe we could put like a little tiny fridge in there somewhere
You know, we could just go up there and hang out
Like open the fridge and stuff
There would already be laid out foods for us
Like little pre-wrapped sausages and things

- Barenaked Ladies

Well, we certainly didn't have a million dollars, but we a lot of free wood, a friend who lent us a nail gun, and a man with a big immagination who would do just about to make his girlies happy.

The free wood had lots of nails in it that had to be removed before it could be used. Each piece of wood had at least 12 nails in it. James pulled them all out by hand.


The Bucket 'O Nails, at least two inches deep


Putting down the flooring while sitting on the flooring takes lots of talent!


Don't try this at home, kids!


Me, wondering how all of our projects get so out of control


Look! Progress!


James saying "Worship my mad building skillz!"


Look at that!! A real playhouse! And the beginnings of a chicked coop and run!


James, Isabella and 3rd daughter Katie on the balcony


The temporary roof- our old trampoline! It's not waterproof, but it makes great shade and it was FREE!


The girls decided they were going to spend the night in the clubhouse.


They got eaten alive by mosquitos, but they stayed out all night! Can you believe it?


Obviously, the playhouse isn't quite done yet. But it's playable, and that's all that matters! Work now turns towards the chicken coop, because the baby chicks are starting to look like real chickens.



(This picture was actually taken a week ago, and they are even bigger now!)

Public Service Annoucement

'Yeah' and 'Yea' are synonyms.

'Yea' and 'Yay' are homonyms.

Don't use yeah/yea when you really mean "Yay!"

This PSA is brought to you by my raging case of PMS. You're Welcome. :)

What a cross between Stonehenge and the Taj Mahal would look like if it were being built in So. GA

For about two years now, we've had a plan to build a playhouse for the girls. A playhouse complete with electricity (and therefore A/C) that could also double as storage, and just maybe a guest house for when people come to visit. Our neighbors heard about the plan and laughed. The next day we came home and found three chairs on the front porch with a note saying the chairs were a "contribution to the girls' first apartment".

These playhouse plans were also part of the motivation for James to bring home all that wood last spring. He built the compost bin last spring, and the pile of wood had been sitting ever since. In James' defense, he's a busy man. But with the addition of the chicks (and the return of longer days) James has been working hard in the back yard.

Which brings me to last week....

James' plan for the permanent chicken coop involved a long yard and a coop with nesting boxes, tall enough for us to walk inside without having to bend over. We planned things out together, spray painting marks on the ground where poles would stand and things would go. I left him to his work. James had been outside digging holes for poles for about two hours when he called me out back, saying he had an idea. This is what I saw.



His idea was to build a small "treehouse" on top of the coop for the girls to give them a place to play until the "real" playhouse was built. In our minds we were thinking of the treehouse my Granddaddy had built over at the compound.



You can see it in the above picture. Something simple. Something easy.

*cue ominous music*

The girls loved the idea, of course, so James go to work going through the piles of wood to see what he would need to use. About this point I suggested that it might be nice if the playhouse was just a little bit bigger than the coop, making a balcony up top, and a covered place underneath where the girls could park their bikes and scooters. James thought this was a fabulous idea and adjested his plans accordingly.

I'm not sure what happened next. The next time I went outside things were...bigger than I had imagined.



See those cross boards? Those are the supports for the playroom floor. Let me show you from a different angle.



James is over 6 feet tall. The floor will be 8 feet in the air. The playhouse itself will be almost 6 feet tall with a pitched roof. To say that this thing will tower in the air would be an understatement.

Then I got to looking closely. All of the posts seemed kind of far apart. James then explained to me that the dimensions had changed a bit to make it easier to work with the wood we already had.



All told, from one end to the other, starting with the entrance to the chicken yard to the end of the balcony this structure will be 38 feet long. The playhouse floor itself (8 feet off the ground, remember) is 8 1/2 by 14 1/2 feet. For the record, this is almost as big as our bedroom. It started out 5ft by 8ft. The plans now included enclosing the area underneath the playhouse and building shelves/cabinets for even more storage.

Please tell me why we can never, ever stick to a simple plan.

TO BE CONTINUED, AGAIN

Chickie Baby

Waaaaaaaaaay back in 2003, when we were still living on the Compound in Tifton, James asked me what I wanted for a Valentine's Day present. I told him "chickens". So he agreed to build a chicken coop in preparation for little, tiny baby chicks that would be available that spring. He drew up the plans and got as far as getting some 4x4s in place that would be the corners of the coop.

The Valentine's present turned into a Mother's Day present, which then turned into a birthday present, then James started schoool and before we knew it it was May 2005 and we were moving to Albany for his new job and I had never, ever got my chickens.

Last spring, James brought home a bunch of wood and made me a compost bin out of some wood he brought home from the base. I alluded to our next project in that post, and finally SEVEN YEARS after his initial promise, WE HAVE CHICKENS.

My brother David ordered 60 chickens from a mail order company, and they arrived the week of the family reunion. Dave set aside 10 chicks for us, and James (after checking out and reading every book on raising chickens from the library that he could get his hands on) set about building a Biddy Box that we figured they'd stay in for at least a month.

James built the box and set it up on some sawhorses over our garden box (which I had never got around to planting anything in this year, although the rosemary and thyme I planted *last* year are still thriving!)


The idea was that each day when we cleaned out thebox, we'd let the chicks run around in the garden.






I don't know if it's our tender loving care or what, but these chicks are SUPER CHICKS. Less than two weeks after the reunion we had to upgrade their "area" because they are getting HUGE!

James decided to mount the biddy box on the end of the (now) enclosed garden bed, giving the chicks a run. I think it's pretty smart myself.






So for the time being, the chicks have plenty of room, and they are happy and thriving. We still have 8 chicks (we lost two of them to a neighborhood cat who found away into the pen. James has sworn to have his revenge. Our ultimate plan has always been to build a bigger, permanent coop in the back of the yard, with laying boxes and plenty of room.

With it being the Memorial Day weekend and having time off of work, James decided to get to work building the permanent coop last Saturday. He had been outside for about two hours when he came into the house and uttered these immortal words....

"Hey, come see this. I have an idea...."

TO BE CONTINUED

*tap tap tap*

Is this thing on?

I noticed it's been almost a month since I updated Ye Olde Blog, and I thought about waiting a whole month, but then I decided that it would just be too cruel to deprive you of my witty thoughts and insights that much longer.

Since we were last together:

- I went on a field trip with Madeline to the Georgia Aquarium in ATL
- I got a haircut
- school has ended for both me and the girlies
- we had the family reunion
- we've aquired baby chicks
- we had to buy a new computer
- I figured out how to stream Netflix, Hulu, Amazon VOD and all sorts of other channels through our Wii and onto the TV. As soon as this season of Gaving and Stacey is over we'll probably be cancelling the cable and saving beau coup dinero each month. (Maybe)

I'm hoping to spend this summer lounging by the base pool as often as possible, reading lots of books and eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. I'm not really all that interested in doing much of anything else. ;)

With that, I'll leave you with a few pictures.

Navel Gazing

Things I Have Discovered About Myself and/or Finally Accepted In Past Year

1. I DO NOT like change. I thought I was okay going with the flow/seeing what happens/etc, but it turns out I'm not.

2. Even though I want it to (if for no other reason than to use the thousands of dollars worth of supplies in my house) scrapbooking doesn't give me the creative outlet that it used to. There's no motivation there, and hardly any desire. Most of my creative energy goes into preschool and writing witty blog entries.

3. I love living in a small(ish) town, because the people have such big hearts. Unfortunately those big hearts too often come with small minds. It's like living in a huge warm, funny, sincere, petty, crazy, dysfunctional family. I need to learn when to speak up and when to keep my big mouth shut.

4. Anxiety medications are a Good Thing.

5. There's a difference between being stupid and Being Stupid. Far too often I am the former, but I thank God every day that I am not the latter.

6. I spend far too much energy thinking about people who are Being Stupid. I need to be more kind in my words and actions to those people, in hopes that they will be kind in their words and actions towards me.

7. Heavenly Father is probably frustrated and disappointed with me, for a lot of reasons. But He probably feels the same way about Pat Robertson, Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright and Glenn Beck, and at least I'm not making money off of His name.

8. I'm fat, but my eyes and lips are gorgeous. It might be time to join Weight Watchers.

9. I wasn't nearly as smart and mature at 18 as I thought I was. (In fairness, I realized this a long time ago. But given that I'm closer to being the mother of an 18 yeard old than I am to being an 18 year old myself is really driving the point home.)

10. It will be OK if I don't ever "finish" college. I have never stopped learning, and I don't plan to stop any time soon. I am an intelligent, well-rounded, creative woman who loves her careers; both the one I get paid for (preschool teacher) and the ones I don't (wife, mother, pseudo book reviewer, wanna-be librarian, occasional writer).

11. Sometimes writing a blog post at 1:30 in the morning is a good thing. SOmetimes it's not. We'll see what the verdict is on this post in the light of day. ;D

12. I physically can't make an odd numbered list.

The Cucumber Museum

Our last day of Spring Break found us shopping


and eating





and gardening. (Say what?)



One of my favorite places to visit in Jacksonville is the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens. In addition to be a pretty awesome art museum in its own right, it also has a great hands on children's room, and GORGEOUS gardens, all right on the St. Johns River. We were really lucky because on Tuesdays the museum is free! So we spent about three hours there, looking at beautiful art, wandering around the gardens and taking lots of pictures.

When we first drove up, Bella misread the sign and asked why we were going to the Cucumber Museum. Henceforth it shall be known as such in our house!















After leaving the museum, we decided to drive back out to the beach to get our toes in the water one last time. I love being at the beach just as the sun is setting (even if we were faving the wrong way to see the actual setting).











We caught a late dinner at Five Guys and OH MY GOSH!!! You haven't eaten a burger until you've had a Five Guys Burger! Sooooooooooo good! Right next door to Five Guys was a Frozen Custard shop, so we walked over for some dessert, and it was the perfect ending to our spring break.

Old Friends

Usually when we head out on vacation we either go north to Atlanta (and The Cannegieters) or south towards Jacksonville (where we have lots of friends and THE BEACH!) This time, Jacksonville won out, but don't worry Lora and Jeff- we're headed your way SOON!! We stayed with my oldest friend in the world, DeeAnn and her family. We have known each other since we were three years old, and she's like a sister to me. I didn't get any pictures of her or her husband Marty, but that's because I was too busy taking pictures of her cute kids!





And if DeeAnn is my oldest friend, the Kiki is probably my second oldest friend! Her mom was my first Primary teacher, and then my Young Women president. Kiki invited us all over on Sunday for an egg hunt (her family recently moved into DeeAnn's neighborhood. How convenient!). We ended up staying until close to midnight! All nine kids happily played and watched movies while we visited and laughed and gossiped.






On Monday we had dinner with The Jarvis' and The Howles. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE that Katheryn and Erin are cool enough to become friends with an old girlfriend of their husbands. Yes, in my misspent youth I dated both Nathan and Jason (although not at the same time ;D). I adored them both (and still do) and my teenage years would not have been as much fun without them in my life.

Our visit was the first time I've met Katheryn (I met Erin about 14 years ago, when she and Jason first started dating). They are both as awesome as I hoped, and we might even all go camping together this summer! (I hope this works out!) I must also give props to my awesome husband who is cool enough to be friends with my ex-boyfriends! YAY James!






I have to give credit to Katheryn for this shot- she insisted me and the guys take a picture together! How funny is that??!!?


I love that we have so many friends who care about us enough to make time to see us and feed us and keep in contact!