A follow up picture

Here's our Robin babies about 10 seconds before they flew for the first time. They scared the mess out of us! Peaches immediately ran over to one on the ground, but I stopped her before she hurt it. One of them hung out in the yard in various spots for the rest of the day, trying to figure out how to fly. By the next morning, it had figured it out and was gone, too.

It was so fun watching them and we've really missed them.

Changes are coming

I can't say what right now because I don't know exactly what. Dave & I are fine, stressed, but banded together as we always have been. The job is still far, far too many hours with little hope of becoming better. He recently worked over 170 hours in a 2 week period. His stress level is through the roof. The difficult, stressful parts of the job are really outweighing the positive. While I don't dislike it here, there are some disappointments. Dillon-super social Dillon- has had trouble really finding friends. She has a few, but it isn't coming together for her like it did in NH, and we see her lonliness in the behavior difficulties we've had since moving here. She will still, out of the blue, say she wants to go back to NH.

So, we're trying to figure out what's next. We've made amazing progress on bills and will have all credit card and bank loans (thought not student loans) paid off within the next 4-5 months. There's money going to retirement funds and we have money in savings again.

We've been struggling with this for a long time and it's steadily becoming clearer that the current situation isn't working for us. So, changes are coming- we just have to figure out what they are.

Our babies

We've been watching this Robin's nest for about 3 weeks. It's on our electric box outside. We've watching the momma incubating the eggs, then had the fun of discovering the chicks on Mother's Day! Dillon thought it was so funny that the newly hatched chicks all sat there with their eyes closed and the mouths open waiting for someone to drop something in. We even rescued one when it fell out of the nest just a few days after being born. The parents weren't there when it happened, so it must've just gotten too wiggly. It was so fragile-looking! I put gloves on, then carefully picked it up and put it back in the nest. We weren't sure how it was going to do, but couldn't just leave it. It has done fine

We knew there were four eggs in there, but are only three chicks. I knew eventually we'd see the other egg kicked out of the nest as the babies got bigger. Sure enough, there it was on the ground this morning. We picked it up and brought it in to look at. 5 minutes later, Corryn dropped and broke it releasing the most awful rotten egg smell.

Homeschooling at it's best. We now fully know what a rotten Robin's egg smells like.

Pretty soon the chicks will start learning to fly, so I have to figure out how to keep Peaches away from there. The dog eating a baby bird would be a heck of a lot more traumatic than the rotten egg!

If she weren't so cute...

Last night I was getting Corryn to sleep. She was laying in my lap, looked up at me and said with the sweetest little sleepy voice
"Momma nose"
W: "Momma nose" (because if you don't repeat what she says she says it again. Over and over and over.)
C: "Momma eyes"
W: "Momma eyes"
C: "Momma booger"