peep peep peep

They continue to grow, and peep, and get little flight feathers on their teensy wings, and try to fly, and fail but are cute all the same. They are turning into little eating/pooping machines. A few have little feathers on their tails, and woe betide any bug that ventures into their spot. Mosquitoes are chased and often get away, but one beetle last night looked like a football as one chick chased it pounced on it, then tried to get past the others that wanted it too. The beetle was dropped, picked up immediately by another, and the whole thing repeated. I have no idea which chick finally got the prize.

The laying hens have settled in and are laying well, still small eggs (D told me yesterday that he'd made himself a 6-egg omelet). Biddy, while still something of a bully, has calmed down and seems to realize that these coop mates aren't going away.

Tuesday we celebrated Canada Day, with D being off and me finding a dead rat in the coop. It looked smaller than the one I had seen, but perhaps it had just grown in my memory ... "I once saw a rat this big!" Since then I've seen no evidence of rat activity. To have gotten away with only one seems too good to be true. We'll wait a while before the chicks go over, just to be sure.

The weekend saw lots of work getting done on the farm, more jams and jellies being made for the market, and on Tuesday night D's fireworks show for us and the 12 million mosquitoes that also came out. That night R and I camped out in the yard. We'd hoped to go across the creek but the recent rains have brought it up to spring levels. Typically at this time of year the rocks are peeking through at the ford and the kids go catching frogs, but when I crossed in the afternoon it was well above my knees. Fordable, but I didn't really want to do it after dark in the strong current. We had a good time in the tent anyway, good talking time.

Today and tomorrow R is at her babysitting course, then it's another weekend. Farmer's market is going well; R is enjoying it and learning a lot. It's a summer-long economics class, basically. IN a couple of weeks A will be helping out while R is away with World Changers. More on that another time.