June Adventures 2020!

I apparently didn't take a whole lot of pictures in June, but this is a snapshot of the first "summer" month that FLEW BY.

(By the way, I learned that the link for the counter top video in the last post went to the wrong site. It has now been fixed, so go to the last post to watch!)

My bro Tim made some sweet "magic marble towel holders" that I may have written about already. I still really like them.

The mountain biking trails in Crosby (about 45 minutes from home) are a great family fun day. Andrew can handle the easier trails on his balance bike.

But NOW he can ride a pedal bike pretty well, and he's been asking to take his bike to go mountain biking sometime. This is great strides, from a kid that we had to coerce into practicing his pedal biking just to the mailbox and back (mostly flat, paved road, about 1/6 mile round trip).

One day, Randy and Tedster built a treehouse out of scraps from home-building! You can't see the part IN the tree much, but Teddy wanted to build a "basement" box, which is what they're working on here.

A few years ago I had MADE my own set of magnetic poetry (with a MUCH larger vocabulary than any poetry set I've seen for sale anywhere, and yes, it took a long time). It got boxed up when we staged our last house for selling and then when we got a stainless steel fridge (not magnetic) that we used in the pole barn and now the house, there was no place to set it up! Randy helped me figure out the cheapest way to make a magnet board, and it's great. It's a flat 2x3 ductwork sheet (~$10) that Randy powder-coated a nice boring gray (he needed to practice powder-coating anyway before doing a custom bike frame, after not doing it for a long time), and we used some of that free wood from Tim to make a frame. There are SO MANY words, the kids and I have a separate 2x3 magnetic white board below it that we use as a word bank. And this board is for creating the poetry.

A sort-of spontaneous escapade was acquiring our own chicks! (We had been talking of getting laying chickens for a while.) Bridget bought the first 4, which are a smaller, more friendly breed (Silkie/Bantam cross) and we got 6 more high-producing chicks from our friends Mark and Cindy. The white and light yellow ones are Bridget's (Popcorn, Lily, Honey, and Bunny).

Randy and I are intermittently working on the final coop for them. Their run will eventually be sort of behind the house and between the house and pole barn (once we get the house main electrical line disconnected, slid into protective PVC, and the trench filled in, which depends somewhat on how long it takes us to finish the basement mudding and taping. Not much to do around here!) The coop is being built against the west pole barn wall. Right now we have a temporary fenced area against the south pole barn wall for them to run around and find bugs. They get herded into a box we made out of scrap building materials every night which is in the pole barn garage.