The Eberly Journals: March things.

Boy this March weather so far has been all over the place. In the beginning of the month it was so nice and we were able to spend some time outside. I took the kid's to a local park a few times and had them do some drills to practice roller hockey. They thought it was so fun and made me some "white boards" to draw the drills on:

We call our time there "Amy's hockey camp" and we have a lot of fun with it. They think I should have whistle now too :P

One day I was able to get out and start cleaning out my flower beds. I had to take a picture of how big this one rose bush got last year before I finished pruning it.

I decided I wanted to pull out the stone path and rake out the butterfly garden really well and then mulch everything before re-laying the path this year. The kids were such a help with this and dug up all the stones and stacked them neatly on the sidewalk for me!

A couple weeks ago we had a big crew at the park and it was so much fun. My kids still wanted to do drills so I let them each come up with their own and they would run that for a few minutes and then someone else would come up with one. Then they all played a game.

One of the drills I came up with: they had to start like this and then when I yelled "Go", get up and try to catch the person in front before they made it around the cones and scored.

I've been working on upgrading our chicken coop and run this month. I built these perches for them out in their run to start with. They were not sure about them at first so Joanna and Chase helped show them how to perch on them :P

I also moved all of their nesting boxes in the coop and added roosting bars. Which of course they haven't started using yet, they'll get it though.

Later this spring I want to transition to sand as bedding in the coop and plant to chicken proof flowers and shrubs in the run to pretty it up some more :P

Yesterday we were dealing with some vent gleet issues (basically a yeast infection for chickens). I just discovered that SOMEBODY had not been giving them fresh water everyday but adding new water to their old dirty water :( at least we know the problem now though and can deal with it.

The kids helped me give all of them Epsom salt baths (which, surprisingly, they really liked!) and clean off their rears and apply medicine. Then we fed them each a spoonful of yogurt and added some Apple cider vinager to their FRESH CLEAN water. I believe we caught it early so I'm hoping we will get this issue cleared up quickly.

So a couple weeks ago we had beautiful spring-like weather and were really enjoying ourselves.

I was out at a store and Katy said, "mom take our picture so we can always remember this." :D

The forsythia was so close to blooming

And then THIS happened:

Haha! Katy worked so hard on that little snowman! She was out there by herself for an hour and was having trouble but just kept at it, she was determined!

We then went with our Sunday School class to a cabin a couple hours away for the weekend. It was so cold and windy that we mostly just stayed inside the whole weekend.
I was starting to feel stir crazy on Saturday though, and so were all the kid's, so I told them all to get bundled up and we'd explore the woods for a little bit.

They all liked walking across this fallen log. I had good muck boots on so I stood in the water and helped the smaller kids balance across.

It actually felt pretty nice in the woods, the wind wasn't as bad and the sun felt nice.

Well after that little bit of fun, I came down with a terrible sickness. It came on so fast and I was incapacitated the rest of the weekend!
We had a big snowstorm on Tuesday of last week but I was still so sick I didn't really get to enjoy it with the kids. I did manage to take a few pictures last week though.