Farewell February!!

I don't know about you, but I am sooo happy to be through February and on to March!

Not a big update from this past week--it was fairly low-key and I forgot to haul my camera around a lot of the time.
Lots of manure and mulch being spread.
One incident with a pack of coyotes (although my cacti perimeter seems to have helped).

We finally decided it was time to start using our chicken and duck eggs.
It's just so magical when they start laying, you don't want to eat them!
...until they start producing an average of 8+ eggs per day, that is!
So this is a duck egg versus a chicken egg (on the right).
For those of you who haven't eaten duck eggs, there is a lot less albumin (the white stuff) in the duck egg, so it cooks a bit faster.
It's also obviously slightly larger.
And the taste is like a chicken egg, but more flavorful.
Duck eggs have more protein and fat, which make them excellent in baking...

but not bad for breakfast either. :)

Mondays are park days, and we were all excited it was back at the original park.
The tire swing is a big hit, especially when Andy volunteers to push!

Some of our best buds, Emmett and Alistair were at park day too, and brought Nerf guns, yeah!
(Emmett and Sam, getting ready to ambush Alistair.)

The adults started talking about geocaching and I said, "I'll bet there's one in this park!"
Sure 'nuff.

I spent an entire day on this...
I was originally planning on planting all of my seeds in the masses of egg cartons we've collected, but Russ had the idea to make cups out of all the paper we've been saving.
(If you get Azure Standard deliveries, their big paper bags are FANTASTIC for this!)
And all of those plastic containers (that I thought were over-running our house, but turns out I didn't have NEARLY enough of) came in extremely handy!
All in all I made 125+ but only got a fraction of the things planted that I need to:
Tomatoes
Butterfly Weed
Artichoke

Asparagus
Huckleberry
Lupine

Bee Balm
Peppers (hot and sweet)
Catnip
Feverfew
Yarrow
English Thyme
Lemon Balm

I can't complain too much about February...it was pretty good to us.
There were even "Popsicle days"!

Both kids (and Russ) go in and out of paper airplane interests.
Luckily, Bubs got us an awesome paper airplane book with GREAT instructions (including fold lines, which helps this momma greatly) and lots of special paper with designs printed on them.
But the best part is that Sam found that the best way to use his airplane was to tell it what to do, 

and listens!
"Airplane, go up!"
"Airplane, hit Mom!"
It's pretty funny because probably 75% of the time, it totally works
(which is surprising because I can't get it to go anywhere but down nearly 99% of the time...).

We took a weekend off from projects (our first in a LONG time), given that it was supposed to rain all weekend and we wanted to be inside, celebrating!
So there was lots of video gaming and garden plotting and staying up verrrrrry late.
I finally gave up at 1am and checked on the kiddos...
Sam (who is usually dragging himself to bed at that point) was high on life,
and Brooklyn (who is usually flitting about the room at that point) could barely keep her eyes open.
He followed me in a bit later, she didn't.
Glad that couch is comfy.  :)

Other stuffs that didn't get documented photographically:
-Water balloons at park day!

-Russ and I made sausage and bratwursts, Mmmm!!

-We cancelled our garbage and recycling pickup, given that it was only getting picked up once every other month and once every 3 months, respectively.

-I planted the greenhouse with cold hardy plants (now that the soil temp stays around 50*)--come on broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, onions, spinach, lettuce, radishes and cabbage!

-Discovered that Brin likes finding duck eggs as much as we do...sigh.

-Another litter of bunnies was born, 13 more!!

-Finished my spiral herb garden!

-Visited the trampoline park with our homeschool group!

-I met with my endocrinologist who cleared me for the next YEAR!
(It's been appointments every 3 months for years...finally stable!!)