Football...

Football season is here.

I am resigning myself to the fact that the chaos has already started.  Summer is coming to an end.

I spent the better part of the morning driving: dropping off, picking up, running across town to get the sports physical that was lost and had to be turned in my 11 this morning, running to get new football cleats before the afternoon practice, dropping off again...

My house looks neglected.  I hate when everyone is busy and they leave and the place looks like a tornado blew through even though it was totally clean when I went to bed.  There's got to be a better way...

For the last two weeks of summer we have some serious playing to finish up.  The kids requests?: go to a water park, stay in a hotel and do nothing. They are serious about the do nothing part. "Mom we can't do jobs, summer is almost over! We have to play the Wii, summer is almost over..."

I have a million projects that I need to get finished before all my helpers are gone and I have no one to distract Jackson. Blah.

Speaking of Jackson...

This boy thinks he's a big kid.  When we go swimming he jumps in the water as fast as I can put him back up on the edge.  He goes all the way under and comes up laughing for more.  Sometimes he backs up and runs so he can fling himself into the water.  Dallin and Landon were like that.  We hope he doesn't follow his big brothers in the injury category.  I think their first ER visit was at 15 months when they ate a bottle of Claritin and had their stomachs pumped.

Jackson can now open the fridge and the dishwasher.  He also climbs onto the table and rips apart anything I attempt to put out as a centerpiece. Right now he is dumping out the boxes of butter from the fridge for the millioneth time today and he is trying in vain to smash the cubes back into the box saying "tatdooo" (thank you) as he smashes each cube back in place.

He also goes through the bread drawer and dumps the bread out and takes a bite out of every piece and then stacks them back up very neatly.

This morning he has also nibbled a hole through the chocolate chips, the brown sugar and the baking soda.

Good thing he is cute!

We are such city slickers...

We finally took the plunge.  I have wanted to add chicks to our backyard for as long as I have had a back yard.  This year some friends finally convinced us to take the plunge with them and become true urban farmers.  The fact that we ordered these chicks from a place called  My Pet Chicken.com gives some insight to how seriously we are taking the title of  'farmer.'  My husband and mother--both of whom grew up taking care of chickens--are rolling their eyes.

We have plans to turn our unused little playhouse into the cutest chicken coop ever.

In the mean time we have the most spoiled fowl around.

Is allowing barnyard animals into the house somehow betraying our five generations of Idaho farmers' heritage? No self-respecting farmer would allow barnyard animals into the house let alone into his shirt, right?

I do remember my grandpa riding around the farm with his dog on the back of the 4-wheeler.  And all of his dairy cows had names (women from the ward...).  He also tamed a pigeon which followed him around the farm, so maybe we come by this naturally.

We were most worried about Beau trying to turn our latest hobby into a snack but it turns out Jack is the true chick predator.  He can hardly keep himself from climbing into the brooder box.

I wonder if we will think this is fun while thawing frozen water buckets in the dead of winter.