A Day on the Couch

I spent yesterday on the couch with a very sudden spring cold--a slight fever, headache, sinus pressure, all that jazz! Not what I had intended to do with the day, but that's life. Aidan was a restless sleeper Friday with a very deep (and disturbing, not as in "oh I can't sleep with this noise", more like, "should we take him to the ER") cough. Needless to say I got very poor sleep. Erica woke up with a sore throat. We (the kids, Jim and I) spent Saturday watching movies, drinking tea and eating chicken soup. Of course Jim isn't sick, I think he was just feeling pressure to conform from the rest of us coughing, sneezing, nose-blowing folks. So he took care of us and enjoyed a well-earned day of rest as well.

HE (husband extraordinaire) had spent the day on Friday raking mulch while I ran errands and had an acupuncture appointment in Madison. I was amazed to see that by late afternoon Jim had the whole garden de-mulched! I think he overdid it, as his back was hurting yesterday. I keep reminding him that we are not so young anymore--time to be more like the tortoise than the hare. Slow and steady wins the race.

The chickies are all doing great. In preparation for their arrival I had done quite a bit of reading and had learned that we could expect to lose 10% of them in the delivery. We only lost one, so we have 29 or 30--I can't get a reliable count they are so fast! We ordered 30, so a good guess is 29, but maybe our hatchery stuck an extra guy in there just in case. Who knows. They are still very skittish when we go to change their bedding and water, but now they stop and tilt their heads to watch me when I go in the spare room, which is their temporary home.  I don't quite know how to break it to my father that he will be sleeping with chicks when everyone comes out to visit in a week and half..... :-)

Spotters continues to settle in and get acquainted with our routine. He seems totally at ease with us and has stopped barking at noises coming from upstairs and at Jim when he comes home from work. This is nice, because it would always set Tippy off. When we get the mail we take the dogs down to the mailbox--it's a good 1/8 of a mile to our mailbox and then (another 1/8) to our neighbor, Mary's house to deliver her mail. Mary lives in the original farmhouse. The property we built our home on is 35 acres of the original 160. Our driveway veers off the main driveway to the north. On our way back from delivering Mary's mail Spotters ran ahead of us. It was only his second or third time on this walk so I wasn't sure if he would continue straight on down the driveway to the road and I became a bit nervous as he doesn't consistently respond to his name. I was surprised to see him gracefully turn up the drive to our house without even breaking his stride or looking back to see if we were following. Amazing.

Spotters is home.