Baby Chick!

I know I have been a little bit absent for a few weeks. Some big changes in the Chaos house! I started working a new job, in addition to going to school. Grandparents moved in with us. And our computer crashed and burned hard. Also, we went on a vacation and I misplaced my camera. No comp = no blog posts (boo). But now we're settling in to a routine and the computer is back from being repaired (yay)! I have still been packing lunches though, so I'll be playing blog catch up again for a few weeks.

I have mentioned before that we raise chickens and ducks. We also had a rooster, until a few weeks ago (no worries, we didn't eat him. He was getting too loud and obnoxious for our suburban neighborhood so we found someone to take him). So when one of our hens went broody at the end of the summer, it was not a surprise. We didn't really think much would come of it, since it was our first broody hen and it seemed like she sat there for a long time. But just when we were starting to think that it was time to pull the eggs and throw them out before they began to stink...Lulu and Bean went out to feed the chickens one day and heard tiny peeping!

Out of the whole clutch only one egg hatched, but OH! What a CUTE egg it turned out to be! It was Lulu's turn for naming, and she wanted to name the chick after herself. After a few days of confusion, we settled on giving the chick her nickname instead. If I can find my camera, I will add pictures of little Lou!

To celebrate, I packed this sweet little chick lunch for Lulu to take to school:

She has a "CHICK" half sandwich snuggled into a nest of lettuce leaves, with the letters spelled out in colby-jack cheese. She also has a hard boiled egg, baby corn, and a little chick stuffed with gummies for a treat. In the top section she has cheese crackers, baby carrots, cucumber slices, and a peeled clementine.

Lulu loved showing off her little chick lunch and telling her second grade class all about little Lou. She said it was her best show-and-tell day ever!

Now a few weeks have passed and little Lou is getting a lot bigger. Free range chicks are much hardier than human-hatched chicks. She lives out in the yard with her mama, Princess the hen. They spend their days scratching for treats, snacking on bugs, and running around through the garden. During the high garden months I keep the chickens and ducks in their large pen, but during the autumn and winter and early spring they free range, turning the garden soil and keeping it fertile and soft for planting. One of the many benefits of keeping backyard chickens!

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Spring is Here!

The weather is going back and forth between sunshine and rain faster than a drunk yo-yo on speed, but we are loving the move toward Spring anyway! The trees are starting to sprout new leaf buds. The daffodils and tulips are poking their pretty heads up out of the ground. The birds are returning from their flight south and twittering in the trees again.

The first day of Spring coincided with a special Pajama Day at the girls' school, so I packed these breakfast-y, Spring-y lunches for them.

For Bean, a Spring Butterfly:

She has an Eggo waffle butterfly with fruit leather antennae, a hard-boiled egg, a little cup of maple syrup for dipping the waffle, and a butterfly silicone cup of Sunbursts. She also has yogurt with sprinkles and a cup of watermelons and blueberries.

Cutting the Eggo Butterfly was super fast and easy!

First I toasted two waffles and allowed them to cool slightly. Then I stacked the two waffles, one on top of the other. I cut the stack in four, lengthwise. The rounded parts became the wings and two of the straight parts became the body. The other straight strips I cut into smaller parts to make the wing accents. Simple and quick!

For Princess, an Eggo waffle Easter egg. The Eggo Easter egg was made by toasting two waffles, then cutting them using an egg shaped cookie cutter. I cut the accents out of fruit leather. Princess also has a peeled mandarin orange, a little mayo cup full of maple syrup, a ducky duck egg, yogurt with sprinkles, and blueberries with watermelon. 

The ducky was made by hard-boiling a duck egg (generously provided by our duck hens) and soaking it in yellow food dye for a few minutes. I rinsed the egg after it had soaked in the dye, then used a carrot to make the feet and beak. The eyes are two small sprinkles.

A happy chick is splashing in her yogurt, and the watermelon flowers were easy to cut using a small cookie cutter!

On the same day G-man had an appointment, so I packed up a lunch for him, myself, and for Beaker.

G-man has an Angry Birds Eggo lunch. The egg Eggo is made using the same method as the Easter egg Eggo for Princess. He also has Angry Birds Honey Grahams graham crackers, apple slices, watermelon balls, and a blueberry granola bar for a snack.

For my lunch, I packed some leftover Italian pasta salad made with Easter themed pasta, chunks of peeled kiwi, apple slices, and Crunchmaster multigrain crackers with Laughing Cow cheese.

It was delicious! Especially the kiwi ~ yum!

Beaker's lunch from that day will be shown in a separate post.

The Dude's lunch was more of a snacky tray.

I rolled deli sliced roast beef around strips of havarti and topped them with grape tomatoes. He also has Laughing Cow cheese with Club crackers, a few raspberry shortbread cookies and chocolate covered espresso beans (in the small dish with lid) for dessert, green grapes stuffed with garlic and blue cheese, and kiwi slices with blueberries.

Pretty tasty and easy to make, my favorite!

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It's Beginning to Look a lot Like...

Winter! Well, Winter for the PNW, anyway. Rain, rain, and more rain. Glad it isn't snow!

Princess and Bean are of a different opinion. Every morning they wake up and immediately look out their bedroom window, hoping to see the ground covered in a blanket of white. Instead, they see our soggy boggy backyard. Generally our area only gets an inch or two of snow each year, if that much, so they aren't likely to see their wish come true anytime soon. But it doesn't hurt to hope, right?

Since the sky isn't providing the kind of snow they can walk in and toss around, I've been trying to provide a little bit of that wintery spirit in their lunchboxes. 

Today Princess has snowflakes in her lunch. A snowflake turkey sandwich, snowflake pretzels, snowflake yogurt, and snowflake Ritz. Think that will hold over her wish for snow for a little bit longer?

We love the snowflake Ritz. They're so pretty! I also cut some cheddar stars, and tucked in a few grape tomatoes, a Princess favorite.

The pretzels are white chocolate covered with a sprinkle of crushed peppermint. They're delicious! Definitely going to have to try making some myself soon.

For Bean, I packed a fun bunch of Christmas trees. She has a tree sandwich, yogurt with sprinkles (trees, snowflakes, and candy canes), apple pieces, star shaped crackers, and some star pretzels with tree gummi candies.

The sandwich is made with whole wheat white bread and turkey, cut with a tree shaped cookie cutter. It's topped with a cheddar star and decorated with sprinkles and decorating gel.

Both lunches are packed in Easy Luncboxes.

My lunch today was too pretty not to snap a pic of. Greek yogurt over banana slices, topped with berry granola. So very delicious! The Greek yogurt brings a nice tang, the granola a bit of crunch, and the bananas round it all out by lending sweetness. My favorite lunch!

In other random news, our ducks are laying! I was starting to think they were going to hold off until Spring, but then the Dude went out to add bedding to their duck house and found a whole cache of eggs hidden there. Ducks roll their eggs in mud and hide them under grasses to keep them safe from predators. Their eggs are huge next to chicken eggs, and packed full of protein. They taste just a tiny bit more rich than a chicken egg.

In this picture, the big semi-white eggs are from our ducks, and the smaller darker eggs are from our chickens.

To give a better idea of size... the egg on the far left is from Chick, our "mystery hen", or might be from Buffy the brahma. The one in the middle is either from Princess, Lady, or Peach  (the buff orpingtons), or Hawk-Stripe or Rosebud, the Americaunas. And the egg on the far right, and the three behind, are all from Olivia and Nut, our duck hens. Nut is a Pekin (she looks just like the Aflack duck), and Olivia (and her mate, Annie) is a mystery breed.

The story of how we came to have ducks, and our 'mystery hen', is actually kind of interesting. The short story is that a friend of mine posted to Facebook that a friend of hers had found a pair of ducklings and a chick abandoned in her yard. She couldn't keep them, so they were trying to find someone who could take the trio. I lived just a few blocks away and had just recently moved my hens from their brooder pen in the garage out to the chicken run in the backyard. I still had the brooder pen set up, and the Dude and I had been talking about getting a few ducks eventually. I picked them up the next day! 

We named the ducklings Annie and Oliver, and the chick... Chick. A few days later we picked up Cutie and Buffy, our brahma chickens, and added a Pekin (Nut) and an Indian Runner duckling (India). They all grew up together in the brooder pen and moved to the yard together. 

Raising ducks and chickens in the suburbs has been interesting. They're loud, but luckily none of our neighbors has complained (yet). We keep them from smelling by keeping the coop and duck house clean and well stocked with pine shavings and straw. Occasionally I take eggs to the neighbors, to help keep the peace. Shortly after we got our ducks, the couple next door started raising a pair of ducks, too, so definitely no complaints there! It's fun to go hang out in the backyard on warm days - our ducks and the neighbor ducks "talk" to each other through the fence. We can hear them quacking and gabbing back and forth.

Chickens are very easy to care for. Ducks are more work, and they're louder and smellier than chickens. But they're also adorable and a lot of fun to watch. Worth raising, if you're able!

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