Cute Chicks

These are pictures of our new chicks.  They are bantam blue silkies and they are adorable.  Even though we only have room for 3 we had to get 5 because they are too little to tell which are hens and which are roosters.  I guess now the boys should be motivated to get that chicken coop finished once and for all.  We ordered them thinking they wouldn't be here for a few weeks.  It only took a week for them to come in.  They are not the best laying hens but because we are doing it for the experience rather than self sustainment we decided to forgo practicality with cuteness.  They are really pretty chickens when they are adults.

Peep, peep, peep

Peep

Peep, peep.

Peepity peep

Peep peeper peep peeper peepen

Even Captain thinks they are cute.  He is probably a little too interested in them but we're trying to get him used to them and train him to leave them alone.  I am more concerned about the foxes and raccoons that roam around our yard at night than I am about Captain.  Hopefully he won't prove me wrong on that.

PEEP, PEEP, PEEP, PEEEEEEEEEP!!!!!

The first day we got them we had to leave for several hours.  We put Captain outside so that we didn't come home to the appearance of a pillow fight at a slumber party.  I had turned off the A/C so I figured the 80 degrees our house was at would keep them warm enough.  We filled a small lid with water so they could get drinks if they were thirsty.  When we came home we realized our huge mistake which was equal to putting a wading pool in a room full of babies.  They were all completely soaked and shivering having gone for several swims in their drinking water.  Bryton rushed them up to his room to get the heat lamp on them.  They all huddled under the lamp and reached their little necks as far to the light as they could get them.  I picked one of them up and turned it over so that its belly could warm up and it immediately fell asleep.  My kids kept telling me I was killing it and that I wasn't supposed to hold them upside down.  

A.  It wasn't upside down. 

B. Where they got this knowledge (unfounded) I'll never know but suddenly they are experts in all things chicken.

If I were a chick with a wet belly I would want someone to do that to me but I eventually relented to their admonitions and put it down.  It didn't take them long to warm up but they were not nearly as cute as they had been when we got them home.  Wet chicks are just not attractive.  Fortunately by the next day they were back to their cute selves.  Fresh eggs should be here by Christmas.  Maybe instead of our annual hand dipped pretzels our neighbors will be receiving eggs this year.

YMCA

There is a first time for everything and this summer I seem to be checking a lot of those first times off of my list.  This week I took the camper and the girls up to the YMCA without John.  It was a little scary since I am used to letting John take care of all the outside details on the camper.  Besides some beeping and buzzing noises that had me stumped for a while and the unpleasantness of dumping the sewer, it all worked out okay and the kids had a ball.  I met a friend who was also flying solo in her RV and who also happened to have one of my daughters with her.  It was an all ladies adventure.

One of my personal favorite activities was the tricycle track

We had fun playing roller tag

They all were impressive marksmen

And courageous zip liners

I remember having a family reunion at this place several years ago but I think they've added a lot to it since then.  Right now they're working on building a summer tubing hill.  Apparently they're going to make fake snow for it.  Definitely a place worth visiting if you've got kids.

Heads Made Out Of Straw

We discovered a new way to do hair.

Voila!

Whew!

I stopped posting rather abruptly after arriving at the final destinations of our vacation.  Not surprising.  I have a tendency to leave one thing undone no matter what I am doing.  If I'm doing laundry, I leave one basket full.  If I'm cleaning bathrooms, I clean all but one.  I guess I like to see what I can get away with.  I must have reverse OCD.  I'm obsessive compulsive about making sure that I don't do everything.  Well, this time I'm going to overcome my personality glitch and finish what I started.  Here are the final pictures from the last jaunt of our vacation.

The Sacred Grove in Palmyra, New York where Joseph Smith had his first vision.

Bryton walking through the Sacred Grove the same age Joseph Smith was when he had his vision.

Standing outside a replica of Joseph Smith's log cabin he lived in.

The inside of the cabin

After the Sacred Grove we took a tour of the Peter Whitmer farm and ran into these boys from New Zealand on a church history tour.  I wanted to get a picture of them to post on my blog so I was happy when they asked us to be in their picture.  Their poses made me self conscious about what boring posers we were through out our entire vacation.

So I tried to make up for it with this one.  I don't know what those hand signs mean but I've seen them done before.  I think my fingers are spread too wide though.  I need to work on that.  My hand looks like a mutated star fish and Whitney looks like she's trying to cut her poncho off with her fingers. I've seen movies where New Zealanders stick out their tongues in ceremony before going to battle.  Along those lines I guess you could call this my, "In your face Niagara Falls!  I'm not afraid of you!" pose.  To which Niagara Falls might answer, "Whooossshhhhhhhhhh." forever and ever.

"What's with the ponchos?" you may be wondering.  Well, besides the fact that it was raining, we decided to go on a boat tour that took us about as close as we could get to the falls without drowning.  It was difficult  to look at it for all the spray jetting towards our faces.

We thought we'd spread out a little in this pose but we came off looking like The Niagara Falls Choir performing "O Canada"

Nigara Falls is where we ended our vacation but we've been anything but bored since we got home.  We got to host our biannual cousin camp over the fourth of July.  We had fun swimming, playing water volleyball, getting really sunburned and watching a fireworks show on a golf course.  After the show we decided to wait around for the traffic to clear so the kids ran around playing with their glow sticks and getting goofed up on Rice Krispy Treats.  When we got home the girls went to bed in their own private dormitory shown below while the boys slept out on the trampoline until it started raining.  That's when they came in and crashed wherever they could find a spot.  I was amazed at how soundly Aaron slept on my stair case.

Cousin camp made me remember that we have a camper so I started getting the itch to take it out.  We had been home for over a week so it seemed like time for another outing.  I'm not sure why I like being away from home so much.  I guess I'm a gypsy at heart.  More likely I just don't like the kids messing up my house.  We headed up the canyon near where the fire raged last summer.  It was crazy to see all the damage that had been done but somehow our little camp ground had been sheltered from it.  The wild flowers were amazing.

John put together this bouquet of wild flowers in a plastic water bottle.  They are being proudly displayed beside Bryton's broken machete he got at Harbor Freight for $4.00.

While camping one can never have too much cushion

While John and the kids were out exploring they found this cool lean to someone had made

You can see some of the damage from the fire through the trees.

Bryton decided to chop off dead limbs to build his own lean to.  He was bummed after it was  all complete and  John and I declared it to be more useful for firewood than shelter.  (We did have a trailer with us after all.)  He didn't complain about the s'mores though.

Today is Saturday and John just had his last vacation day.  Right now he's out in the garage finishing up the chicken coop he's been building with Bryton.  He ordered our chickens yesterday!  We'll see how long they survive with Captain around.  He's bummed to have to go back to work but he knows that he has no right to complain.  He finally got his sabbatical that he's been looking forward to since starting with this company and I don't think he would have changed much about it.

Final Day in NYC

Our last day in NYC we devised a master plan.  We would all go to Ground Zero together and then separate so that John could pick up the rental car while we visited the Museum of Natural History.  The first half of our plan went swimmingly.  The memorial at ground zero is incomplete and there is a lot of construction going on.  To me, the construction almost made it more meaningful knowing that it happened such a short time ago that they are still working on rebuilding it.

This tree is known as the survivor tree.  It was found in the rubble of  911 as an 8 foot stump.
It was nursed back to health and replanted at the memorial.

There are two identical water sculptures placed in the exact places that the towers were in with the same  outside dimensions.  I don't think they could have come up with a better tribute.  The names of the people who died are placed all around the outer perimeters of the 30 foot falls.

The motorcycle at the 911 Memorial Gift Shop that Paul Jr. from American Chopper made as a tribute.

After the Memorial we jumped on a subway and carried on with our plan.  The Museum of Natural History was 4 stories tall but we only made it to the 1st and 4th floor before we ran out of time.  There were some really cool displays.

This is a real meteorite

While we were blissfully soaking up mountains of knowledge at the same museum Night At The Museum was based on, John was having a little trouble at the car rental place.  It turns out that he lost his driver's license somewhere back in...Europe?  Unsurprisingly, National Car Rental would not release the car to him without one.  We had been planning on having him pick us up at the museum and then returning to the hotel to collect our luggage before heading out of town.  The kids and I had to make our way back to the hotel via subway and then hail a cab to bring us to the car rental place.  It's so strange that we should feel comfortable hopping into a car with a strange man just because his car has the word Taxi written on it.  That's what we did though and he turned out to be a nice man from Algeria whose only complaint about Americans was the way we pronounce our T's.  He has a point.  Once we arrived at the rental car place we had our car within 5 minutes.  Poor John had been waiting there for about 3 hours and was a little wound up.  Now it was 7:30 and we had a 6 hour drive before us.  Plus we needed to stop for dinner.  I wanted to stay in NYC for one more night and start out fresh the next day but John booked our hotel online and it was non refundable.  The happy ending to this story is that two negatives make a positive.  When John called the hotel to tell them we would be arriving late, REALLY late, they told him that they had no reservation for us until the next night.  Sweet!  We screwed up!  We get to pull over and get a hotel instead of driving all night!  Best mistake we ever made.

Execution

We have been gone for 5 weeks now and our trip is finally winding down.  Before the journey began, as I was planning and booking I had a lot of anxiety about how well our plans would be executed. Every time we’ve reached a new destination I’ve been tickled and a little shocked that we actually made it.  I like to keep my expectations low and that way I’m never disappointed.  There was really no reason to do that in this case but it has helped with some of the punches we’ve had to roll with along the way. 

One of the biggest punches that we had to roll with on the trip was the NYC subway.  I now see why it is the butt of so many jokes.  I usually left the logistics of traveling by subway for John to figure out.  But on two different occasions I ended up having to buy subway tickets myself because John was either trapped on the other side of the railing or in a different location.  What New Yorkers do so frequently that they don’t even have to think about was a terrifying ordeal for me.  To the credit of New Yorkers, all I had to do was slightly furl my brow and some nice man would come to the rescue. The first time this happened I am ashamed to say that I was skeptical and I really thought he was trying to take my $5.00.  That mind set comes from being in tourist Europe where everyone is trying to hustle money from you.  I guess New Yorkers are understanding because a lot of them know what it’s like to be new to the city.  New York City was almost more foreign to us than some of the cities we visited in Europe and I think they get that.  I feel kind of sorry for all those people who go there to visit because they want to see what it’s like in the U.S..  While NYC is a good place to start, they’re not really seeing the whole picture.  We sat with an English woman at breakfast one day who “politely” trash talked the U.S. as only an English person can.  I didn’t give away any of our secrets though.  I just nodded my head politely and listened. 

On Sunday morning we traveled about a mile or so to go to church.  Church in NYC is about the same as anywhere else in the world except that the building blends in with all the others and it is combined with a temple.  The only thing that was kind of comical about it were the tourists I watched come in and peer at the congregation that met after ours.  Undoubtedly having seen The Book Of Mormon musical, they seemed put out that we didn't have more entertainment to offer.  They soon left, seemingly disillusioned.  Sorry guys.  You get what you pay for.

After church we decided to take the Subway to the Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue of Liberty.  Liberty Island is closed due to the hurricane and won’t be reopening until July 4^th (how conveniently symbolic) so we had to settle for a drive by.  As you can imagine, it was hard for us to hide the fact that we were out-of-towners.  We don’t look anything like New Yorkers.  So when we boarded the Subway with slightly furled eyebrows, a loud man from New Jersey with a heart as big as his stature enthusiastically took us under his wing.  He started asking us about places we had visited and any time he mentioned a place that we hadn’t seen his eyes would get big and he would grab his head like he was being plagued by the mother of all migraines.  At one point, the train stopped and unexpectedly started heading in the opposite direction.   He was as surprised as we were but he lead us off the train and onto another one that was sure to bring us to our destination.  When this train suddenly emerged from its subterranean state to go over a bridge it gave us great views of downtown Manhattan and the Brooklyn bridge.  Despite our gladness about the unexpected sight seeing tour he once again assured us that this was the wrong direction and once again lead us off the train and onto another.  He was becoming increasingly more embarrassed with each mistake and I felt bad for him.  He clearly wanted to help us out and should have been an expert at the Subway because he takes it every day to work in Manhattan.  The problem was that it was Sunday and we failed to see the 8.5 X 11 papers that had been posted sloppily on a few of the walls about the train schedule being completely different on the weekends.  He apologized to us emphatically and I felt so bad for him that I wanted to come up with some sort of lie that would appease him.  “Actually, this is where we wanted to go all along.  How did you know?  What would we have done without you?”  Knowing we couldn’t get away with it, we did our best to reassure him as we stepped off the train, headed up to the street and hailed a cab.

View from the ferry

WTC. Amazing how the light shining up is just a reflection of the sun.  

It's so bright up here above the earth!

Oooooh.  Ahhhhh.

One thing that concerned us about being a large family in NYC was the Taxi problem.   No Taxi is allowed to carry more than 4 passengers at a time.  We learned quickly that that’s really more of a “guideline” and the cab drivers kind of follow a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.   We started off trying to be secretive about it.  John would distract the driver while 5 of us piled in the back seat.  We got bolder as time went on until we realized that they just plain didn’t care.  We got pretty good at hailing taxis.  It made us feel really cool too.  We were in different locations each time we decided to get one and each time it took us about 30 seconds.  It’s kind of empowering in a Fonzi sort of way knowing that if you want a ride all you have to do is snap your fingers and a car will immediately come screeching to a halt.

If the NYC Taxi's "anti family" policy could not deter us, the hotels were certainly no match for us either.  Throughout the trip, we all had our own individual beds but once we got to our tiny hotel room in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City we had to get creative.  It came with two double beds and no room for a roll away.  John, who is nothing if not resourceful, pushed the two beds together and we slept sideways, 3 by 3, legs overlapping.   This we did for 4 straight nights.  I am acutely aware of the hilarity of the situation but, honestly, no one missed any sleep over it.  Roll with it baby.