Baby Ryder turns 1!

I can't believe my new nephew has already turned 1!!  I'm so excited for him, his parents and my kids who love their baby cousin.

A Cooper's Hawk

April 2011, Maylee convinced her dad and I that we should get chickens as pets. We were down at Grandpa Buckle's house and he always had chickens in his backyard. The girls LOVED playing in the backyard with the chickens. Darren and I talked about it and I start researching chicken coops. Well non of the coops were exactly what I wanted,and having the handy husband that I do, I decided to design it and let him build it. He LOVES me, he really does. We brought home our new pets in June 2011!! Living in the house with 3 small girls our life pretty much revolves around Disney Princesses, so all 4 of the hens were named after one: Mulan (dark/black), Cinderella (buff/brown), Pocahontas (buff/brown) and Kiara (light/white).

Well back in February, I went out in the morning to let the chickens out of the coop and into the yard, but noticed there were only 2 (Pocahontas died of the heat back last August). I started looking around and found a chicken behind the coop, something had gotten to her. I rushed off to do my school drop off run and was going to clean it up later. I got home and was getting the babies settled in before I went outside when I noticed a feather butt in the air that did NOT belong to our chickens!! I ran outside and found a hawk behind the coop!! Well him and I did a stare down and we were both unhappy!!

I got him shoo'd off and got Mulan cleaned up, put the other chickens back into the coop and let my neighbors with small animals know that there was a hawk in the 'hood. I called Kansas Wildlife and Parks to see what options we had to get rid of him as he was perching all over our yard waiting for his next meal, we since we live in town our only option was to wait it out and keep our other chickens cooped until he found another place to hunt for food. Finally, after 2.5 weeks we were able to let the chickens out in the yard again and they have forever been grateful since!!

So much has happened....

And I know that is a totally lame excuse for not keeping up the blog. I have a lot of blogging to do if I am going to meet my goal of 52 blog posts by the end of the year!! I cant believe that school is almost out and summer is almost here. I am in the process of planning for our summer and how we are going to have a great summer on a greatly limited budget, but I know we can do it, we always do!! I thing I have been trying to do (if your on Facebook you already know) is ride my bike more, hopefully I can keep it up too. We will see. I know this is short and sweet, but I am going to go ahead and post it and work on another blog post that will have more guts to it and let you know what is going on in the Pousson Abode!!