Small Shifts and Poultry Progress

I make up words for things in my brain...or use words in unconventional contexts. Ivy does the same thing. If she's sitting by the fire, she doesn't feel the "warmth"...she feels the "heatness". One word that comes up in my mind this time of year is "shift"...as in "The Shift". To me, The Shift is that time when Winter is finally transitioning out, the ground is starting to thaw, patches of new green start to appear, the ice on the pond has melted and you catch a glimpse of an occasional ripple as a fish makes a quick turn near the surface. Normally, around here, Winter is a VERY long season. As that temperature drops in November...you start to batten down the hatches; put the lawn furniture away, pull the boats up out of the water, tune up the snow blower. Then it's almost 5 full months of very cold and very snowy. We like to be outside quite a bit in the Winter but with little ones, it sometimes gets tough...you know the drill...spend 45 minutes layering them up with warm clothes only to get 10 minutes outside before a face plant or tumble sends snow where it shouldn't be. I dig Winter...but I LOVE the shift...that means, boating, fishing, gardening, outdoor living is right around the corner.
This year's "shift" was hardly one at all. We experienced the 4th mildest Winter on record here and got to spend a great deal of time outside all season. It is still nice to think about Spring and all the outdoor stuff that goes with it. It's been in the upper 60's this week and we've been talking full advantage of this gorgeous weather. I'll show you...but first....

Chicken Update!
The girls have just about tripled in size since we got them. They are two weeks old now and all of them have their wing feathers and most of their tail feathers in:


They are still cute...but it won't be long until they hit that gawky, feather-ruffled, necks-a-little-too-long-for-their-tiny-head stage...the "teenage" phase as it's known in chicken raising. I'm still anticipating one or two of them to be a rooster..we'll see.
Well...being that the ground is thawed, work began on their coop:


My pops (Pa, as he's known to his grand kids) has been designing and mainly working on this baby. We're thinking it's gonna look pretty cool as it comes together.

So today, after work, I got changed and in about 2 minutes was outside with the fam working in the yard. There's some work that needs doing on our gardens so we started on that. We had dinner...then right back outside. I took the kids for a sunset ride in the boat:


with snacks:


and swans:


We even managed to do the thing that spawned this blog's name:


We found the Blue Heron (this was the best shot I could manage as I fumbled in my pocket for the camera while it was flying away from me.

After we docked, we had 15-20 more minutes of daylight. Gavin decided to "reward the day with a little fishin'" as we've been known to say around here:


While Ivy and I played catch with her new junky frisbee-thing:


Ivy insisted on bringing the frisbee back in her mouth. It wasn't until 5 or 6 tosses in that I realized that what I was doing wasn't playing "catch"...

I was playing "fetch".

Which sort of works...cuz I've never had a dog.

Not a bad Tuesday.


Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the earth”; and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields seed according to its kind, and the tree that yields fruit, whose seed is in itself according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. So the evening and the morning were the third day. - Genesis 1:11-13

I love that part.