Midnight SanDiego Adventures of Carpools, Puking, and Baby Chickens

How does that saying go? Something about when it rains it pours? Oh yeah. I think it goes something like, "If you think things are busy you'd better watch yourself because it's about to get way worse."

Troy had his surgery on the Wednesday before spring break. It was only natural that Romney would be leaving on her choir trip the next morning. At 4am. So of course on Wednesday night I was trying to keep Troy comfortable and bring him anything he needed while simultaneously helping Romney pack for a four-day trip to Southern California and trying to get everyone to bed since she and I would be up at 3:30 to get going. 

boarding the bus in the dead of night

Does that mean we should have been sleeping soundly until 3:30? I suppose so, but that is absolutely not what happened. We were both awake around 2:00, nervous that we would sleep through our alarms. We did not. We finally got up, tiptoed around, trying to make sure we wouldn't wake Troy. Sadly, that turned out to not be an issue, since he got basically no sleep that night. When I got home from taking Romney to the bus-loading party in her high school faculty parking lot, I got a text from Troy, asking for help upstairs. I thought I WAS being helpful, taking him food and pain medication, but an hour later when I heard him lose it all into the sink, I realized that I had not been at all helpful. 

Then it was time to get Emma up for school.

I would have crawled back in to bed after that, but seriously, I could not. I mean of course I was doing Emma's carpool that day, and meeting a new doctor for Romney. Crazily, one of the other things was buying more chicks. What bad timing. We haven't had chicks since 2020 because our chickens have miraculously been staying alive since then. A new feat for us. They're actually getting kind of old to be laying eggs, and we realized that we should start adding two or three hens to the flock each year to prevent us losing all our layers at once. Chicks are still in high demand around here, and I had already tried a couple of times without success to purchase the kind of chickens we like. That day was the day that IFA was getting silkies in. So....chicks were purchased that day. Did we have a place to put them in the garage? Oh no, of course not. They moved into a laundry basket in the living room. 

They're the cutest little things. Three black silkie bantams, plus I caved and bought two frizzled bantams. We have had the worst luck trying to get frizzled, but I'm giving it another shot. We're already pretty sure that one of them is a rooster, but that will be a blog post for another time. 

Oh yeah and it's been dumping snow for basically the entire month. 

I'll tell you, Friday morning, after I got Emma out the door for school, made sure the chicks were all in good shape and Troy was snoozing quietly upstairs, I climbed into Romney's empty bed and slept until 10 in the morning. 

Here is Troy recovering by a cozy fire on a gray day, the chicks under their heating lamp behind him:

Our suspected rooster, already given the very feminine and delicate name Orchid: 

Two of the three silkies, which so far are indistinguishable from each other

Here are some photos from Romney's trip to San Diego, which consisted of one full day of driving. two busy days in the city, and then another full day of driving. The choirs won all sorts of awards, including an individual one for Romney, who won the "maestro award" for outstanding musicianship. She sang in multiple groups plus played the cello in the orchestra and accompanied another group with it as well. Way to go, Leopards!

Here is a photo of the beloved choir teacher, getting his now-traditional birthday celebration as they were out to dinner on a boat in the harbor. Was it his birthday? Nope. But the kids tell the waiters every time they eat together that it is, each time with an increase in age. I think he's now up to about 45, despite having been born in the late 90s. 

 

Good thing that when she got home on Sunday night, it was just the beginning of Spring Break. You wouldn't know it, since we were getting pelted with snow as we gathered up her bags, but it was. At least the snow cooled off her sunburn a little bit.