Abby the dog

This is Abby, our new dog.



She was rescued from the shelter by our friend Bianca, who passed her on to us. She's been a Jacobs dog since August and we love her a lot. She is a red heeler mix. Mixed with what is a great mystery! She is really cute, she has one blue eye and one brown eye, and she's just short enough that she can't counter surf.
She lets the girls dress her up:


Even though she doesn't exactly enjoy it:


She loves her squeeky chewy toys:


And puts up with lots of love and such from Anna:


Yes, I swore we wouldn't get another dog while we lived in the city limits, and Abby would love to eat the chickens, so we have to find creative ways to keep them separated, but Abby just won our hearts and we're really glad she's here. :)

It's been a bad blogging year

I've been meaning to get back to the blog for some time, but for some reason I just don't feel like talking too much these days. Several months have gone by with no posting, but a lot has been happening...

Eleanor became a 5 year old girl. :)

We discovered that same week that we are expecting a number 5 Jacobs baby. (Preemptive answers to the standard questions are...no, we aren't trying for a boy, no, we don't know if it's a boy or girl, and no one was more surprised about the baby than we were.)

The garden started out great, but suffered severe neglect when I began to experience the 24 hour a day nausea that has been my new friend for the past 6 months. I am anxious to start again this spring.

Tony became a licensed architect (way to go Tony!) and has managed to at least stay employed through layoffs and pay cuts at his office... we are very thankful for his job.

We said goodbye to Maggie the bear dog finally, it was a very sad time, and we still miss her daily.

Our lovely easter eggers began laying lovely blue eggs, before all of the chickens started molting for the season and stopped laying. We're really missing the backyard eggs!

The shrinking income and uncertain economic future would have us down, but we still have these:





And someone gave us this:



I will post more about that later. ;)
And then there's always Christmas around the corner



Life is good.

Kids at the park

A bit overdue, more photos, taken at the park this past week:
















Just a bunch of happy, silly kids. :)

Highlights from conversations with Eleanor

I haven't posted many of these stories lately because I began to wonder if our beloved readers would rather just skip the stories and look at pictures of the kids, but I really love telling them and it occurred to me that the blog is also for me to enjoy, so here goes:

This one is from dinner last night, when Tony and I were discussing the new handwriting books that the girls are working in and how they will correct the problems that the little girls have with letter and number reversals.
(this from Ellie:) "Well, I can't reverse the number 8! But I can reverse 2, and 4, and 3, and 5...."
As her doting parents we of course see this as evidence of her budding genius. :)

And another from a few days ago, when Ellie was doing her characteristic wandering around the house and talking to herself, she came into the room and said to me "So mom, if I'm not Good, and I'm not a Jerk, then just what am I?"
I don't actually know who told her she wasn't good, but I'm afraid it's mostly true. ;) She also isn't a Jerk, so I guess she's just a funny little kid.

Just some photos of the kids

Anna eats toast with jelly

Sophie has an attitude

Ellie has another new talent

Anna takes her potty everywhere

Anna can make very scary faces (she had green paint on her forehead)

piggie in a basket

Dyeing Eggs with Onion Skins

We spent the morning dyeing eggs to bring to church for Pascha (which is this Sunday). The tradition is to dye the eggs red, but there really isn't a good way to get eggs really red without using yucky dyes that come off on your fingers when you handle them. Last year we came across this natural way to dye the eggs and it's my new favorite. I've been saving onion skins for several months, and we've saved up several dozen of our own eggs just for the occasion.

Here are the eggs before


and the bags of onion skins (yellow ones)


I made the dye first by boiling the skins


Here is the strained dye cooling before I poured it on the eggs


These are the eggs after boiling in the dye


The finished product, I really like the dark reddish brown color.

New Baby Chicks

We ordered four new chicks for this year. They are "easter eggers" which means they will lay very pretty blue-green eggs. As an added bonus, they have very cute puffy cheek feathers. They came in the mail four weeks ago, so this is a bit late, but here they are:

This is what they looked like when they came out of the box


This was last Wednesday, when they were 3.5 weeks old, and we took them outside for the first time


they aren't little puff balls anymore, but they're still really cute


they let the girls handle them


the girls named this one Turtle, she's the sweetest


this one is Sunshine, we think she will be white


and this is Bean


and Ivy


Anna with Turtle on her lap


The big chickens are spending most of their time in the pen we built them these days because they like to tear up the garden beds and we have seedlings in them now. :)


We are busy working on plans for a new improved coop so they will be more comfortable when they are all outside full-time.

So Much for Spring.

We had a late ice/snowstorm Saturday that has slowed down the blooming of our shrubs and trees. I don't know exactly how much snow we got, but we were lucky...we had a blizzard warning with up to 2 feet of snow in the forecast and most of that went southwest or northeast of us. We just got mostly ice.

The good news is that as of this afternoon it was almost completely melted and even though all of the blossoms on our trees are gone, I'm sure that they will leaf out soon. I did cover our lilac bushes, because I couldn't bear to think of a whole year without the lovely lilacs. They seem to have fared well, I'll post pics when they bloom :)

Ellie's New Toy

Here we have the cute little girl pushing something in her stroller...





What could it be, that beloved toy she's playing so nicely with?



Why, it's Log!

Kids in motion