First day of school

me: Owen! How was your very first day of pre-k?

Owen: great! The teacher said at the beginning NO WEAPONS. Weapons are like guns, swords, light sabers and stuff like that. So me, Oliver and Finn played guns on the playground and we didn't get caught! And I shot Oliver 10 times.



Ah. Great. You, Oliver and Finn are going to be quite the little prison gang someday.

We went on vacation and I didn't take any pictures.

Let's just get that out of the way right there in the title - I didn't take any pictures. I know, I know. It's much less interesting to read text on a blog than it is to look at cute pictures, but it is what it is. I am simply a lousy photojournalist, and what's more, I found it insanely frustrating as a kid when my mom would follow us around like a maniac with a camera insisting we reproduce certain activities, pose in front of various landmarks, and just generally pretend to have fun for the sake of taking a picture instead of actually having fun. So for the sake of posterity, I'll have to verbally recap our vacation and the last bit of the summer.

We went to the same place we went last year, and oh what a difference a year makes. In fact, this year's vacation was vastly superior to last year's vacation for two reasons. First and foremost, both kids are a year older. A year older, a year less irrational, a year more compliant, and a year less likely to plunge themselves to an untimely death at any moment. (Also! Both potty trained. We cannot overlook that.) Second, we learned that the secret to a successful vacation is going with another family. Kids have playmates that are NOT their siblings, and thus much less likely to instigate all-out brawls, parents have company AND can crib a little date-night time as a couple by switching off nights leaving one couple home with all the kids. In addition, while the ratio is the same when you have two parents and two kids as when you have four parents and four kids, somehow it seems much, much easier with four adults. For instance, in the morning: one adult can make breakfast and pack lunches, one adult can pack beach bags and organize the stuff for the day and straighten up the condo, two adults can do all the sunscreening and coralling of wiggly kids. It's great.

Newport was again, a great place to spend a vacation. The biggest highlight was the beach, as last year. I've concluded after this summer that there is literally no amount of time my children can spend at a beach (ocean or lake)after which they are sick of it. They can and do spend all day at a beach and still protest when it's time to go. We spent two full days at the beach, dragging all the children off only for lunch, during which they just demanded to go back to the beach. Easton's beach is great for kids, with the carousel, waterslide, playground and clean restrooms, but there is a significant red tide problem there that put a little bit of a damper on our second day at the beach. The kids also loved touring Fort Adams - I wasn't sure how a tour of a historic site would go over with a gaggle of four and unders, but surprisingly they were captivated. Owen became extremely into the idea of "listening tunnels" as a strategy to defeat his enemies (enemies TBD, naturally. He's just filing ideas away for later, I guess.)

We went back on the Amazing Grace Harbor tour. You might remember that we did this last year; if you do remember you're probably surprised to hear that we did it again. It was a pretty traumatic experience last year. Both children were waaaaay too young to be on a boat and it was all we could do to keep them from man-overboard. They ran around the boat, resisting arrest, refusing to wear life jackets, and just generally trying to drown. This year, they were both cooperative and loved it. Like I said before, what a difference a year makes. The other highlight of the week was the Newport Gulls baseball game. The boys LOVED it. The stadium is tiny (truly tiny) and it's not even a minor league team, it's a college wooden bat league. The staff was so friendly (the bat boys came out to the bleachers giving kids balls from the game, the announcer would announce whatever you wanted him to - he wished the birthday boy in our party a happy second birthday - and the whole night out was so cheap! Including tickets for our family, parking, and a bag of popcorn at the stadium, we spent $17. By contrast, we spent $28 that morning to play mini-golf - and the mini-golf place didn't even charge us for Elias! (BTW, if you find yourself in RI - there has to be a better mini-golf place than Mulligan's Island. We weren't impressed). We enjoyed taking the boys out for lunch, which we didn't even attempt last year. All in all, a good time was had by all.

Now summer is winding down, and Owen is so, so excited to be starting at the "big school" (the public elementary school across the road from us) in pre-k this fall. I have mixed feelings about it. After our week away, we went back and spent a weekend at our friend's houses in West Roxbury in our old neighborhood. It's true, summer here in Lakeville is great, but as the fall approaches, I'd much rather be back in Westie, with all the kids' old friends, our friends, and the city than here. I'm just a city person, honestly. For what it's worth, the kids have made new friends and if you asked them, I'm pretty sure they'd rather be here. And I do think that I'd rather live here than in a suburb of Boston - I'll take Lakeville over Needham or Natick any day. But it did make me a little West Roxbury-sick this weekend, I have to admit it. Maybe it's just because it was where our first real home was, but I miss it and suspect I'll always be comparing where we live to there. I do realize there are real advantages to where we are, however (great public schools being chief among them), so c'est la vie. And la vie rolls on into the fall.......

Summer

In today's news, summer continues to be great here in Lakeville.

Today, the town had a 4th of July celebration at the Grove (complete with guy in colonial garb showing up to read the declaration of independence and the town band - average age 75 if it's a day - playing a patriotic medley that was actually pretty peppy) and it was great. There were games for kids - old school potato sack and relay races, a parachute, and water balloon toss - and of course, the lake for swimming. Almost all of the kids' school friends and their families were there. We ended up having an impromptu potluck lunch/party with several other Housatonic Child Care Center families who are also associated with Hotchkiss. A good time was had by all. True story: I said to one of the other women there "I thought Lakeville was just AWFUL all year, until memorial day. Now I think it's totally great! It's such a great place to spend the summer!" She replied "well, that IS why most people don't live here year round." Ba dum, ching. Right. Of course.

Anyway, The past few weeks have hatched a different Cox family long-game. Sure, we still want to move back to civilization in a few years. But we want to try and do so in a way that lets us keep the house. If that means renting instead of buying for our next move, it might be worth it if we don't have to sell what we hope will someday just be our vacation house. I'd like to spend quite a few more summers at the grove.

Some photos from the day:

and this one, just because it's funny. It's an action shot of Owen throwing a water balloon - it's just the way the photo came out but this kid looks like he as a killer gym-chiseled physique in this shot, does he not? when I first saw it I thought "who is that teenager wearing Owen's star wars swim trunks?" (Immediately after, I thought "why the heck didn't I notice he was wearing his socks? Did he swim in those?"

After School Pickup, Before Dinner:

Have I mentioned how great it is to live down the street from the beach?

Curb Appeal

Andy had a commitment this afternoon but I really was getting tired of looking at our sorry window boxes:

So, despite my misgivings in trying to do any sort of project while in sole charge of the kids, I decided we were going to go for it. Surprisingly, despite the loss of about a cubic foot of potting soil (some was spilled while "helping me", some was deliberately dumped instead of helping me, and at least a handful was eaten by Elias) we managed to get it done. we cleared out the dead plants and old soil, and refilled them with shade loving flowers - mostly varieties of impatients and begonias, and a couple blue flowering vines that supposedly like shade. I ended up with 5 extra 6-packs of impatients, so I planted them around the stairs.


and after:

whole front of the house:

It really does make a huge difference from the street, but looking at these pictures it's not really appearing as a dramatic effect. The pictures aren't really capturing the extent of the improvement, but oh well. It really does look much better now.

In the back of the house, we have the truly awesome Hen Palace, built entirely by Andy and I have to say I am impressed. It's really nice.

Here are some interior shots of where the hens roost at night, for safety. you can also see the nest boxes he built with a separate hinged roof, to make egg collection easier:

The thing is a veritable 5-star hen hotel. It has indoor and outdoor areas. shaded and sunny areas. some grassy area, some dirt for pecking and scratching....and yet. One thing we didn't anticipate is that we would end up with the 5 dumbest hens on the planet. In all the chicken books I read, it just explained what sort of living environment was ideal for hens - some indoor area, some outdoor area, secure from predators, etc. It provided plans for building a luxury chicken coop just like the one we built. But our stupid chickens can't figure out how to get in and out of the coop (where, according to the book, it is their instinct to go in at night and roost, and come out during the day and forage, peck, wander around, whatever.) When the coop was completed, we put them in to the run, where they pecked around. as night started to fall, they showed no interest into going into the coop to roost. So we had to actually enter the coop ourselves, catch them, and put them in for the night. In the morning, we opened the door. surely, they would walk down the ramp into their fenced area to forage around and do what hens do. Nope. By noon, they were still all in the coop. I started to worry about them starving, so I moved their food and water (which is supposed to be out in their run) into the coop and tried to shoo them down the ramp. no such luck. they're STILL in there now, and it's 5pm. The door is open, they just can't or don't want to walk through it. dummies.

......I'd Be Rich

If I had a nickel for every conversation I had, exactly like this one:

Person: "So, how are you guys settling into Lakeville?"
Me: (politely, if unenthusiastically) "Well, thanks."
Person: "you guys are right in town, right? Do you LOVE it?!"
Me: "We're settling in. Getting the house in order. Starting to come together."
Person: (visibly consternated that I am not singing loudly the praises of the eden that is Lakeville) "wait, you guys haven't been here for a summer yet, right? you came in the fall."
Me: "right. well, technically we got out here mid august last year, but we were in a rental far from campus while we sold our house and got our bearings and figured out where we wanted to live. We didn't move to Lakeville until November."
Person: "Ahhhh. that explains it. Just wait till the grove opens and you're here for a summer. You'll love it. Especially where you are."
Me: (inwardly rolling eyes, outwardly polite.) "So I've heard. Can't wait! thanks!"

....I'd be rich.


Everyone told us to buy a house in Lakeville. Despite this, we started our house search in Great Barrington and Egremont, MA. I was dead set on living over the MA border. Our realtor gamely showed us houses, but kept hinting that if we were working in the Lakeville/Sharon area, we really should consider looking at properties in CT, because we'd really hate the winter commute and she was sure we were just going to want to be in Lakeville in the summer anyways. It's so great! So we looked at places in Lakeville and Sharon. We saw a huge house in Sharon that I was in love with, 2 miles from the hospital I work at, 5 bedrooms, being sold by an elderly couple who needed to go into nursing care and so priced lower than it was worth. We almost moved on it, but we kept getting nudged by well meaning locals in our house search back into Lakeville, to a house near the lake. We ended up in this little house in the middle of town 1/2 mile from the town beach, which everyone calls "the grove". It was really small, and didn't have a huge yard, which we assumed we would get since we were moving to the country. It was a little oddly laid out. The space definitely could have been used better in the original floor plan, and it would take more money than we want to put into it to make those changes now. It needs some updating. And yet, everyone - including our realtor, who would have made twice as big of a commission on the sharon house - kept telling us that if we were considering getting a place on Prospect St. we'd be crazy not to grab it, and so we did. I've been tepid on the house from the get go. I figured it would be passable once we did the necessary improvements, but I definitely didn't LOVE it and there were aspects of it I really didn't like. However, despite the fact that I come from a long line of people who are constitutionally incapable of admitting they were wrong under any circumstance, a character trait which I definitely inherited more than a touch of - I hereby announce to the great wide internets, everyone was right. Lakeville IS great in the summer. Today was the opening weekend for the town lake, so I put the kids in the stroller and rolled on down to see what this vaunted grove was all about. It's a great little beach - tons of sand, tons of grassy area, the requisite fries n' soft serve hut, docks for boating and swimming, grills for grilling, etc. There are lifeguards, a little kid section (blocked in by docks, supervised by a lifeguard, with water that only goes up to about Owen's waist) so you really can just let the littles go play. And the best part is that the grove is only open to people who either live here or rent a house for more than a month (and can prove it with a utility bill or a lease), and because the town is so small, it's always people you know and never crowded. Most of Owen's preschool class and their families were there - this is a small town, so that's about 9 kids - and the kids had such a blast that Elias went missing around 5:40 this afternoon, and after a frantic search we found that he had literally fallen asleep in a corner. All the summer people are here this weekend opening up their summer homes, the restaurants all opened up their outdoor seating, and there starts this weekend a series of festivals, fairs, and town/region celebrations that happen every weekend all summer to entertain the weekenders.

I 100% recant on wondering at times if this house was a bad idea. What I didn't realize about living in a town that is primarily a vacation town is that we now have a vacation house. Sure, it's a bit smaller than would be ideal, and needs some updating, but I definitely made a 180 on the whole Lakeville experience today. There are worse things than having a weekend house that you don't even need to pack the car and drive to on the weekend because you're already there.

Chickens. The first two weeks.

Why chickens? Most of the people aware of our little chicken adventure have been enthusiastic and supportive (backyard chickens are definitely an "in thing" right now - but you don't have to take my word for it. If backyard chickens ever had any hipster cred, they lost it all when Willams Sonoma started selling a line of $1000+ chicken accessories. not kidding. click the link) But some people are perplexed by and/or outright hostile to the whole chicken situation. So before I update my loyal readers on the status of the chicks in our basement, I'll try and provide a few of our reasons for getting them in the first place.

I'll tell you one reason we did NOT get chickens: To save money. If you think keeping backyard chickens is in any way an economical choice, you're dreaming. Take a walk over to your local supermarket and head to the dairy aisle. You can probably get a dozen large white eggs for less than two dollars. At that price, we're going to need to get 90 dozen eggs (that's 1,080 eggs) out of these biddies before we even recoup the investment we've already made, and they're two weeks old. Just to be clear, that's not counting any chicken feed, grit, bedding equipment and whathaveyou we spend on them going forward. Not to mention, chickens only lay for two years. Did you know that? They also don't start laying for about 6 months after you get them. After they're "layed out", you just have a passel of avian pets that do nothing useful for you. Luckily they don't tend to be long lived, but you still probably have about a 2 total years where the birds don't lay. Also, chickens are incredibly temperamental animals. They won't lay unless they have between 15-16 hours of light. That means, "naturally", chickens won't really lay in the winter. If you want them to, you need to light their coop on a timer so that they have the appropriate amount of exposure to light. They hate to have their feet wet. If they get "stressed" - and they're easily stressed - they'll lose their feathers, stop laying, or turn on each other. In order to keep them happy, fed, and healthy you need to put in a lot of time and energy. I read a 300+ page book on chicken keeping, and then used another as a cross reference. So if time is money, then we're even further in the hole. And our chicken coop is home-made from scrap lumber by Andy. Imagine how many eggs we'd need to break even on one of those spiffy Williams Sonoma jobbers? Obviously, there are lot cheaper ways to get eggs then ordering 6 silver-laced wyandottes from mypetchicken.com. So we certainly didn't do it out of some misplaced effort in frugality.

We did get them, at least in small part because I am highly uncomfortable eating and purchasing standard supermarket eggs (and dairy products and meat, for that matter, but those are blog posts for another day). I read Peter Singer's The Way We Eat several years ago when Andy and I were first married, and then I made him read it. Although I wasn't completely convinced (and Andy would never be) to adopt a vegan diet, I was forever convinced that I couldn't participate or support industrial agricultural practices. And the worst of the worst - believe it or not, truly the most inhumane farming practices of all - are commercial egg productions. I've read more and more the last few years about the conditions that make those supermarket eggs so cheap. If you missed that Nicholas Kristoff column I recommend you read it - once you do, it's hard to un-read it. It's horrifying stuff.

But of course, just because you object to industrial agriculture practices doesn't mean you need to turn into some crazy back-to-the lander trying to homestead with a chicken coop in your backyard and a dairy goat in the front. It's perfectly possible to buy cruelty-free eggs at the grocery store, which is what we usually do. (Actually, now that we've moved out to farm country, we generally buy them straight from one of the nearby farms, or one of our chicken keeping neighbors.)So the chickens weren't obtained because we have no other way to access eggs we're comfortable eating, that's merely a major perk. We got them, largely, because we wanted the kids to learn something about the relationship between humans and animals with respect to food, and a little bit about the effort required to obtain food, and a lot about the appropriate way to treat animals that provide you food.

I. know. You're rolling your eyes. Listen, in many ways, I am one of the most cynical people on the planet. But I do think that it's a shame that I got to the age of 25 or so before I ever had a serious thought about the treatment of animals in factory farms. And laugh all you want, but this is something that is important to both Andy and I. Am I aware that our kids will totally go through a rebellious oscar-myer-bacon-on-paper-plates-washed-down-with-high-fructose-corn-syrup-while-denying-climate-change phase? yes, I am - and that's fine, but I do believe that when they get over that,they will come out of it as adults with at least shreds of what we teach them now. It's really important to us to model a environmentally and socially conscious brand of consumerism. Some people feel strongly their kids need to go to church every week whether they like it/understand it or not, and we feel strongly that our kids need to recycle and go without hot dogs if we can't find ones we feel good about buying whether they like it/understand it or not. And I seized upon chickens as a bit of a teachable moment to that end. So far, the chickens have been an incredibly rich learning experience for the kids. We talk about them every day - what they need to stay healthy, how chickens behave, what their habits are and how they adapted those habits based on their environment, why they do the things they do (even when they all ganged up on the weakest one and started to attack it). Owen has made a lot of thoughtful connections and comments between the chicken that we eat and the chickens in the basement, and if we end up with a vegetarian out of this that's fine with me. We've talked a lot about how some people think it's ok eat animals, and some people don't, and that we do but only if they are well taken care of.

So, speaking of well taken care of, I'd say our personal chickens are, for the most part. We started off with 6 - and the kids named them Bossy, Chirpy (real creative, there), Rosie, Zebra, Jo, and Caboose. Caboose was so named because she was pretty runty and always seemed to be 'resting' in the rear while the other ladies were eating, drinking or running around. Sadly, Caboose's retiring nature ended up being a symptom of failure to thrive, and we had to remove her from the group so that she wasn't pecked to death. Andy's uncle Tim was thankfully here the day that Caboose needed to be put down and he knew how to do it humanely from his work at the Audobon Society. So now there are 5. 4 of them seem to be growing like weeds and seem larger every time I go down there. The 5th - Jo, we've decided, although the names are hard to keep track of for the other 4 since they all look exactly the same - is much smaller. I'm hoping this isn't a slower-motion version of Caboose's failure to thrive, because Tim isn't coming back to visit anytime soon and I'm worried I'm not up to the putting-down task. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

They're in the basement, still, and will be there another 2 weeks before they move outside. Let's bust some chicken myths: 1) do they smell bad? In a word, no. We have far too few chickens to have any discernible smell. They have pine shavings as litter just like a hamster or rabbit would, and as long as you change it every other week or so you won't have odor problems with fewer than a dozen chickens, especially those who, like ours, have access to the outdoors. In the books I've read, odor control is addressed when people have more than 20 chickens - 20 seems to be the threshold where odor becomes a problem. They certainly don't smell like anything right now. 2) are they loud? Well, you can hear them. They're not loud. they peep, they cheep. I did a lot of research and deliberately got a quiet breed so we wouldn't bother our neighbors, but in general only roosters are really loud, and we (knock wood) have none of those.

Otherwise, we are looking forward to getting them outside. Andy is still working on constructing their coop, a project which the boys have also been involved in and are loving. Once it's constructed, we'll have an enclosed coop for sleeping and nesting and a 10 foot run for the chickens to forage and enjoy the great outdoors in, safely. We're hoping to roof at least part of their run so that they can enjoy the outdoors in the winter, too, when it's not too cold. As soon as the chicks are outside I'll post more pictures, but it's hard right now because that red brooder lamp makes all the photos of the chicks look weird. So for anyone that's not totally chickened-out after this long post (ha! I slay me), stay tuned as the chicken adventure continues.