Joy

We have been making plans for the summer, specifically summer camp for JD. He will be going to the YMCA summer camp near our house. They have the pricing structure set up so that if you want your child to go for the whole summer, you would be an idiot not to join the Y. It is more expensive to not join; that is the member rate for summer camp plus membership fee is less than the non member rate for summer camp. So, we have a 6 month membership to the YMCA. Super bonus, we have a place to go swimming this summer. JD already loves it and asks to go every day and we haven’t even gone swimming yet. The childcare has lots of toys, a tv, and a nice little playground. Also, we have friends who belong and have children the same age, so there is a good chance he has a friend when he gets there. I even saw one of my Sunday school kids yesterday.


I’ve been taking the dance classes, Zumba and Hip Hop. The Hip Hop class made me realize that I am a (almost) 30 year old white woman. It was fun, but I suspect I look ridiculous. Daddy has been running and doing weights.

The big excitement this week-end was that the chickens arrived. Our yard isn’t big enough and our neighbors live too close for us to have our own chickens, but that isn’t the case on the compound (Family property in Hammond). Since December we have been preparing for chickens. Technically they are my cousins, but it has grown into a family project. I said I wanted to help as much as possible and have one chicken be JD’s; he named his chicken Miss Granger. The coop was built, the fence put up and the chickens arrived on Saturday. We were there for the home coming. I have photos that I plan to post on face book after Easter. They won’t start laying eggs for several more weeks, and we are anxiously awaiting our farm fresh eggs. I’d really like to also be a co-owner of a dairy cow, but I think that will be too much work at this point. With the chickens we can help clean the coop on week-ends, but cows have to be milked twice a day.

Sunday we had the Easter Party with the Knights of Columbus. Not only was it a well organized party where lunch was served before candy consumed, but as the KC are a men’s organization, the moms didn’t have to anything other than wrangle their own children. The Easter egg hunt was split up so that JD was 1 of 4 kids in his age group and the oldest of the 4… he got a lot of candy.

Another thing we have been doing more of recently is cooking from scratch. We don’t buy bread at the store at all any more. We make bread, doughnuts, biscuits, tortillas, pizza dough and cake from scratch. Last night I made red beans from scratch for the first time. They came out pretty good. We also found the best cookbook ever, Joy of Cooking . We checked it out from the library 6 weeks ago and just keep renewing it. We are planning to go ahead and buy it. When we were extolling its virtues to Grandma, she asked to look through it and randomly opened it to a recipe for Mango Lassi… awesome. I already cleaned a bunch of cookbooks off my cookbook shelf that we won’t need anymore.

JD has been hanging out with daddy this week since there is no school. Yesterday they did a photo shoot and went for a visit to his “old school”. After they left JD said, “They really love me at my old school.”

I was also told when I got home there was some sort of incident during the day the result of which was JD agreed to throw away all his candy from the egg hunt except for the chocolate Easter bunny. Daddy said he ate some starbursts and then went crazy. I have had a suspicion for a while that JD may be sensitive to food dyes but it’s hard to tell since almost everything has food dyes added (See above about cooking from scratch).