The Minivan's First Trip to the Feed Store

About two weeks after we got the keys to our new home, my husband came across an ad for some ducks at the feed store about 15 miles away. After considering the pros and cons of duck keeping for approximately 17 seconds, we piled everybody into the minivan and drove over to get some. The drive was pretty uneventful; we brought an old dog crate with us and determined we would pick out three of the five or so three-month-old Khaki Campbells the Co-op had to offer. After the guy at the Co-op chased down the three slowest ducks in the pen, we tossed them in the dog crate in the back of the minivan, covered the crate loosely with a tarp,  and headed back the 15 miles we had come.

Mind you, this wasn't actually the first time we'd transported poultry in the back of the minivan. We once drove about 8 hens from the family farm to my brother-in-law's house about 2 hours away. It was at night, and we put a blanket over the same dog crate, and everyone slept the entire, uneventful drive. Another time we picked up three spent layers someone was giving away, and butchered them in the garage of our townhome so we could learn and practice chicken processing without having to lay out any cash. Technically, there was nothing in the HOA bylaws that forbade butchering chickens in your garage, but we kept the garage doors shut during the process so that no one was any the wiser. It smelled...unpleasant. Especially with the garage doors shut. But the actual transportation of the three chickens was fine.

So we didn't actually think much about driving off with a few ducks in the back of our van. Rookie mistake, I guess. Ducks, unlike chickens, smell terrible. Our route home took us along a highway with a speed limit of 60 mph, and it was raining, but we rolled all the windows down. Even with the windows down and a nice mist of rain blowing through the van, the drive was odiferous, to say the least.

It is unbelievable how much three ducks can poop in the span of about 15 minutes. They put chickens to shame.

Now that they're home, we love them. Ducks have some serious attitude. They have a purposeful air about them that, paired with a waddle, makes them pretty hard to take seriously. Most importantly, we haven't seen a slug in the yard since we got them, which makes that initial odiferous drive totally worth it to me. Now that it's winter, it's hard to say how much of a difference they're making, but I'm looking forward to some spring gardening with their help patrolling for slugs and snails.

2014-The Year of Crazy

As the hardest year of my life comes to a close, and I sift through the photos on the SD card of my camera (a random hodgepodge of memories I happened to capture), the flood of emotions is complex and diverse. Overwhelmingly, the feeling that pervades all the others is gratitude. I truly wake up every morning surprised and delighted to find myself living the life I'm living now. I never would have seen any of this coming even one year ago, and the changes and transitions my family and I have undergone in just one year are pretty all-encompassing. We went from a family of four to a family of five, and then our family of five sold our 1100 sq. ft. townhouse in the suburbs and bought a big old farmhouse on 1.5 acres in the country. Our minivan suddenly finds itself in a new role it probably didn't see coming, either. From short little trips to Costco, Target, and various parks nearby in which it acquired a thin interior crusting of Larabars, sippy cups, Annie's Organic Bunny Crackers, and playground wood chips to hauling ducks, wood chippers, firewood, muddy boots, fence posts, and goats, this little minivan is experiencing a bit of an identity crisis that (if I'm honest) pretty closely parallels my own!

Since I constantly find myself doing things that would utterly shock my younger self, and wondering how I ended up with this life, I've decided to chronicle my adventures in transitioning to country living. I'm constantly marveling at the things I see around me (Frogs! Deer! Mountains! Owls! Coyotes! So many bugs!), constantly learning new skills (building a fire, pruning, putting in field fencing, caring for chickens, ducks, and goats, and so much more), and acquiring new vocabulary specific to country living (I actually use phrases like "go into town" and "Do you need anything at the feed store?" and "I dunno...It's not an International..."). Most of these things are things my husband takes for granted from growing up in a small town and spending time on his family's farm. He's constantly surprised by the useful things I don't know, but through his patient explanations, I'm becoming handier by the day, and I'm getting so tough I can even kill some of my own spiders instead of outsourcing that job to my five-year-old.

Ergo, this won't really be a blog about how to homestead or how to DIY or anything like that, although I expect there will end up being quite a bit about what not to do. Mostly it will be where I chronicle our escapades, triumphs, and failures for the amusement of friends and family. I'm hoping one day it will be a fun way to look back and see how far we've come. In the meantime, I'm grateful to be living a slower life, learning, growing, getting muddy, and waking up to the most beautiful sunrises I've ever seen.