Mamma Works

This year, we decided to get some chickens for eggs.  Our household goes through four dozen eggs a week.  I live in the middle of nowhere, New York, so why not?  (I know; it's not normal, but neither are we!) So, a couple of weeks ago, we got six baby chickens.  Their names are:  Chirpy, Tweedy, Pecky, Stripes, Omega, and Baby Chicken.  Can you guess which on the two year old named?  :) So, we invested in these gold beauties and needed to find a place for them to reside.  I figured it would be easy, because this whole "backyard chicken" thing has been going on for quite some time now.  Everyone's got this figured out and it will be as easy as pie getting ready for "the girls" to come home.  Boy, was I wrong.  Maybe I'm wired the wrong way or something, but I found it incredibly difficult to sift through the information out there about finding a good affordable chicken coop for six hens.  I researched by looking through websites, forums, blogs, soci

Tell me if this sounds familiar.  No sooner do I get all of the groceries put away than my husband tells me that he needs razors.  ("Ugh!  Are you kidding me," I think.)  So, I have to remember to make a special stop at a Rite Aid this weekend, because there is NO way I am battling through Walmart again.  You get it, right?  Do you hate the random stops to RiteAid as much as I do?  It's not that I have it out for the organization its just one more time lugging the kids out of the car, herding them away from the candy/toys, and then carrying them screaming out of a store.  Please, I have better things to do. Truth be told, this kind of thing used to happen all the time in my house.  Even though we had a system to make sure we were getting the groceries we needed, we still missed things.  It was the things that hide in my house, the not so obvious stuff, that would get me each time.  And then I found a solution that has literally changed everything. Instead of the fre

Do you believe in women's rights?  Me too.  But, I feel like my generation has been duped.  "Work hard, sweetheart, and YOU can be anything you want," they said... I can remember it so vividly.  Standing up in my sixth grade classroom to fight for my right to play tag football with the boys during recess.  The teachers, all the while, muttered that it was no longer appropriate for the girls to play, because the girls who wanted to play with the boys were "developing."  No longer having boyish figures meant it was time for us to play more passive games or to cheer for the boys on the sidelines.  It made me so mad.  With gritted-teeth, I said,  "Girls can play!  Girls are just as good, if not better than boys at ALL sports."   "Settle down, Gretchen," they said.  "Boys play too rough for girls.  It is just a matter of nature, boys are stronger and faster than girls," they continued.  Each word that they muttered put a fire into