A big oops...

Last Saturday Kent and his manliest friends had a great time having a guys night, killing and grilling a chicken, smoking cigars, and drinking some manly hard liquor.  It was a night they'll never forget.  As far as the kids know, Kent took Dottie (our rooster) to a Rooster Farm.  He is crowing happily with all the other roosters every morning, and generally having a wonderful life.

 Fast forward a couple days...I had been out for a couple hours and when I got home the kids announce that they found....yes you guessed it....a chicken foot in our backyard!  How exciting!  Kaden tells me he thinks a snake snapped the foot off of someone else's chicken and brought it to our yard to eat it.  They have not connected the dots...or the Dotties...so to speak.  Seems they might think it a little coincidental that they find a chicken foot right after Dottie left, but we were apparently quite convincing in our wonderfully picturesque stories about the rooster farm.  Kent did get a little grief from me on this one, but how was he supposed to know a wild animal would go through the bag of chicken remains that he left sitting on the side of our backyard?  Hmmmm.....

And that is just a little snippet of the excitement we've had this week on the crazy train :)

9 Months Old!

Little Allie Jane has done it again...made it another month on this crazy train that is our family.  In fact, she is not completely along for the ride anymore.  It seems more and more that Allie is not only a part of what we are doing, but she often has her own agenda and her own opinions.  In the last couple of weeks, she has moved to a full on crawl and she is now pulling up on anything and everything to stand up.  She is just so pleased with herself and her accomplishments, and we are just beside ourselves because we are nowhere near ready for all that she can now do and get into!

Here is Allie being so proud of herself for pulling up and playing in the kitchen.

Allie is such a source of light and joy in our home.  She has the biggest smile on her face from the time she wakes up.  She then gets more and more excited with each person in the family that she sees.  In the last week, she has had several days where she is running a little fever, but she has remained amazingly happy.  She has two little teeth on the bottom, but that is it for the teeth count at this point. She is growing faster than we would like, she is happy, and we have decided to keep her!

A little of this and a little of that...

There has been so much going on around here, and I have had so many witty blog posts in my mind.  Then days go by, more has happened and the backlog of unwritten blog posts is feeling overwhelming to me.  So, we'll just have to go with more of a summary of all that has been happening lately.

• Our rooster (Dottie) is still with us, but his days are numbered. Kent and some of the guys have planned a "Kill it and Grill it" party for this coming Saturday.  Sorry, Dottie, only 3 days left of this lovely little life you have led.  We will remember you fondly...sort of.
• All five of our chickens have literally been flying the coop lately.  Kent and I went so far as to educate ourselves with a YouTube video and then clip the wings of three of the chickens.  And still they all just jump or fly our of their pen as they prefer the more "free range" situation that the entire backyard provides.  I have about had it with herding them all back into their area several times a day and cleaning up chicken s$%* on the back porch.  I kind of think Dottie is the instigator, though, so we will wait until he is gone to decide what needs to be done next.  If all goes well, we will start getting eggs out of the remaining chickens in the next month or two.
• Speaking of flying the coop...Allie jumped out the crib for the first time last week.  She was getting up on her knees and we knew the crib had to be lowered soon. I put her down for her nap and was barely downstairs when I heard the thump.  I found her sitting up in the middle of her room...practically laughing at me.  I had to immediately lower the crib all the way and so far she has not escaped again.
• In the last week, Allie is now fully sitting up and crawling.  Gone are the days of the army crawl.  She is all hands and knees and into everything.  Allie is sort of quietly into everything.  Just quiet enough that you sort of forget about her until you realize she is sucking on the fireplace poker (hypothetically, of course!), or some other equally undesirable activity.  She is the sweetest thing in the world, but something tells me she won't stand being forgotten for long in this crazy family of ours...
• Last weekend we went camping for the first time as a family of five.  We went with three other families that all had small children.  The kids had a great time wind surfing, playing in the water, playing in the dirt, eating s'mores and sleeping in the tent.  We had a great time, but were thoroughly exhausted after two nights.  Here are a few camping pics...

• Kaden had his first T-ball game this week.  Kaden's uncle Andy said that Kaden is "first in the league in sand sculptures"...meaning that he spends a little more time playing in the dirt than he does watching the ball.  He has a little ways to go on his skills and knowledge of the game...but we are taking baby steps. Here are a couple pics from his first game.

And lastly, Kaden has taken to sleeping on the floor lately. Maybe it's because it's a fraction of a degree cooler on the floor than on his bed, and we are doing anything we can to beat the heat in our house lately.  But tonight, either he convinced Maddie to join him or she just did it on her own.  And here is what we found when we went to check on them.  I'm not sure that Kaden's foot would appeal to me as a pillow...but to each his own.

That is all for now folks! ( I don't know why the writing shows up the way it does with a white background and it is driving  me crazy!)

8 Months Old!

Allie continues to grow and amaze us all.  Kaden and Maddie are just as enamored and amazed with her as ever.  It has been so fun to see how much she lights up with joy when she sees them and vice versa.  She has also become a little ham lately, making funny faces that she knows will make us laugh. We were a few days late taking her picture with the bear, but fear not...we fed her less for those few days so she wouldn't grow too much :)


Last month I showed how she was swaddled with one arm free while she slept. That lasted less than a week. She was still rolling over and then would be pushed up on her one free arm smiling at me when I came to check on her.  So, we decided it was time for her to be a free woman, and we have put our ace bandages into retirement.  Now she just scoots happily around her crib and settles in to sleep on her tummy.  This is much more to her liking and after a week or so, she was basically sleeping just as long as she was when wrapped up.  Losing any precious sleep is the main reason I always swaddled my kids for so long.  Being the perfect baby, however, she has made the transition very smoothly.


Allie has also become quite the eater in the last month.  A month ago I was worried that she wasn't taking baby cereal and wasn't eating very much of the baby food.  Now, she can down several jars in a day and hasn't slowed down on the breast feeding.  The only food combination she hasn't loved so far has been pear/mango/spinach.  I mean...can you really blame her?  They have some of the weirdest combinations in baby food these days.  I might like that in a salad, but pureed and sucked through a tube?  I'd pass on that too.


We are not in full crawling mode yet, but her forearm scoot continues to get faster and more efficient.  She does get up on her hands and knees now and rock back and forth.  But when she tries to launch herself forward, she just kind of lands on her chest and commences with her scooting.


Allie Jane is beautiful, funny, loved, and a ray of sunshine in the Vanderploeg household.  She is adored by all and is always happy and smiling.  We could not imagine life without that precious little cheeky and dimply smile.


On another note...Allie's monthly pictures with the bear are getting increasingly difficult to take. You'll notice the paper is on the other side of the bear this month so that she wouldn't constantly grab it and just start eating it.  And just in case you think I snap one picture and we're done...here are a few of this month's outtakes...

A Rooster in the Hen House...

We took the leap a few months ago and officially became the owners of five "backyard chickens."  The experience has been interesting, but mostly fun, so far.  A little before Easter Kent took Kaden and they picked out five little baby chicks.  We have Dottie, Buttercup, Daisy, Hoppy, and Penny.  They were so cute and fuzzy...

The chickens spent about the first five weeks inside our house.  They all lived in a big box (the one that the trampoline came in) in the laundry room.  Towards the end of the five weeks, I was getting pretty desperate for Kent to finish the chicken coop. The chickens were starting to jump up on the side of the box and just sit there.  None of them had really jumped out, though, so it seemed manageable.

One day I had my friend Song over.  After seeing the chickens, she asked if she should close the laundry room door.  I said, "No, they never jump out. It will be fine."  About an hour later, I walked downstairs and was shocked to see two chickens in the bathroom, one in Amy's room, and about 30 piles of poop on the laundry room floor!  I was shocked.  Apparently they were willing and able to jump out of the box.  Since Kent was leaving for the weekend, he quickly constructed a lid for me to cover the box with and the following week, they chicks moved to their new coop.

And now, after almost 3 months with these creatures, we have settled into somewhat of a routine.  In the morning we let them out of the coop.  They hang out in their yard all day, and in the evening they go back in the coop for the night. There were a couple of weeks there where we had to run around chasing the chickens at night with a broom and our bare hands trying to get them back into the coop. One night Kent was out of town and I was out there in the middle of a thunderstorm and hail desperately chasing scared chickens all over the yard and threatening to leave them on their own if they didn't get in the f%$#&* coop!  So, there was some cursing and there was some questioning as to why we ever decided to get chickens in the first place.  After a couple weeks, however, we have learned easier ways to coax the ladies back into the coop and things are going much more smoothly at night.

So, with a few hiccups, this owning chickens thing has gone pretty well smoothly except for one thing.  We have had a lingering and growing fear that Dottie may actually be a rooster. This would be problematic for several reasons.  The first, and most obvious is that neither I nor my neighbors want to hear that cock-a-doodle-doo at some un-Godly hour of the morning...every morning.  Secondly, we want eggs that we can actually eat, not lots more baby chicks.  I also think it would be quite disturbing to be trying to make my fried eggs in the morning and crack the egg into the pan only to find a not fully grown little chick starting to sizzle in the heat.  Yes, disturbing on many levels.

Back to our current problem...Dottie is the biggest, she (or more likely he) is the meanest, and has the look of a rooster with the red plume on top of the head and below the beak.  Multiple people with some level of experience raising chickens have now told us that they think we have a rooster in the hen house.  So now, we have a big problem on our hands.  Dottie is going to have to go...but how? and when?  Kent is trying to figure out when her meat will be at its prime.  I have decided that I want nothing to do with the disappearance or the eating of this chicken.  Yes I eat other chicken, and yes I will eat the eggs...but I have fed Dottie since he/she was just a fluffy little thing and I just don't really think I can stomach eating him.  I know, I do not make a good farm wife.  It is what it is.

In the next few weeks to months, something will have to be decided and something will have to be done.  Dottie will likely to continue to get louder and her/his presence may prevent us from getting usable eggs from the other chickens.  At this point, we know we have a problem and we don't fully know what to do about it.  Any suggestions?

7 Months Old!

Little Alllie Jane is all grown up! Not really, but she is getting bigger by the day.  I think we could also officially consider her to be mobile. She is not crawling, but she is quite efficient with scooting forward on her forearms.  She can get just about anywhere she wants.  We are very close to having to baby proof this house, which we are nowhere close to at this point.  Every time I turn around she is into something new...chewing on an electrical cord, organizing my papers that need to be filed, emptying the trash...whatever her little hands can get to!

After a successful initial attempt, Allie showed a complete and unflinching hatred for baby rice cereal.  So, we have now moved on to other baby foods.  So far she has had sweet potatoes, squash and carrots.  She tried bananas, but did not seem too pleased with those either.  I remember with my first two kids being much more methodical about introducing new food.  Every few days we would add a new food, just to make sure there was no adverse reaction to the previous food.  This time I just sort of walked past the baby food in the grocery store and used my arm to swipe about 20 containers into my cart as I was walking by.  Then, if I actually remember to feed her food, I just grab one out of the pantry and that is what she gets!  Very scientific if you ask me.

One of her milestones in the last week was going from both arms being swaddled when she sleeps to having one arm free.  She is now the one arm wonder when she sleeps.  We had to make the move because she was rolling onto her tummy with both arms being swaddled and then she was kind of stuck.  She is still rolling over with one arm out, so I think we may be done with swaddling in the next couple of weeks.  She already has three appendages free, just one more to go!

(Don't mind the ace bandage, it's just a little extra insurance on the swaddle!)

We all continue to absolutely love and adore this little girl.  She is such a ray of sunshine in our house. She is still just the happiest little baby and always smiling.   Kaden and Maddie are always excited when she wakes up and they can play with them.  They are such loving siblings...just a little overbearing sometimes.  I feel the worst for her when we are in the car.  Allie is facing backwards with a sibling on either side leaning into her carseat and talking right in her face.  Personally, it would make me a little claustrophobic, but she is usually a good sport about all the attention.

A Mid-Month Allie Update

In my last post I was elaborating about what a little chunk Allie is.  While people still comment on her little (or not so little) cheeks, she was only 10th percentile for weight at her 6 month appointment, weighing in at 13lb 13oz and 26 inches long. So, while she has some healthy little chubs on her, we are not concerned about her tipping the scales too much at this point.  She is, however, still showing signs of having the lightest hair in this family.  She may not be full Vanderploeg blonde, but she is probably the closest you will get to it out of our three kids.
In the last month Allie has more than mastered rolling over.  She has also started to master the army crawl/scoot forward.  She pulls both arms forward and then digs her elbows in to scoot forward whenever she wants to get to something.
Last weekend Allie accompanied Kent and I to Orlando, FL for uncle Kevin's wedding.  It was one of the most beautiful and fun weddings that we have ever been to.  The bride was beautiful, the groom couldn't stop smiling, there was lots of dancing and good food...and through it all Allie was a delight.  She was a champ for the whole trip.  Even when exhausted, she remained a smiling and happy baby. She also laughed hysterically every time she saw her dad dancing.  She lights us and laughs when she sees him more than anyone else in the world.  It is so amazing to watch.  Anyway....I digress...it was so fun to bring her and also to see her personality bloom under difficult circumstances (travelling, lack of sleep, etc).  She is just the funnest, happiest little thing and we are so blessed and lucky to have her in our family.  We struggled for a while whether it was a good idea to have 3 children, but what an incredible blessing that little girl has been.
Here are a few random recent pics of Allie:

Cinco de Mayo party for Auntie Jenny's Birthday

A photo shoot at Sears

New sunhat she picket out in Orlando

Seeing Uncle Kevin in Florida

Just hangin out in underwear! What a crew!