4th of July Week

At the beginning of the week, Anthony took James to the grocery store and then to a friend's house to check on his aquariums, leaving me at home with Rett. I was trying to get him to finish his dinner and he kept winking at me. The face he makes when he winks is so ridiculous! He scrunches up his whole face to do it. I laugh every time!

At bath time Rett had so much fun having the bathtub all to himself. He got to play with anything he wanted and didn't get pushed over or have toys taken from him. At one point he decided to start hiding under a bucket and then peak out to see if I was watching him. Love this boy!

The chicks are growing so fast! It is hard to believe they are only 1 week old. They are started to look more like birds than chicks.

While at the playground at McDonalds, James finally convinced Rett to climb up into the tunnels with him. Usually he is too scared to go up there. He liked it for a little while, but then he was crying and I had to climb up there and get him back down.

James tried poprocks for the first time. He loved it! He laughed and laughed!


Rett didn't want to try it, but he watched Anthony eat some. Look at that face! So amazed!

James built a magnatile maze to put the chicks in whenever we clean their cage or I need to check their bottoms. It is so funny to see them stick their heads out of the open squares!

We trekked to home depot to buy wood to start building the pen for the quail. This is the frame Anthony built and painted. He spent all of the holiday adding mesh panels and a door that latches. It is so close to being done! We will probably move the chicks into it in about a week.

They were looking cramped in the tupperware bin, so we switched them to a larger cardboard box. Now it is harder to watch them since the sides aren't see-through. But it is fun to watch them stretch their wings in the larger area!

Smashing a pinata was on our summer list, so the 4th of July seemed like a good day to do it. James was ready to smash it!

Rett wanted to hit it a few times, then he gave the bat back to James to get the job done.

Then we did some sparklers. Just a few because James wanted to save some for after dark.

It was finally time to go see the fireworks! James decided to bring a few firefighter hats.

While we were waiting for the fireworks, the people around us were doing sparklers and small fireworks. It was a great preshow!

Time for the show!

Rett was scared of the "big fireworks", so I brought some headphones for him. He liked them, but he still refused to watch. As soon as they started, the closed his eyes and shut down. I picked him up and he was clung to me for the entire time. I would ask him if he was ok and he would keep his eyes closed and just nod his head.

James laughed and laughed! He loved every minute of it!

Of course, on the way home, Rett was happy and excited and kept saying, "Fireworks! Fireworks!" like he loved it. At least he wasn't traumatized!

Our town had the fireworks a day early, so on the actual holiday, we didn't do much. While Anthony worked on the quail cage, the boys took turns "helping", watching tv, going with us to the store, and we took a few minutes out to do a fireworks craft. We seriously only do crafts twice a year, so here is proof that we did it :)

Happy 4th of July!

Quail Chicks!

After much waiting and wondering, our quail chicks finally started to hatch! I had read so many things online of people saying that none of their eggs hatched, or only a few of them that it got me worried it would happen to us. I just wanted at least a few to hatch! When I took the eggs out of the turner a few days before they were due to hatch, I saw about four of the eggs move around after I set them down. They were alive!

Saturday morning I noticed some eggshell on the ground in the incubator, which meant that a chick was trying to hatch! So exciting! We checked on it throughout the day and we could hear it peeping, but it seemed to be taking so long. I finally couldn't take it anymore and wanted to see what was happening, so I opened the incubator (which you aren't supposed to do) and quickly turned the egg so that the hole was facing up instead of down. I think it helped the chick, because it hatched pretty quickly after that and we got to see it all!

Right after hatching:

Resting on the other eggs:

A few minutes after the first one hatched, Anthony got home from work and I went to the grocery store. By the time I got back, another one had hatched!

In the middle of all this excitement, we realized that Rett was acting strange after he got up from his nap. He was just sitting on the couch and not trying to bug us or anything. I checked on him and he was burning up with a fever. We tried to get him take some medicine, but before we could he vomited everywhere :( A little while later we tried to make him swallow some medicine which caused more vomiting. Poor guy!

That night after everyone was finally asleep, I woke up in the middle of the night with an upset stomach. I don't know if it was the same thing Rett had or just a coincidence, but I was awake almost all the night. On the bright side, I got to check on the chicks. By 5am we had seven more hatch out!

Rett woke up around 6:30am crying, so I set him up on the couch with some water and the ipad. Then I fell asleep on the couch and at some point went back to my bed. Anthony woke up a little bit later and went out on the couch to be with Rett, where they both fell asleep. When I woke up again at 10:30am, everyone else was still asleep in random places: James on the floor in our room, Anthony and Rett on the couch. It was a sickly Sunday!

Being home meant that we got to watch more of the baby chicks! Two more hatched on Sunday during the day, this was the first one of the day, #10. The cool hatching part is towards the end if you want to fast forward.

  

Since they had dried out enough, we got to move them to their temporary home outside of the incubator. We ended up with 11 healthy chicks that hatched! Unfortunately one died after about four days because we didn't realize that it had something called "pasty butt" where their poop dries up and blocks their vent and then they can't poop anymore. Since then we have been diligently checking all the chicks twice a day to make sure it doesn't happen to anyone else. So now we have 10 happy and healthy chicks, growing every day!

James holding them for the first time:

Look at how little they are in Anthony's hand! They are almost a week old now and have easily doubled in size.

James is really good at being careful with them and he was very serious about placing them gently back in their box. I was so proud!

The chicks are starting to grow their adult feathers, so in the next week or two we will be able to look at their feathers to tell which ones are male and which ones are females. We can only keep a few males (otherwise they fight), so if we end up with more than two we aren't sure what we are going to do with them yet.... All of the girls are going into the hutch Anthony is building for them on our back porch. They will start laying eggs by mid August and we will be eating quail eggs!  

End of June

After a fun play date at the park, we stopped and got happy meals. James likes to go inside because then he can get the little cups of ketchup. He has decided that he likes ketchup now! He has always been so particular about his food mixing with other food, so this is great progress for him.

We got a new toy sprinkler that uses water to shoot balls into the air. Since Rett doesn't like being in the water and James loves it, we have had to get creative with what water things we can play with at home (since that rules out the beach and the pool unless someone can come with me to watch Rett).

We decided to try out bowling with the boys as a practice run for a bowling elder's quorum activity coming up. We tried two different places and each one we went to said they were booked up for bowling leagues. Bummer! One of them was all the way in Daytona, so it was a good 45 minute drive home. Rett decided to randomly start making large raspberries in his hand while we were driving home. It was so loud, we all couldn't stop laughing!

I couldn't find Rett's swim shirt, so I put him in one of James' old soccer jersey's. I was trying to convince him to go play in the water in the backyard. He decided to hide behind my chair instead.

A week after our failed attempt to go bowling, we finally were successful! The elder's quorum reserved a few lanes for families who wanted to come bowl and James was so excited!! Rett was excited for the little arcade they had there, so we took turns chasing him around while James concentrated on bowling.

Our lane had some technical difficulties where it kept resetting over and over, so we had to wait for someone to come fix it.

We didn't have bumpers on our lane, but we still did pretty good! Rett just liked pushing the balls.

James even got the hang of throwing the ball without the roller. By the end he was pretty good!

After we finished our game, I let James do an arcade game since Rett did a bunch while he was bowling. He chose this hunting game and really got into it. 

Rett was ready to go home :)