Little Peeps

Nope. Not the marshmallow kind.

We have real actual chicks! I've wanted chickens for some time now, but we just finally got ourselves together enough to do it. We got baby chicks on Wednesday, and Seville is totally enamored of them (as am I. I mean, really, who wouldn't be?)

They're really unbearably cute. They are so soft and fuzzy and weigh about as much as a paperclip and do nothing but peep and poop all day. Believe it or not, the constant pooping is a commodity I was looking forward to. I want the fertilizer. But obviously I'll be even more excited about eggs, when they come. It will be a while yet.

In the meantime, we need to find names for them (which means we can't eat them, as I understand it. You can't eat something that has a name.). Our neighbor, who has long teased us about our cat's name (Richard Parker - after the tiger in "The Life of Pi" - we always use both the first and last name, as in the book) says he fully expects sophisticated first and last names for the chickens as well. We'll see.

New York City - Auntie x11

My sister, who lives in Manhattan, just had a baby. She's sooooo cute and tiny! Dutiful aunt that I am trying to be, I went out to visit her. I didn't bring a camera because Delta charges for every bag (even your first one! jerks!), and so I was trying to cram the trip into a carry-on. (My sister gave me a hard time all weekend about how I looked like a tourist with all my multi-purpose clothes and shoes - there is apparently no worse insult in Manhattan. Like how in Germany the worst thing you can do is call someone a pig-dog. oooooooh.)

Anyway, there are a total of two pictures of me in New York, both taken from my brother-in-law's cell phone, so the quality is great, as you'd imagine. This one is in some fancy hotel where we asked if we could change a diaper...

And this one holding the baby in the Theater District before bidding my sister and her hubby farewell for the evening. (They went to a Broadway show, while I took the baby back home via subway and bus and took care of her until they got back.)

I didn't really do anything New York-ish while I was there. It would have been more or less the same if we'd been in some po-dunk town in Iowa (sorry, Iowans). But Manhattan is definitely its own thing. We were running errands one day and I went to pick something up at the drugstore. I'm crossing the street to the Walgreens when I look up and realize I'm on Times Square. Everyone around me is dressed up, hustling and bustling, taking pictures, full of energy. Meanwhile I'm here just buying diapers. Funny.