Finally, the snow is all melted and the temps are rising! The ducks are getting back in the water again, but into the small water tub I have for them and NOT their wading pool.  Don’t you think this would make for some nasty drinking water?  Why don’t they care?? 

Pretty soon I’m gonna need to clean the poop off the patio and get them focused on the back of the yard.  I also got my first egg again since November, woo hoo!!

More snow last weekend.  This means the ducks still aren’t laying eggs.  Seems to me they have their days and nights mixed up.  They stay under the deck all day when it’s bright and beautiful.  When it gets dark or starts to snow, they go to the middle of the yard and they sleep there all night.  Isn’t that backwards?

Kacey doesn’t particularly like the snow.  The neighbor dogs always want to play, but she won’t have much of that!

The only great thing about this white stuff is that it keeps me inside and addicted to my sewing machine.  I finished my second baby quilt for the month, which in itself is incredible!   That big word, FINISH, isn’t usually in my vocabulary.  So here’s one of my favorite boys, Arvo, with his new blankie.  I used the abundant scraps I had from the fabulous freecycle giveaway to make a pretty cute bug blanket. 

Big brother, Nico, pointed out all the bugs for Arvo.

I’m pretty sure that Nico has much more fun when the boys come over than Arvo does at this stage of the game.  Arvo just wants his mama.  Understandable!

I am a thrifty kinda girl!  So much so that I can’t even bring myself to throw away scraps like this….

leftover from the multiple string quilts I’ve been working on.  Really now, what can be done with pieces so darn small?

I’ve got a new quilt, thanks to ideas from a few different quilters, Crazy Mom Quilts and I Love Baby Quilts.  Crazy Mom did this fabulous Ticker Tape quilt.  What a great scrap using idea!  And the mini size baby quilts are a super idea over at I Love Baby Quilts.  Why does an infant in a carrier need much more blanket than this? 

The finished size is approximately 24″ x 24″.  I started it last week during the Super Bowl and finished it mid week, which for me is an accomplishment just to finish something!  Does anyone else sew at times on their coffee table like this?

Absolutely enjoyable!  And if you want to make this little blankey, just follow my brief show and tell….

Start by making a quilt sandwich.  White cotton, batting and a soft flannel for the flip side. 

Pin together and now you’re ready to put your scraps on AND quilt at the same time. 

There really is no rhyme or reason to it.  Start putting pieces all over the top side until you’ve covered the whole thing.

Keep going and going and going.

I used a satin binding so when this little baby gets a little older, he’ll love to rub that satin right up to his cheek (or suck on it!)  and take it with him everywhere he goes ;-)  He’ll be addicted, just like my oldest daughter was to her first blanket!

Of course, the ultimate product is after it has been washed and has that great crinkle and softness.  The edges frayed really nice too! 

 Nope, I didn’t forget about you duck followers.  They’re hangin’ around the back porch during these cold days.  I’m such a nice girl, I put some straw under the deck for them. 

I guess I’m just ASKING them to poop all over my patio!

Seeing that this is my first winter with ducks, I have determined that snow eggs may be  harder to find than even hidden eggs.  Really now, can you see an egg in this mess of white?

Luckily, or not, the girls quit laying eggs after our last crazy snowstorm.   This was the last egg and we haven’t seen one since.  I guess I can understand their confusion and frustration.  No grass, no worms, no mud, no large masses of water.  What IS there to do around here?

They hunker down in snow drifts.

Use one trail to go back and forth down the yard which looks to me something like a cha-cha.

Peek through the kitchen door to see what leftovers might be coming their way.

Continously poop all over my deck!  I try to chase them off, but they don’t seem too scared.

And then they give me this look and cock their neck, “Who, ME?”

Right now my obsession really has nothing to do with ducks, except that I do worry about them a little too much. They spend most days sitting in snow drifts and tonight we’ll see how they do in the minus temps. So far they don’t seem to be fazed by any of our nasty midwest storms, except that I can’t find any eggs.

THIS has become my indoor addiction…

I found it on a fabulous quilter’s website, Film In The Fridge .  I dreamed about it so much that I HAD to make it!   I’m hoping to make it king sized if I can stick with it long enough.  Of course, Kacey makes sure all blankets in the house are up to code (her code….COMFY!).

But then I decided I needed something to work on while I watched TV, so I struggled for a day and knitted my first sock!

“WOW!” you say?  Yep, I’m pretty proud of this one only because it was my first attempt.  Let’s just say after hours of youtube instruction and another hour on the phone with my superb knitter friend, Lauren, I finished sometime around midnight.  Mind you I started at 8 in the morning with very few breaks! 

Hubby says the per hour cost of my single sock may not be cost effective. 

What? I have to duplicate it!!??  AHHHHHHH!!!

And that means the holidays are over and we can move on to new things! I get a little Scroogey this time of year, maybe because I’ve worked in retail for so long and that puts a whole different spin on Christmas. Speaking of Christmas, boy did we get a doozey of a snowstorm! 

I was concerned and curious to where the girls might be during this 10 inch dump of snow.  Through the wind, the snow, the ice….they were out in the middle of the yard! 

Yes, they have a house, heat, water, grain, straw, all the comforts of a duck home, and yet they choose to sit right out in the middle of everything……

Then I thought, maybe they just can’t get to their home, so I made a path from the patio all the way down to their house, thinking this might make them stay inside that cozy little house of theirs.

No matter what I do, they really like staying up by MY house and pooping on MY patio and yesterday I saw them in short flight to get up on the deck!  Then they sunned themselves there all day and at least I ended up with frozen duck poop all over the place.

This is what I learned this week, once again, not to worry too much about duck housing.  They are just as happy under a patio table or under a deck or sitting smack dab in the middle of the yard.  And temperatures, you ask?  Well, we’ve had some 1 degree evenings that don’t seem to phase them a bit! 

Now, snow eggs?  That’s a post for next time.

I received the nicest email today from my friend, Tim Byrd (of course), who this fall “adopted” my original three ducks.  Sounds like Sonny, Cher and Ringo are doing well in his wonderful pond and as the picture shows, are still sticking together.

This last month the falling leaves in the backyard have created a real game in my life.  It really is an egg hunt now!

When the leaves are really deep I have to follow the swishing sounds of the ducks running across the yard just to find them.  But the eggs, let’s talk about the difficulty of finding THEM in this mess!

These are crazy hard to find!  At least I do know that the most I can gather is three. 

The nest they’ve made under the tree is an easy spot.

Also easy to find in the yard IF we’ve raked the day before.  Can you see 2 eggs out there?

Another easy nest to spot.

My favorite are the eggs they lay on the patio and then I only have to walk a couple of feet for my breakfast, dodging duck poop all the way!

Then came Thanksgiving.  We were out of town so my mom was on egg watch.  Day after day she would tell me they weren’t laying.  We all decided it might have been the weather change and they weren’t fond of the cold.  I came home and still couldn’t find any eggs.  I had come to the conclusion that they just weren’t going to lay much through the winter, until just a few days ago I discovered an amazing sight…….

In a small space between my compost can and the fence I spied a very large pile of eggs!!  OMG!

28 eggs to be exact!  The downside of all these nests is that they hardly lay in the same place more than once or twice.  And as of this morning I’m already missing 5.  It’s makin’ me crazy!

I spent a few days this summer building this great looking fence around my most beautiful tree in the backyard to keep the ducks from eating all my flowers.

I thought it was pretty ingenious and I made sure to put a stick wherever I thought they could squeeze through.  And besides being functional, I was looking for something that would blend with my yard and look good at the same time.  Most of the summer I had a big old piece of chicken wire wrapped around the perimeter of the tree and it looked a little trashy. 

The ducks….

had been laying most of their eggs either out in the middle of the yard or in various nests around the house.  Easy enough to locate.  A few weeks ago, I went out in the morning on my usual egg hunt and found NO eggs.  Thinking they were having a late start to their morning, I gave them till lunch to pop those puppies out.  Still, no eggs.  After work, no eggs!  And then I see one toddle out of the forbidden zone!

Lesson learned.  There is NO forbidden zone!

Yes, I’m a bit behind in my posting, due to a fabulous vacation to the northwest corner of the world (at least my world). We went to visit older daughter, Kendall, and her fiance Evan, in the country north of Bellingham, WA. She did a great vacation post at www.lonelilly.com . 

And so there are three ducks in the backyard now.  As sad as I was to see my others go, I have to admit that the peace and quiet that we experience now is pretty awesome.  I call them the Hoover Girls……

They came by that group name because that is their purpose in life, to hoover over the yard, usually in team form, and eat bugs.  I may have to name them now that I know them better.  Sometimes I actually go out in the yard and holler, HOOVERS!  Once again, I hope my neighbors aren’t watching.

I am fascinated by how much these girls preen.  They love the pool and then spend hours just fixing feathers.  Reminds me of teenage girls in the bathroom! 

You get the idea!!