Sweet E was born Feb 4 at 7:14 am. She weighed 9 lb 6 oz and was 20 3/4 in long.
She will be 3 weeks tomorrow. Looking through these pictures, I realize that I don’t have very many of her! Poor 6th child. 
Everyone is so excited to welcome her into the family. Even Lil’l, who I thought might not be so happy, loves her. She likes to pet her head and stick her face in Sweet E’s face and say, "Hi! Hi! Hi!"
School is going well. A couple of months ago I ordered Managers of Their Homes. I highly recommend it. It has helped us tremendously. I am not a person who likes schedules. I am organizationally challenged. This book walks you through the scheduling process step by step. It made it so easy! I found it great to have a schedule for the older kids to follow. They get up, know what they are supposed to do and when, and it makes it easier for me to keep track of them. And when I had the baby, school could go on, because they didn’t need me around to tell them what to do.
Another thing I did to prepare for the baby was to change up science and history. Previously, we had been doing things together, but I wanted the older boys to work more independently. So I bought them each their own history and science books.
Well, it’s time to make dinner, which means, Sweet E will be waking up soon. Adios!
Yesterday, B and C took a bubble bath. N wanted to take one, too, but we were low on bubbles. I told hubby to just turn on the jets and that would make more bubbles. Well, you know men.. er… kids… they never know when to stop.
It started out innocent enough… but soon escalated out of control.
And then D wanted in on the fun.
We were all laughing so hard at how the bubbles kept growing. The little ones were screeching in delight. It made for a fun evening.
One day, as we were innocently watching some tv, a nasty smell started wafting into our noses. My hubby said it smelled like death. All I knew was that it stunk. For about a week we searched the house for the smell. My hubby actually went down to the basement and cleaned and still didn’t find the smell. Finally, I turned the couch over because I was convinced there was a dead mouse in the couch. I smelled all over the couch, didn’t find the source, but then, out of a strange hunch, I smelled the outlet. There it was! The outlet stunk! That’s when I remembered about a month previous to that, we were sitting in the frontroom and heard scratching in the walls. UGH! There was a dead mouse somewhere in our walls! What were we supposed to do? My hubby wanted to start tearing apart the walls – which I couldn’t really blame him since the smell was just awful. We tried to wait it out for a little while. We were hoping it would go away. No such luck. Finally, hubby started surgery on our house. Thankfully, the other side of the wall that the smell was coming from was the basement stairs. So we didn’t have to rip apart a wall that could actually be seen.
And this is some of what hubby found:
Creepy. Obviously, this isn’t the first time this had happened. Unfortunatly, he still didn’t find the source of the smell. And we are still living with it. It is definitly not as strong as before, but it’s still there. I need to write a book about everything you need to know about before you move to the country.
I don’t have much to say today, but I will post a couple of pics. I already had these up on photobucket and since it takes about 20 min to upload photos, I might as well use them.
We made maple leaf cut out cookies. I think it was on recipezaar.com. The kids always enjoy making cut out cookies and I don’t, but I let them do it once or twice a year because I remember how much fun it was as a kid. Now that I am the grown up, I have to deal with rolling the dough – which is my least favorite part – and of course, the clean up. Lots of little sprinkles all over… yuck.
B was walking around with a bandana, so I turned him into a pirate. He was a pirate with a sullen attitude. He likes drama. 
But isn’t he adorable?
My next post will be a little more exciting. Or creepy….
This is a picture of the chicks at about a week old.
Aren’t they cute? They didn’t stay cute for long. They grew fast, and soon we needed to move then into their big chick coop.
Here is D inside the chicken tractor, which was their "nursery", catching the chicks and passing them out.
And N moving the chicks to their new home.
They have so much more room now. You see how they’ve gotten ugly? Some of them look like hawks.
Our neighbors gave us four chickens about a month ago – two hens and two roosters. Two days ago, we found an egg from one of the hens. And a little over a week ago, Mrs. Duck started laying. That is very exciting news around here. Our four hens do not produce enough eggs to feed this family. Now that we have two more birds contributing, that will help a lot.
And that wraps up this edition of Fowl News.
momanna98