Bed for Rent

I don't know if you experience this at your houses, but my middle child is constantly playing musical beds.  I believe the reason she prefers not to sleep in her own bed is she doesn't want to make it in the morning.

It seems the boys are onto her.  Her older brother will not let her sleep in the bed unless she promises to make it in the morning.  She has reneged on this a few times and so he has refused to reconsider her access.  Now he says she will have to pay him.  So she stuffs herself into the twin lower bunk with her younger brother.  However, her younger brother is also onto her and has also decided to charge her rent.  Daddy suggested six cents per night, but he decided he wants six DOLLARS.

Nighttime is a bit interesting as she tries to negotiate the rental fees.  Just the other day I found this notice...the price is suspiciously the same as the rent...  I like that it has its own web address.

Of course when I broke my toe and asked her to help me out she said "Hey!  I should be getting paid for this!".  Really?  I asked her if she would like to see her bill of what she owed me and she agreed to work for free!

Why she doesn't just make her own bed in the morning is beyond me...or at least sleep on top of the covers or employ any of the tricks we learned as kids to make a less messy bed...  I found this one this morning, so I don't think the negotiations are over yet...

...and I have no idea what membership entails, so I asked Jack and the plot thickens a bit.  He said he made the membership cards.  Her rate is 5 cents a night plus making the bed in the morning or 10 cents a night.  The more she rents she earns points which can be redeemed for something, but he isn't sure what yet.

Interesting...The frightening part is that they have this whole system between themselves and were it not for the notes, I may not even know what was going on.  Right now it's just bed rentals, but as they get older it could be a lot worse.  I hope they keep putting things in writing and leaving them around!  Or, I can do what most parents this day and age do, just log-into their social media accounts and monitor them.

Meet Henry...

We are down to one unhatched egg and one duckling.  Isn't he adorable?!  Daisy has no idea that he is not biologically hers.  I say the duck that spent four weeks sitting on the egg, definitely deserves to be the Mother!

We won't know for awhile the gender, until it starts quacking.  Girls  have a loud duck quack and drakes a low pitched mumble.  Very distinctive, but right now it just does baby peeps.

We are hoping that we don't have an only duckling...  The other egg is getting darker, showing signs of black feathers under the egg shell.  If we do have another duckling hatch, then the name might change...  East Indie Anna & Jones baby  is named Henry, after Indiana Jones son.  If there end up being two of them I hear we may have instead Chocolate and Rain...  

The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Duck Eggs...

This summer my son has decided to try and let some of his duck eggs hatch.  The trouble with this plan is that some of the domesticated ducks will not sit on their nests.  Ducky, our mallard, will sit on her nest, but complains loudly and gets bored and leaves to go play with the other ducks.  Anna, our East Indie bantam, makes nests and lays eggs around the yard, will sit for a few minutes and then abandons the whole project.  Snowball, our Pekin, just doesn't care about any of it.  Thankfully, there is Daisy.  She is some kind of Pekin hybrid who seems to still have an intact mothering instinct.

We noticed Daisy making nests in the duck house and also in the hay in the pen.  We need the nest to be protected within the pen.  Ducks lay one egg a day and once they get enough eggs they will start sitting.  We didn't want to hatch a bunch of the big ducks for space reasons, so we smuggled Anna's eggs into the nest when Daisy wasn't paying attention.

Once there was one Daisy egg and seven Anna eggs in there, she happily sat on them.


Ducks eggs take about 28 days to hatch (which is 7 days longer than chicken eggs).  We have all been patiently waiting, but then we noticed eggs disappearing.  The first egg that was missing was Daisy's big egg.  She was still sitting on the 7 of Anna's though.  After another few days we were missing two of the little eggs...  Finally we were down to four.  We had no idea what was happening to the eggs..

Then yesterday, the husband noticed a little black puff running about the pen and lo and behold we had a duckling!



So far the other three eggs have not hatched.  Today we noticed a bit of a stink.  The boys said it smelled like tuna fish.  Then we saw Daisy pick up the stinky egg and chuck it out of the pen!  Unfortunately, it was a almost formed duckling that just did not survive.  The egg disappearing mystery solved.  Somehow ducks must know when the eggs are viable and get rid of those that are not.  Jack said that he did find a few eggs outside the nest that were squishy...

We are down to to two eggs...waiting to see what happens with those...they are hoping the other two hatch so then the boys can name them Mo, Larry and Curly.  Mom is hoping they are all female!!!