so, what came first, the egg or the egg?

Breakfast was interesting yesterday. Our chickens lay some huge eggs, so big sometimes that we can't close the egg cartons all the way. Yesterdays egg was particularly large, with a bizarre rippled pattern to the shell. The shell was also pretty fragile and cracked a bit when I was washing it, so it was first in line to become breakfast. I cracked it and put it into the egg poacher and saw, what looked like a double yolker, which I've had before, but then noticed that the color of the yolk wasn't yolk colored. Upon closer inspection, it wasn't another yolk, but another egg. Yep, there was a little egg, complete with hard shell, inside the first egg. It was about the size of one of those bigger shooter marbles. When I cracked the little egg, which had a really hard shell, incidentally, it had a little tiny yolk and everything inside it. How weird is that?

After breakfast, we loaded the family up in the car and roadtripped it out to some friends of our who live a 3 hour drive away. Angel #4 had spent the week with them helping out with their kids, so we needed to pick her up. We had a great afternoon with them, then decided to visit some other friends who live near them. They just bought a new house and we wanted to go check it out. We got the tour of the house, the yard and gardens and ended up staying and visiting with them until 8:30 or so before heading back on the long drive home. Our car doesn't comfortably carry 6 people, but we all squeezed in and had a great time on the way home. Traveling with the family is a great way to have good conversations with your kids, you just have to resist the urge to turn on the radio. It was a great trip and I'm so glad I had that extra time to spend with all my kids. With Angel #1 going back to the Marines on Monday and Angel #2 working her way toward her own apartment and independence, times like that are going to become more and more rare.

When we got home, we discovered that we had extra passengers in the car we weren't aware of. Our friends yard was full of ticks, and now, so were we. I pulled 3 off of myself, 4 off Angel #2, #4 had one in her neck and I'm not sure how many hubs pulled off himself, at least 5 or 6. We were all paranoid after that, and soon all the kids were stripped down to their undies so I could do a full body tick scan on them. Of course, this had to be done in the kitchen so I could pop all the nasty culprits down the garbage disposal when I found them. Someone peeking in our window around 11:30 last night, would have definitely been wondering why there was an entire family standing in the middle of the kitchen in their underwear picking at each other like a family of orangutans.

Today is warm and slightly overcast, perfect for working out in the garden. I went out by myself for about 2 hours this afternoon and really enjoyed messing around out there. I replanted a few things that didn't come up and found deer tracks all over the place. Hubs was going to put up some fencing, now it's going to have to be sooner rather than later since I'm not spending all that time sweating out there to provide a Bambi salad bar.