our chicks are living it up on the taylor farm

Tuesday, the day of our Cooper Christmas party, was also the day I took our most recent batch of chicks home to the Taylor farm. Tuesday wasn't the best day to introduce them to the farm because it was chilly and rainy. But, the chicks were 11 days old and getting bigger every day. It was time for them to go.

When I got to the farm, Melissa took me over to the Show Chicken House. As she opened the door she told me that's where my chicks were going to stay. I excitedly squeezed the handle on their cage and told them they had just hit the jackpot.

On our November visit to the farm, we'd gotten to see the show chickens in action. Melissa and her son started out with 100 one-day-old chicks, and kept them inside a special area they'd built just for them. The goal is to grow the show chickens really big, really fast, while whittling the flock down to the 10 best chickens. The top 10 chickens go to the livestock show.

Unlike the rest of the chickens on the Taylor farm, these show chickens are bread to be meat chickens. The 90 chickens that don't go to the livestock show, well, they go into Melissa's freezer. That's the reality of life on a farm.

Here are a few pics we took in November of this year's show chickens and their awesome house.

Grace with one of the smaller show chickens.

A view inside of the Show Chicken Palace. While these chickens were growing, someone at the farm woke up every two hours, around the clock, every single day, to feed them and keep them moving around to help build the muscles in their legs. They eventually get so big that if they don't have strong legs, they would have a hard time standing up.

Tuesday, when I got to the farm, the show chicken area was empty. The livestock show was in early December, and Melissa's son won Reserve Grand Champion with one of their show chickens.

You can't imagine how happy I was to see our 8 little chickens running around Show Chicken House. Check out the vast expanse of pine shavings that the chicks will be able to roam around on, and in the background you can see the inviting warmth of a heat lamp. Nice.

Just so you know, the chicks that we hatch for Melissa are egg chickens. Even though they are living in the show chicken house for a while, they wont wind up in the freezer. Once they're old enough, they'll roam free on the farm with the rest of the chickens.

We'll be heading back to the farm soon for fresh hatching eggs...

cooper christmas

Growing up, every year, we spent Christmas Eve at my grandparents house in San Antonio eating tamales.

My cousins, my sisters and I would spend the entire evening badgering our parents about when we were going to open presents.

Now, we're older, and have our own families and holiday commitments, but we still try to get together around Christmas for our Tex Mex style celebration.

This year, the party was at our house, so we decorated the kitchen with the decorations we found last week at El Mercado. Quite the transformation.

Somehow, I managed to get every single person at the party to stand still long enough for a picture. These are the people I have eaten tamales with every year at Christmas time for as long as I can remember. My grandma and grandpa's son and daughter, grandchildren, great grandchildren, and even a great, great grandson. A great big happy family. And I got them all to pose nicely for a picture by telling them they could be silly in the next picture. After we took our pictures and ate our tamales, we all sat down and enjoyed several hours of vintage 8mm movies. These movies were "old" when I was a child. Last night I had the special pleasure of being the almost antique projector operator. The funny thing about the films it that they are very short, and it takes almost as long to load them on the projector as it does to watch them. One of my first projects in the new year is converting these little suckers to DVD.

The glimpses of the past that the movies gave us were amazing: Moving pictures of Grandma and Grandpa when they were in their 40's, our parents when they were so very young, my mom in a yellow bikini, and of course ourselves as babies and small children.

In this clip you can see Susan and me, then little Mindy toddling by my Grandpa's Opel Station wagon.

Memories.

chickens aren't the only animals we torment with santa hats

Chloe's hat even has a beard attached.

christmas evening

After spending most of the day sitting around in our pajamas, playing with all of our Christmas loot, we headed over to Ellen and Tony's house for an afternoon and evening of food, fun, and friends. It was the perfect end to our Christmas day.

christmas morning

christmas eve

We're celebrating Christmas with the family on Dec 28th. So, Christmas eve was kind of an informal warm up for our big Tex Mex Christmas. We needed a little break from all of the Mexican food, so we decided to go Italian. I made a huge baked ziti. I found the world's greatest baked ziti recipe a few years ago and always make it when I need to take someone a meal. Like when people have babies, or someone is ill. This year, I decided to make it just because it's soooo good. On his way out Stuart did mention that he felt like he was coming down with something and I might need to bring some baked ziti over soon : )
Here we are post ziti, but pre gifts.
We only open a few small gifts on the Eve. Just enough to give everyone a taste of the big things to come tomorrow morning. Everyone was happy with their gifts. My copy of Vanity Fair was, by far, the best gift of the night.

more san antonio

Mi Tierra - there are no words:
Day Three in Tex Mex Heaven = Pants with an elastic waist. Our final destination, the San Antonio Zoo. It was cooler outside than it had been the previous days, but still warm enough for ice cream. There are all kinds of animals at the zoo. We, of course, especially love the birds.
In the bird house there was an awesome egg display. The giant egg is from a bird that became extinct over 1,000 years ago. The smallest eggs were the size of peas. The kids and I discussed the pros and cons of hatching each and every egg.

The flamingos are always a favorite.

And there was a fascinating bird drama that I could have watched all day. These two were working on a nest. I'm not sure if it had eggs in it, but that would be my guess.

And this guy, with the prehistoric shaped head, really, really wanted to get into the nest. You should have heard the commotion the long beaked birds would make to keep the curious bird away. Hours later we returned to the same spot to find the strange headed bird still up to the same tricks. It had all the makings of a great tv series. Being the bird lovers that we are, Lori Landing is always our favorite spot at the zoo. They let you feed what have to be the friendliest birds on the planet.
Usually, I take pictures of everyone with birds all over them. This year, I decided to get in on the bird action.

So, I got a cup of food, and, well, I'm not sure if it was my pink coat, but I was a bird magnet. I know this is an absolutely terrible picture of me, but can you believe all the birds? At one point there was even one on top of my head picking through my hair with its beak. When the red bird landed on my coat it freaked me out a little bit and I had to ask Ray to help get them off of me. They did not want to go.

Next year, I think I'll stick to taking pictures of the brightly colored Loris. Yes, I pull chickens out of their eggs while they're still wet, but there's something about a bird that lands on you with a yo-gimmie-some-food attitude that's a little unsettling. Because I have to end this post with something pretty, we came home to find our paperwhites had grown very tall. Some are over two feet high. And, had started to bloom.

san antonio day two

First and foremost, the food:

Last year we discovered an amazing Mexican restaurant right around the corner from our peacock hotel. El Mirador left quite an impression on us so we definitely wanted to try it a second time.

Last time we ate there, I was feeling adventurous and wanted to try something new, so I gave their Sunday special, Barbacoa, a try. It was good. Very good. (I just googled it and found out what part of a cow Barbacoa comes from. Probably better that I didn't know that when I ate it.)

This year, I decided to continue with my tradition of trying new things at El Mirador.

I've lived in Texas all of my life and have always enjoyed Tex Mex, but I have to say there were several items on the menu I didn't recognize. Not wanting to rule anything out, I asked our waiter to tell me the best thing on the menu. He recommended one of the things I'd never heard of: Machacado. He also recommended Menudo. I've never eaten Menudo, but have a pretty good idea of what's in it, so I went with the Machacado.Machacado, it turns out, is shredded, dried, seasoned beef, scrambled with eggs and pico. Very tasty. And, I have to say that the corn tortillas at El Mirador are so light and fluffy that it's hard to tell them from their flour tortillas.

Their pancakes aren't bad either.

With our bellies full of breakfast, we set out for some of our favorite San Antonio destinations.

First on our list: Shopping at El Mercado.

A few steps from our hotel, we were waiting for a trolley to take us down to El Mercado. I'm not sure exactly how far it is from the hotel, it's definitely walkable, but the kids in tow, it's just easier to take a trolley.

Feeling like I needed to burn a few of my Machacado calories, I suggested Carter and I race Ray and Grace. Them on the bus, us on foot. The bus route is full of stops and definitely takes the long way to El Mercado.

Carter didn't want to have anything to do with not riding the bus, so I decided to go it alone. I took off before the bus arrived. I was making good time when I had to stop for a red light a few blocks from the bus stop. I heard lots of honking behind me and turned to find my family on the red trolley sitting behind me at the light.

I smiled and waved, then the bus door opened and the bus driver called out to me, "Girl, you better get on this bus, El Mercado is waaaaaay down there!" Apparently, the kids had informed the driver of my plan to race the bus and he wasn't having any part of it. He insisted I get on the buss for free and gave Ray a free ticket for my ride back to the hotel. Guess he didn't want to take any chances I might do something crazy like head back on foot. Gotta love San Antonio.

After our bus ride to El Mercado. Grace and I shopped for traditional Mexican Christmas decorations for our family Christmas party. We always eat tamales for Christmas dinner, so we figured the decor would be appropriate.

Half way through El Mercado, we had an umbrella drink break, then Ray and Carter disappeared for a few minutes and returned with a tiny AK47 for Carter, complete with lights and sounds. Um, yeah....Finally, one of my absolute favorite things about San Antonio. The building next to the Alamo in the picture above is the Emily Morgan Hotel. My dad was born there. It wasn't a hotel in 1937, it was the Medical Arts building, and the top floor was a hospital. Such a beautiful building and so very cool to have been born next door to the Alamo.

Tonight, we're heading to Mi Tierra for dinner, so I'm sure I'll have more to say about the flavors of San Antonio.

the first day of winter

It finally happened!! Yesterday morning, the kids and I were loading up the car and we saw that someone had decorated an outside Christmas tree at the end of our street. We immediately ran down the hill to get a better look.

It's not as carefully decorated as ours, but it's a Christmas tree in the woods. We were all thrilled. Year after year, we decorate our outside tree and hope that someone else will join us. This year, I was even considering putting a sign up. Something that said, "We'd love for you to decorate a tree, too!"

Just think, this could be the start of something big. There are lots of trees in those woods....

In the picture above, you can see our tree on the far right and the new tree on the left.

Next stop, San Antonio. The weather here is even more amazing than the weather in Austin. Beautiful, warm sunshine. A true Christmas miracle : ) The view from our hotel. Really, aren't fresh tortillas always in season? Our trip to SA wouldn't be complete without a stop to put some new flowers on Grandma and Grandpa's grave. This time we brought them red hydrangeas.

One of our hotel peacocks.

I'm blogging from the hotel lobby and the natives are getting restless. More to come....

happy back yard campers

Because we are enjoying such beautiful weather, we decided to have a camp out in the back yard with Logan and Ellie.
We ate our hot dogs inside. Just because it was easier than taking all of the food outside.

Then, Ray built a camp fire.
There were plenty of roasted marshmallows and smores.

After everyone ate their campfire treats, we drove around and looked at Christmas lights. Always one of my favorite things to do this time of year.

Back at the camp site, everyone got ready for bed.

I slept inside, but Ray and the kids had a great night outside.
This morning, the happy campers had donut holes and kolaches for breakfast.