Follow the shenanigans of a woman's attempt at going green while trying to raise a little one on a small ranch in Arizona with chickens and horses.
Lilly’s Second Annual Twig Sighting
My Lil’ Fairy
This past Sunday, we took our daughter Lilly to her second RenFaire at the Arizona Renaissance Festival. The reason we take her is for her Second Annual Twig Sighting, to go see the wonderful and delightful Twig the Fairy.
When I was a child, all I ever wanted to be for Halloween was a fairy…. okay, who am I kidding, all I ever wanted to be every single day was a fairy. One of my favorite dolls as a child was the Herself the Elf doll. I had her books, cardboard cutouts, dolls, her companion dolls, I watched her cartoon, you name it. Yeah, Herself the Elf and unicorn My Little Ponies were my thing. And every year, I wanted to be a fairy for Halloween, but alas, I usually ended up a witch or a clown or a ghost or something.
So when I first spotted a picture of Twig on the AZ Renaissance Festival’s site I thought “OH WOW! HOW COOL IS THAT?!” and I think I yelled it too. It was like having my inner child awakened in an instant.
She visits several states each year, so please take a moment to check out her site and see if she comes to a festival near you, because it’s totally worth it to go meet her, whether you’ve got kids or not!
Found a quick video on Youtube of her if you want to check out what I’m talking about!
I had either just had Lilly or knew I was pregnant with a girl when I spotted Twig looking up the ren-faire info and I thought to myself that I would make sure we took Lilly to see her every year. Even if we move back to Iowa (which we are considering), we will make the trek up to Minnesota to see her. As long as she’s performing, we’ll be there.
I have to admit, I’m more keen on taking Lilly to see Twig over Santa or the Easter Bunny to be honest, not that I have anything against Santa or the Easter Bunny but I don’t have to worry about explaining why there’s 20 million Twigs at the mall, now do I? She’s one of a kind! 
There’s just something truly magical about Twig and I’ll tell you another thing, even when you have a line behind you, the world disappears when she focuses her attention on your little one. She speaks in sign language instead of verbally and she uses her flute to communicate through song and quick little blips to show emotions and excitement.
She has several (adorable) books, and in her first book, the story tells of how children could visit the fairy realm by putting her baubles under their pillow to sleep. At the end of the book, the children give her a sock to try and bring her to the human world. So you guessed it, this year we brought Twig a sock (with a little note in it and some gratitude to help offset a replacement book that Twig sent to us when goblins at the post office destroyed the package of her last book and lost it. We have all the Twig Books for Lilly which are delightful wonderful stories and Lilly loves the pictures and I use the Twig Calendars to track major milestones for Lilly and keep them. What can I say, I’m a total ham.
Twig gives Lilly a green heart-shaped bauble stone.
As for Lilly’s costume, well, Lilly’s Great Aunt Julie gave it to her when we were on our last Iowa visit. Yeah, Aunt Julie get’s it!!!! She knows we’re a geek family and we like to do things a little different than tradition. This is actually the second fairy costume she’s sent Lilly off with so Lilly has a backup.
When Lilly is older, I will actually make her a full costume but she’s too little to manage wire wings.
Oh, and just for kicks- last years (First Annual Twig Sighting) outfit and meeting Twig. Wow has Lilly grown.
Lilly’s first fairy costume, which I used way too much tulle. Her Onesie said “I BELIEVE IN TWIG” which I wrote in puffy paint.
Lilly’s First Annual Twig Sighting-
So for anyone who happens to come across this post, remember… Fairies are real!
Random Ramblings from the Ranch
So I haven’t been updating my blog lately, shame on me. 
Life is busy, as always. I took on a part time position as the webmaster for a non-profit which takes up most of my evening time, Lilly takes up the rest.
School is going okay, I have a couple classes that I’m really struggling in, of course there’s a ton of math in them and I suck at that.
I started a walking/running group with the other 3 people that I did the color run with (which was awesome!) and we are trying to plan out fun events. Our next two are the Firefly Run (not Whedon related, unfortunately) and the Neon Run. Both are night events, Neon Run involves paint too.
Ranch life is pretty much as usual except my chickens keep figuring out how to get out of their run and we lost 3 more due to wild animals. It really sucks when this stuff happens. So this weekend we have to resecure the coop and figure out how they’re getting out.
My friend Zel is going to start her own chicken farm this spring, she’s getting her hutch ordered soon, and I’m going to send my “chicky bunker” to her to get her started on securing the little ones. We’ll both be starting up again in march with new babies. (that’s when it starts warming up enough here to keep them outside, I will never again try to raise the little ones inside. That was too much.
Other than that, Lilly’s growing up so quickly (she’s out for a nap right now, so I’m taking a quick moment to blog). Everything is funny to her, and in general she’s a really happy little girl. Except when she’s tired… or hungry… and then she’s just like her Daddy. lol.
5 Shades of What?! (Color-Run Eve)
No, not 50 shades… 5 shades, of pink, yellow, orange, blue and purple. In 8 hours, I will be crossing the starting line to the Color Run 5K race. I have been anxiously awaiting the chance to do this since the first day I heard about it a little over a year ago.
Tonight, our team met up at Olive Garden and enjoyed carb-loading for the run tomorrow and one of our peeps told us about a couple more upcoming off-the-wall races that we’re going to look into. One is a 5K race like the color run but done at night. That one is in a couple months. The other is a SIXTY MILE walk, over the course of 3 days, walk for the cure. That one is thankfully not until November which gives me time to prepare.
I will post pictures of the Color Run event tomorrow after I get back home. I really need to go get my iron-on decal that Jenn made us for our team put on my shirt, and call it a night. gotta be up early early early tomorrow morning to be at the event.
So EXCITED!!!
Mrs. Chicky Fix-it Mama at it again!
Is it bad that sometimes I look forward to disasters because then I get to blog about it?!
My husband is off looking through the “Pope Scope” (The vatican’s observatory here in Arizona), Lilly and I were headed to the feed store to get food for the chickens and what do I see? A massive spray of water coming from the pole-barn’s water pipe. CRAP!
This leaves it up to me and Lilly to fix. Well, just me.
Got Lilly loaded into the car to stay warm first and then I went to investigate. So I went out to it, slushing through a bunch of mud and when I went to twist the faucet handle it flew right off the wall and the “spray” turned into a full on fire-hose effect, spraying water all the way into the center of our round-pen.
Uh oh.
Luckily, we’ve been through this before so I drove down to the end of the road and turned off the main water supply. I attempted to wrench off the top faucet so I could run to home depot but the pipe below was twisting along with the faucet and I already know that’s not good, last year we broke off a full pipe trying to do the same thing. So I stopped and tried to see what tools we had because I was going to need two wrenches at least and I have no idea where my husband stores all his tools. All I had was an adjustable channel lock plier. Craptastic.
So off to Home Depot I went, took the piece that broke off, picked up two pipe wrenches and the store clerk sold me the wrong size ball faucet. Realized that when I got home, and I had put Lilly down for a nap so I had to wake her back up and head back.
Got back home with corrected ball faucet, got that on and got the water completely shut off at that faucet. Phew. This let me turn the water on back to the house at least! However, still don’t have the right part that I need to complete the job but realized I might be able to salvage the neck pipe off the old faucet (above). There’s no way to turn off the water out to that faucet close to the ground so I went ahead and wrapped the hell out of it with insulation.
But main thing is, I didn’t break the ground pipe thankfully, there’s no running water anymore and I have water to the house.
Making Dishwashing Detergent
This post is about saving money instead of pouring it down the drain… literally.
Here’s a quick way to save yourself $50 or more that could better be spent on a Christmas present or something fancy for yourself.
I make my own dish-detergent, it’s super fast and easy to do. Regular dish-detergent which if you’re lucky will last about a month is on average about $5.50 x 12 months, that’s $66.00. More if you fill the pre-wash part which you’ll never have to do with this recipe.
Instead of wasting that money, I spend $14.11 and get about a 1.5 year supply of detergent. (The bucket is like 5.00 and reusable, I don’t count that.)
My Supplies
What you need:
1.) AIR TIGHT container- Do not buy the cereal containers at Walmart for this, they have little tiny holes at the top near the flip lid and it will harden the heck out of the mix. I lost about 5 months of my mix because of this. Learn from my mistake!!! Our walmart carries air-tight buckets for food storage for like 5 bucks, go find that or use a large tupperware container.
2.) Supplies.
- 1 box of Borax (20 Mule Team is what they have at our walmart). 4lb 12oz box. $3.38- Laundry Aisle
- 1 box Arm and Hammer Super Washing Suds, 3lb 7oz box. $3.24- Laundry Aisle
- 1 container of LemiShine $3.66- Dishwashing Aisle– The LemiShine IS A MUST. Don’t skip it.
- 3 cups of Epsom Salt- The container is in the deoderant aisle at Walmart for $2.86 but will last for TWO mixes
- 24 packets of unsweetened generic lemonaid koolaid mix. (it’s not sticky, that’s only if you add sugar to it and there’s no sugar in our list. $2.40 (10 cents per packet).
I mix mine right in my bucket and then seal it up. You use ONE, and I mean ONE tablespoon of mix per load. That’s it, you won’t ever need to use more than that. You won’t need a rinsing agent either, the Lemishine and the Koolaid takes care of that, so whatever you spend on JetDry, won’t be needing that anymore either. Bonus bucks!
Figured I’d share it with my chicky-readers!
I learned this recipe from: http://beingcreativetokeepmysanity.blogspot.com/2011/01/dishwasher-detergent.html and can’t thank her enough for posting it. If you get a chance, go to her blog and read the rest of her posts. She’s a great blogger!
