We are sad to announce that we are no longer chicken farmers here in Alameda. After a fun three year experiment of raising hens in our backyard, we've decided we'd like to reclaim the space so that Madeleine can play outside without sinking to her knees in chicken manure. So we sent out an e-mail to other people we know in Alameda who raise chickens, which made its way to the Alameda Backyard Chickens Yahoo! group. 

Within a week we had takers for our faithful egg layers, Annie, Omelette, Wiggly, and Joy. Joy went to a household just six blocks from us, and the other three moved a few miles from here where they joined a flock of 13 hens.

As our egg ticker reports, the girls faithfully produced 1,914 eggs while they were under our care.  We aren't happy that we have to buy eggs again (we were shocked at the price of organic eggs when we bought our first dozen from the store recently), but we are glad to not have to wipe chicken poop off our shoes, clean out the coop, and keep up with food and water. We do plan to raise chickens again after we re-landscape our backyard and figure out a better system for confining them to a part of the yard. Our hope is to get more day-old chicks in another year or so and let Madeleine watch them grow.

During the last quarter year of Madeleine's life she has proven to be an absolute delight. She has officially toddled into toddler-hood and is supremely proud of her new walking (and running) skills. What can we say? At 15 months old she's already a budding soccer star. She LOVES to dribble the soccer ball all the way around the block.

On other developmental fronts, Madeleine likes to show off her knowledge of sign language (more, eat, drink, cheese, hot, sleep, all done, milk, etc).  She is curious, playful, sweet, and good-humored. She can also be insistent when she knows what she wants. We think she would make a great traffic cop—"pointing and grunting "Go there! No, not that way, this way! Now!" Madeleine has also graduated to her first household chore: feeding the chickens. She adores this task we've set her.

After being sick on her first year birthday, Madeleine was able to celebrate in style on her 13 month birthday.  It even worked out that her Midwest grandparents could be here for it!

This past month Madeleine was baptized at St. Columba Catholic Church in Oakland. It was a wonderful experience having an aware, alert 14 month old baptized - we're glad we waited past the newborn stage. She was happily passed up and down the pew between her three godparents and her grandparents before she had water poured on her head. Rather than being frightened, she was just really, really interested in what the priest was doing. She also wanted to play with the chrism oil, the baptismal candle, and the seashell used to pour the water.  Her Grandma Naffziger made her baptismal dress as a  gift since she couldn't  be with us on the day of the baptism. 

New photos are here.  Photos of the baptism are here.

Maddy is officially a toddler, as she has been refining her newfound walking skills over the past week.  Yesterday was the first day she's been walking more than crawling.  I think it's a little hard for her to slow down a bit from the sprinting crawl she perfected, but she's already starting to pick up speed now that she's on her feet.

But don't take our word for it... see for yourself in Madeleine's YouTube debut...

The birch tree in our front yard consistently gets infested with aphids every year, and this year it was hit hard.  The aphids suck juices from the leaves and excrete a colorless sticky honeydew.  That attracts ants and causes growth of a fungus called "sooty mold" to grow on the leaves.  So we have ants marching up the trunk and when we walk across our lawn the soles of our shoes become covered with sticky leaves.  It's particularly annoying this year because we just got a little play structure for Maddy to play on under the tree.  The tree does not seem to be greatly stressed, but aphids could eventually kill it.

In addition to the ants and aphids, we noticed a whole bunch of other strange bugs crawling on the tree (as shown in the photo).  After some research, we found that these were lady beetles (also known as ladybugs) in a larva stage.  Wikipedia has some good pictures of the various stages (early larva, mid-larva, pupal, and adult), all of which we have seen on our tree.  They showed up because they are predators of aphids.

In addition to letting the lady beetles do their thing, we are doing our part to combat the aphids.  We borrowed a power washer and have been spraying the leaves with water from our rooftop and from the top of a ladder.  This knocks many of the aphids off the leaves, and seems to be washing some of the honeydew and mold off.  We tried adding a castille soap additive (which will kill aphids on contact), but we couldn't get the power washer to spray that with enough velocity for some reason.  While spraying a big plume of water into the tree from my rooftop with a pistol wand feels almost like I'm acting out a scene from Ghostbusters, it gets old pretty quickly (particularly when the wind starts blowing the water right back at me).  We've done it once a weekend for the last three weeks, and hear that six weeks may do the trick.

Now that we have a plan, we hope to jump on the aphids early next year and head off the problem before it gets bad.

Madeleine hit the one year mark last week, but unfortunately she was too sick to enjoy it very much. Our tree has inundated us with plums, even more so than last year at this time, so we made some pie for her birthday.   But she had no appetite and wouldn't touch it.

She and her parents are doing much better now, and are catching up on things like posting photos.  In her twelfth month, Madeleine took her first dip in a swimming pool, continued gaining teeth, and learned how to intentionally blink her eyes (accompanied by a very cute smile).

You can check out month 12 photos here.