Booktalk at Nicola's. Well, that was fun!

Have you been to the great little bookstore called Nicola's Books in Ann Arbor?

The first time we went there, my older daughter turned to me and said, "No offense, Mom, but I want to live here."

They have cozy chairs for enjoying the many unique, charming, and beautiful books they have there.  They host book signings and storytimes.

Here are the girls with Christopher Paul Curtis a couple of years ago.

A few months ago they started carrying My Detroit Garden, my little children's book from 2012.

For a while, My Detroit Garden was displayed right next to Michele Obama's gardening book!

And, they agreed to let me share My Detroit Garden and a seed planting activity this morning!

Here is the storyteller chair.

Who doesn't love a few seeds and some soil?

 Thanks, Nicola's, for a fun spring morning!

No love allowed: meat chickens

Almost on an impulse, I brought home 7 meat chicks last week.

It started a few months ago when I found myself avoiding making dinner whenever chicken was on the menu.  The boneless, skinless chicken breasts that we were in the habit of buying seemed more and more spongy to me, and didn't resemble at all the lovely hens that were decorating our backyard.  At all. 

So I contemplated meat chicks, chickens that are bred specifically to become tasty dinners.  They only need about 8 weeks to grow to a good butchering size, which is a bonus because our little backyard homestead is already over our city's chicken limit.

So with strict instructions not to name these birds, not to love them, not to even cuddle them too much, I surprised the family with 7 fluffy, yellow chicks under the brooder lamp in the kitchen last week. 

Now that we're one week into this meat chick experiment, I realized I shouldn't have worried.  There is no love.  The cuteness only extends as far as the fluffiness, which is quickly being replaced with dingy white feathers.  There is too much odor to allow for oohing and ahhing.  And the spunky scurrying that we had with our eggs chicks has been replaced with unattractive laying around, sometimes with their heads resting in the feeder.

There is no love.

The Music Man asked me what breed I bought.  "This breed," I said, as I pulled up a Google image of a Cornish Rock.

Seven weeks till dinner time!