I occasionally give myself a mental treat and read a blog post or two, and one of my favorite blogs to read is 5 Kids is a Lot of Kids. I feel pretty sure that Beth Woolsey–who writes the blog, and has 5 kids–and I would have a pretty good time together if we ever had the chance to sit down for coffee and conversation together. This isn’t likely to happen, but you never know.

Here’s something that Beth and I would agree on: that junk, clutter, and stuff can suck the life out of you pretty quickly. Also, that when you have a multitude of kids, that the potential for how quickly stuff can pile up around you is really, really astonishing. One more thing: that it’s worth a bit of time and effort to clear it all out.

But what’s a busy mama who already has too many irons in the fire, to do? There’s barely a moment to spare, most days, between schoolwork and dental appointments and music practice and the dishwasher is broken again?ing and whatnot. And you know, it does take time to clear out clutter. Obviously. C’mon, if it was an easy, quick thing to do, I wouldn’t be sitting here surrounded with so much STUFF. Would I?

True story: For the past few weeks, I’ve been running the house in a minimal fashion, because of putting on a play, “The Fireman’s Flame,” which I still haven’t written a decent post about, though our show ended a week and a half ago. Boom. Guilty. I’m guilty of getting through an intensely busy time, like the few weeks before a show, the week of the show, and then turning my face to the sunshine afterwards (if there is any, which, it must be noted, there hasn’t been), taking a deep breath, flinging my arms out willy-nilly and saying “Wow, that’s done, now back to life!” and not taking time to put things away, and return props to my parents (sorry Mom) and tying up loose ends and clearing away the detritus left from the production, before throwing myself headlong into The Next Big Thing.

We call in the pros for hair and make-up: alumni and our own drama students, and they do a great job.

The costumes which were flung on the stairs, which ought to be carried up the attic and put away, may just stay there for a week or two, until somebody needs to get up to the attic for something, for example. But things that have to be taken care of (like overdue library books and overdue bills and mysterious moldy things in the refrig’, and of course feeding the pets and also the chickens and of course the fam) will probably be taken care of, as soon as possible. There’s an urgency there, you see. I don’t want a big fine on my library card; I don’t want to pay late fees on my bills, either; and I don’t want my pets or chickens or children to die miserable deaths of deprivation.

Back to Lent. I was telling Amalia this morning, as we drove to her cello lesson, that I grew up a Lutheran, but that I didn’t remember much about observing Lent in the church I grew up in. Maybe it wasn’t a big deal at Salem Lutheran Church, or maybe it just wasn’t on my radar. I think in general that Lutherans do observe Lent, although how they observe it is probably as varied as the believers themselves. Amalia and I talked about what Lent might mean to us, and what we’ve observed our friends doing with it.

Google says (and so it must be true) “Lent is a time of repentance, fasting and preparation for the coming of Easter. It is a time of self-examination and reflection.”  It seems to be a different experience for everybody, although the one trend that I notice among those who practice Lent around me, is that most people give up something that is precious to them, to prove that it’s not too precious to them, that it–whatever it is–hasn’t been elevated to the status of an idol. Throughout the Bible, there is one theme that is patently clear, it seems to me: God is pretty much down on idols, in any form. Amalia and I chewed on this as we drove along. “What would you give up?” I asked her. “Sugar? Chocolate? Movies?”

Amalia shuddered. “No. How about exercise? Math? Liver and onions? I could give those things up.” I think she kinda missed the point. Pretty much entirely.

When we got home, still thinking about the Lent season, I sat down to do a little reading, and I happened onto Beth Woolsey’s post on Lent, and I started getting really excited. Excited by the possibility of drawing closer to God during this Lent season, not by depriving myself of coffee or chocolate, but by clearing away some of the STUFF that takes way too much of my time and attention.

Really. Can’t STUFF be an idol? How much time every day do you spend shuffling through piles of stuff? Can’t find a bill that you need to pay because of the clutter on your desk? Can’t find little Mack’s boots? Or socks? Or what about that library book that’s lost? Sigh.

When you have too much STUFF, you’ve got to spend time polishing it, sifting through it, organizing it, filing it, dusting it, fixing it, moving it, what else? Yup. STUFF definitely can be a problem at our place. What about at yours?

“Lent is a time of repentance, fasting and preparation for the coming of Easter. It is a time of self-examination and reflection,” is what Beth observes.

I like what Beth says in her post:

“The truth is, Jesusy people in America freestyle when it comes to Lent. We like to participate for loads of reasons. Sometimes to feel closer to God, sometimes as a spiritual discipline, sometimes to draw attention to a cause, and sometimes because our best friends in the whole entire world, Caffeine and Chocolate, come to us in our dreams dressed in red riding hood cloaks with cloven hooves and horns on their heads and tell us with maniacal grins that they own our souls, and we wake up screaming and sweating and longing for big cups o’ Joe and entire bags of Hershey’s nuggets. Lent – it’s a high church synonym for Caffeine and Chocolate Rehab.”

“At its center, though, Lent, like other cultural and religious observances, pulls us into community with each other and ties us with thick cords to our historical roots. It makes us stop for a season to reconsider who we are at our core. It forces us away from the insignificant things that entangle us and turns our eyes to examine what’s relevant, what drives us.”

“At its best, Lent isn’t about deprivation. At its best, Lent allows us to work in concert with Love to refill our souls.”

Clutter, detritus, stuff is a serious problem in our home right now. We’ve been very busy, and when we’re very busy, we tend to shove problems to the side. You know how easy it is to get more than you need–we love garage sales, we get freebie magazines in the mail, we dote on shopping at thrift stores–and we bring home lots and lots of stuff, without dealing with the too-much stuff that we already have.

But let’s not beat ourselves up over it. I think we’ve all probably done enough of that already. I tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to borrow Beth’s idea and spent a bit of time every day that I can handle it, I’m going to say 20 minutes, cleaning up something and dealing with some bit of clutter, during the Lent season. I have 40 days, well, actually only 39. I’d better get to cracking.

39 days of 20 minutes each day (hopefully!) = whoa, nearly 800 minutes, right? That really sounds like something impressive. I think I can do something fairly impressive in 800 minutes.

I’m starting today. I’m going to do what Beth suggested and take 20 minutes to clean off one small area that is bugging me. And I’m going to take a before picture (honest) and an after picture. You’ll see the after picture tomorrow, fair enough? While I do it, I’m going to talk with God about how this STUFF has gotten between Him and me, more than I’d like to admit, and I’m going to ask for His help to do away with a bunch of it. I’m hoping, Gentle Reader, that you’ll join me, and that you won’t be disgusted and annoyed by my honesty. Honestly. There are some really bad, neglected areas in our home, and they are all full of STUFF.

I’d love to have some company in this pursuit. I hope I’m not the only one drowning in clutter. Surely not! Please tell me you (at least occasionally) struggle with clutter, too?

Today’s assignment: Go clean off your desk. Or a table. Some horizontal surface. Or something that just is really bugging you. Set your timer for 20 minutes and when it goes off, stop. Or keep going, if you feel so inspired. Be sure to have a trash bag handy. You’re probably going to need it. And hey, leave me a comment if you want to.

We’re all in this together, after all, aren’t we, Gentle Reader?

Here’s my “before” picture of my desk that I’m going to clean off. I bought a new desk a couple of months ago and I really like it, but it doesn’t have the storage drawer space that my old one had. No matter, thought I at the time, that just means that I’ll get rid of the STUFF that is inside those drawers. But instead, I just piled it all onto my new desk, to take care of later. It’s a mess. I know that I can’t get it all cleared away in one 20-minute session, but I know that I can make a dent in it. And that’s what I’m doing to do today.

I believe this is proof that I’m a “vulnerable blogger.”

Tra-laaa, Gentle Readers! I’ll check in tomorrow!

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By all accounts, our musical melodrama, The Fireman’s Flame, that we put on this weekend was a big success. Once again God blessed our efforts: proof that a couple of bumbling well-meaning parents with no training for producing theatre, but plenty of passion and fairly strong backs and a talented group of thesbians, can put on a good show. We had two big enthusiastic audiences; the kids performed with passion and high energy; all the tricky backstage tech stuff worked out after all; the audience left grinning and chuckling; the families of the actors and crew left exhausted but happy, too. 

In the middle of an intermission the second night, I slipped out of the Green Room (where I was hanging out with my energetic thespians) to dash to the bathroom across the hall. I looked one way and saw a couple of drama parents running the Silent Auction, with people carefully considering and jotting down their bids. I looked the other way and saw several drama mamas selling concessions. These sweet ladies are volunteers who serve in order that our drama bills will get paid. “Geez,” thought I, “what an excellent team I’ve got. I am so blessed!” And so I was. And am. Not to mention supremely grateful.

Of course our melodrama had a big chase scene, this one involving the two teams of firefighters, carrying their apparatuses.

I’ll write another post about The Fireman’s Flame later this week, when I’ve had a chance to upload all my photos and give it some more thought.

But today, I’m writing about chickens. Feeding chickens, to be more particular. Feeding sprouted grains to chickens, to be precise. So why, you may be asking (and well that you should, Gentle Reader) am I prefacing a post on feeding sprouted grains to chickens, with anecdotes about your weekend melodrama?

There is a reason: it hearkens back to the cold night that our rehearsal space was taken over by the Boy Scouts. It was not a violent takeover, but merely a scheduling snafu, which drove us out to our vehicles and through the bitter driving wind . . . to our house. We couldn’t afford to skip even one rehearsal, and the only matter of course that we could figure was to take all the kids to our house. Before we headed for home, Bryan called over his shoulder to the drama parents climbing into their cars: “Give us 5 minutes!”

5 minutes. Ha. I gritted my teeth and prayed for patience. 5 minutes. Bryan was trying to do me a favor, but I knew that I actually needed several hours to make the house presentable for company. We had been spending every available moment at that time on building and painting set, practicing musical numbers, sewing Amalia’s costume, and whatnot. I knew how cluttered and dusty and just plain dirty the house was. I knew that we’d left the kitchen in a mess, with the sink full of supper dishes and a bucket of dirty eggs on the counter. Oiy. My pride was certainly going to take a hit. I braced myself.

Now please don’t make the assumption that I am a perfectionist where the appearance of my house is concerned, because I’m certainly not that. I just knew that the house had crossed the line from “comfortably lived-in” to “downright disgusting.” It had gotten so bad that I was a bit embarrassed when the dogs came in the house. “Sorry, Ollie, the house is a bit messy right now . . . oh don’t go into that room, Bea . . . ” And I had 35 people coming to my house in less than 5 minutes.

Timothy had hurried home before us, and was busily making a fire in the wood stove on our sun porch, the only room big enough to hold 35 people, and where we’d hold our rehearsal. In his resourceful way, he was hauling furniture out the window to the backyard, so we’d have enough space for a rehearsal of sorts. And the two freakishly broad cow-horse creatures that we’d made out of chicken wire and paper mache were going out, too. Timothy is a problem solver, and he doesn’t waste time at it, either.

I admire this about my son: he doesn’t moan and complain about the sorry state of affairs, he just puts his head down and figures out a way through it. I could learn a thing or two from him. Sigh.

I dashed into the living room and folded up a couple of blankets and loaded some wood on the fire in the living room stove, and tossed an armful of clutter into our bedroom, closed the door firmly, and hurried into the kitchen to do what I could to tidy it up a bit. I had, perhaps, at this time, 2 minutes left. I glanced out the window and saw the caravan of car lights coming down our driveway. It looked like my 5 minutes was already up.

The kids were either blessedly oblivious (far as I could tell) or blessedly gracious to the mess that surrounded them, giddy as they always are to be together and rehearse. At one point in the evening, I went into the main bathroom, to see . . . several buckets of grain sprouting for my chickens.

I quickly swept up a few grains that had spilled out of one of the buckets, and casually draped a bath towel over the buckets. Maybe nobody had been in the bathroom yet? A couple of the buckets had been there for several days, and were beginning to smell a bit fermented.

Those soaking grains in my bathroom just clinched it. It’s winter, right? And so if I tried to soak and sprout grains outdoors, I’d end up with a block of ice (albeit with grains frozen within) so I have to keep the grains inside the house, preferably close to a water source, that is, a sink. So they are in the bathroom. Actually, my family hasn’t said a word about this, which amuses me to no end. Suddenly four 5-gallon buckets show up in the bathroom with grains soaking in them, and nobody seems to notice?

I used to do things the easy way, where feeding chickens is concerned. I used to bribe Timothy to take me over to the Co-op a couple of times of year to fill our little trailer full of cracked corn. I would mix the cracked corn with our layer ration and feed it to the chickens day in and day out. That is, cracked GMO corn. Then I started noticing (this is anecdotal: no double-control study has been done that I know of to prove this: it’s just my experience) that my poor hens were having problems, um, staying alive. About one hen every month or two would succumb to something, usually related to her egg-laying apparatus. I wrote about poor Phillipa, who had an egg stuck in her, um, in her vent for days, and what we went through to get that sucker out. Poor Phillipa. She recovered, but there were other hens who went through the same thing who did not recover. I wrote more about all that in another post. (But I don’t share everything with you, my Gentle Reader. Some things are just too sad to share, don’t you agree?)

Here are the grains I buy, a mixture of weed seeds, barley, wheat, and whatnot, BEFORE sprouting. Dry and hard.

So I started doing things that were just a bit harder, but apparently are much better for my chickens. First, I found a source of organic mixed grains (they are “screenings” so they actually cost no more than the cracked corn, though we do have to drive an hour to pick them up) and then I started soaking them.

Some people take it even further and grow fodder from their grains. I don’t do that. At least, I haven’t yet. And others ferment their grains. Sometimes my grains (like that night that all the drama kids were at my house) get away from me and they might get a bit fermented, but I’m happy (for now, anyway) with just soaking them for a day or two before I feed them to my chickens.

I have three reasons that I sprout grains, and will continue to do so:

1. Better nutrition: Did you know that if you let grains sprout, the protein content can jump by 50%, depending on the grain and other factors? Apparently this is true.
2. More grain for your money: the volume of the grains, as they swell up with water  and sprout, increases. A half-bucket of dry grains becomes a three-quarters-full bucket of grains, just with the addition of warm water and time. I like the economy of that.
   
3. Palatability: Anybody who feeds chickens will notice that fowl rarely clean up dry grains. Here’s something you may not realize: chickens don’t have teeth! Hard, slick grains can be tough for chickens to eat. But not soft, soaked ones.
4. One more thing: Did I say three things? I meant four. Sprouting neutralizes phytic acid, which blocks the absorption of many minerals, and it also increases the vitamin content. Here’s a cool fact: sprouted wheat contains four times the amount of niacin and nearly twice the amount of vitamin B6 and folate as unsprouted wheat.
5. Okay, so I actually meant five things: It takes only minutes a day. That’s it.

Here are the same grains, after a couple days in the sprouting bucket: swollen, fat, and sprouting! They look tasty even to me!

Okay now, perhaps you’re thinking of crossing the line to becoming a crazy chicken person, too, and soaking some grains for your chickens. How to do it? I have tried several different methods, and finally landed on the one that I like: I’ll coin it the pillowcase-bucket method. My friend Anne (of the Back to Eden garden fame) suggested a variation of this method to me, so I knew it would work. After some experimenting and tweaking, I came up with a method that works well for me. Maybe it’ll work for you, too?

First: I fill a clean white cotton pillowcase with the amount of grains I will need for a day (for my flock, that’s about half of a 5-gallon bucketful), twist the top closed, and place in a bucket with plenty of holes drilled in the bottom. This bucket I slide inside a non-holed bucket. Then I fill the top bucket with enough warm water to cover the grains and add the lid. I check it after a few hours and add more water, if necessary, to cover the grains. The grains swell quite a lot.

Second: After 24 hours, I pull the pillowcase out of the bucket, dump the water out of the buckets, and then replace the pillowcase into the holey bucket (slipped again into the intact bucket) to drain. I let the grains (still in the pillowcase) drain for another 24 hours.

Voila! After the second day, the grains have sprouted and are ready to feed to my hungry chickens. And they clean up every last sprout and grain, let me tell you!

The “chicken trash” from the kitchen on this day included some spent Valentine’s Day flower petals. I had to take pictures of them. They were the prettiest roses ever.

I carry the bucket out to the chicken yard, and dump a trail of sprouted grains through the yard, including on top of the deep mulch that I’ve piled there for my flock. The chickens will scratch and eat those grains all day long. I also dump any kitchen trash (vegetable peelings, leftover crusts, expired veg, etc.) and they love it all. Our opportunistic cat, Tristan, always insists on first dibs.

So if you want  to try this for yourself, this is all you need: (I have a flock of about 50, so if you have less you can certainly scale this down, and use smaller buckets or even quart or two-quart jars).

• grains that have not been put through a dryer (always ask): heated grains won’t sprout!
• 2 5-gallon buckets
• 2 5 gallon buckets with holes drilled in the bottoms
• 2 cotton pillowcases (don’t use your favorite ones)
• water
• time

That’s it! Ohh, if you do this for your chickens, they are going to be so happy . . . .

I’ll be sharing this post with the linky party over at The Prairie Homestead. Join me over there, and you’ll learn lots, I promise!

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