Growth spurt, gray skies, and a little ingenuity

The chooks seem to have gone from featherweights to almost-hens  in no time flat.  I went in this morning to feed and water them, and realized that they're fast outgrowing their brooder boxes.  Hence, Yours Truly needed to step up production on Ye Olde Chicken Coope.  And yet, the weather outside has been grizzly and cold for the past few days---certainly not conducive to fun-filled family times in the yard with power tools, but what's a gal to do?  In this particular case, the only tenable solution was to make (yet another) lumber run (making sure to fork over a roll of quarters for the guy in the orange apron to do my dirty work for me) and to shlep all those freshly hewn studs down to the playroom for a good, old-fashioned coop raising.  (I'll leave out the part about running out of gas on the way out of the parking lot.  And the part where the guy who's "been in lumber for 25 years" spent a solid 15 minutes of my afternoon trying to convince me that there was no such thing as a 2x3. )  Anyway, the only hitch in my plan was that the big kids seem to have burned out on the idea of building.  So it was me and the three littles (all noteworthy for their precocious construction skills) assembling the first 2 walls of the hen-house-to-be.  There did seem to be some significant benefits to the "inside construction" plan, though.  I found it much less nerve-wracking to supervise the munchkins whilst I toiled, knowing that there were locked doors between them and passing vehicles, friendly dogs, and curious Child Safety workers.