S-W-I-N-E

    GD told us a couple years ago that he did not want to raise animals for meat if those animals had eyes. I guess he didn't want to look his food in the eye, which I don't think is unreasonable for a preschooler.  However, about a year ago, right after eating a delicious Christmas ham, G started talking about getting some pigs.  

     GD was excited about the prospect of pig farming. My mom asked him, "Would you be all right with raising pigs for meat even if they have eyes?"

     "Well," GD answered, "I really like bacon." 

     And so it was tentivitely decided that we would be getting a pig and naming it Christmas Ham. 

     But after a rough winter losing 21 chickens and a goat, we decided it was best to wait to add to our livestock collection.  Until a few weeks ago when we were sitting around the table watching the boys chow down on ribs. That's when G started talking seriously again about getting some S-W-I-N-E. 

      G has learned it is unwise to just show up with livestock without warning me first. I don't mind surprises, I would just rather they not have four legs and require food and housing. So over the next couple weeks he asked me several times about getting a S-W-I-N-E.

      And then gradually that became two S-W-I-N-E, because "it really wouldn't be much more work for twice as much meat."  Whatever. 

       

         Now, there are two reasons to refer to your pigs as S-W-I-N-E. 

1.  You automatically spell everything because you think you're fooling your children but, really, there's no fooling them (after all, I have been trying to teach them to spell). 

2. S-W-I-N-E is much less endearing than calling them P-I-G-S. P-I-G-S conjures up images of prancing piglets and children's storybook characters. It's harder to become attached to S-W-I-N-E before you send them off to the butcher. 

After putting a down payment on two partially grown S-W-I-N-E (yes, around here you do need to reserve your craiglists swine before someone else snatches up the bargain), we did finally tell the boys we were getting some future bacon.  

     They were pretty ecstatic at the prospect of being swine farmers. They insisted on going to pick up the swine and go out to check on them everyday saying, "We're going to eat you someday."  We do have an agreement with them that they won't be required to do any chores for the swine because they don't want to become too attached to them. 

       I think that's wise.  I don't do any chores for them either. The pink one is just too happy to see me for me eat him someday.   He (or she?  I didn't ask, I don't want to know, my food does not have a gender) looks at me with those happy eyes and all I can think about is Babe or Wilbur. 

     And that's why food shouldn't have eyes. 

(No picture of the swine, we may get too attached to them if they're in our photo album) 

How to Make Everything

     GD is a kid that always wants to know "how," especially how things are made.  And then he wants to make the things himself. A few weeks ago he came out to the kitchen with a spool of thread and started cutting lengths of it and laying them out on the table, announcing that he was going to make his own fabric by weaving thread. He said then I would never have to buy fabric ever again. Sometimes his ideas get a little grandiose. 

     This led to me getting out my old loop weaving loom and an all-out investigation into weaving. While perusing YouTube for weaving videos we stumbled upon the How to Make Everything Series, watching a segment where they showed how to hand-weave threads made from natural materials into fabric for a men's suit. GD is now hooked on the "How to Make Everything" channel and he gets to watch an episode every night before bed.  In this series the host, Andy George, attempts to make everyday items like a book or a sandwich completely from scratch, even collecting his own raw materials.  

    It's an interesting series. I have been enjoying watching it with him and it is educational. We've learned how to collect silk from silk worms and that silk worm moths can't eat because they don't have mouths so they just mate and die (something he found very disturbing). We learned that acorns are actually not poisonous to humans and you can make flour out of them (we haven't found any acorns to try it yet, much to GD's disappointment). We leaned how to make our own cheese and butter, how to bind a book, and how to tan a deer hide. 

GD has also picked up some new vocabulary. In the episode showing how to collect hemp to weave into pants, GD was introduced to the word "marijuana."  I hadn't expected Andy George to go off on a tangent about how legalizing marijuana would be good for the hemp industry, and I thought GD would just gloss over it, but evidently the word "marijuana" has a ring to it and he started letting it roll off his tongue, trying it out in different voices.  We had to pause the video to discuss what marijuana is, why we can't grow our own hemp, and that it's not a word we should go around saying for fun.

That's why he doesn't watch these thigs by himself.

   Recently we watches the series on how to make Thanksgiving dinner from scratch in preparation for Thanksgiving.    We were kind of disappointed that there was only 8 episodes because we were hoping it would last us until Thanksgiving. But Andy used a lot of leftovers from when he made his sandwich and his root beer float so we watched those too.  

    A few nights ago we watched Andy go wild turkey hunting. If I had known how much footage there would be of the turkey flapping around after getting shot in the head twice I probably would not have shown this at bedtime, but in my defense I thought the video was going to be about Andy raising his own domestic turkey  (Yes, maybe I need to pre-screen these things).  Fortunately GD fully understands and accepts where meat comes from and has been inspired to hunt his own wild turkey.

The next day he and GE set up a turkey blind out of some kitchen chairs and GE's security blanket "Bee" and proceeded to hunt stuffed chickens with air pumpers.  While GD instructed GE to aim for the head, KM took a more hand-on approach.

While they were setting all this up I realized that when we made the "our kids do not play with pretend guns" parenting decision, wild turkey hunting had not been a factor we considered.  I texted G at work asking what our parental position was on using pretend guns for hunting and if that decision extended to using pretend guns for hunting if your brother is pretending to be the turkey.   His opinion was both of those were ok, but I'm still not too keen on pretending to shoot turkey-siblings. 

After that GD hauled the chicken-turkeys to his kitchen and plucked and cooked them.  He then proceeded act out the other 6 videos in the series, collecting cranberries, sugar beets, acorns, and potatoes.

By the way, Andy George does not include pie in his Thanksgiving dinner.  It just seems wrong.

My Favorite Thing About Fall

    I actually wrote this last fall and never published it.  I found it in my drafts and I have been celebrating the end of sunblock for the past couple weeks so I thought I would finally post this. 


   My oldest son is kind of obsessed with fall.  I've already written about that, but the level of his love for all things autumn is really beyond description.
    I, on the other hand, do not have warm fuzzy feelings about this season.  Well, I guess I do if you're referring to the two layers of fleece sweatshirts I put on when the temperatures dip below 70 degrees.  There are a few things I do like about fall....the colors, the crisp air that reminds me of running high school cross-country and marching band at football games with my favorite drummer, and the festive feeling of the approaching holiday season.  But mostly my thoughts about fall revolve around how we're entering 6 months of freezing darkness and doubts that my house can withstand the forces of two little boys cooped up inside for days on end.  Basically, I just can't enjoy fall because I have a really bad attitude about winter.
  But, I have found a silver lining to all of this.  This realization was the highlight of my week last week.

    WITH THE END OF SUMMER COMES THE END OF SUNBLOCK.

    I feel very strongly about the importance of sunblock application in young children.  My husband would tell you I'm tad bit obsessive about it (well, maybe more than a "tad bit"--I have been known to use up an entire 8 ounce bottle of kid's sunblock in one week).  My fears of my children being expose to too much UV radiation are not unfounded; I have two very light-skinned boys, one with red hair, and a significant family history of melanoma.  So two or three times a day every day from March through September my boys get a thorough slathering of Banana Boat.
    Research shows that when applying sunblock only 25-50% of people use the dermatologist-recommended amount of lotion; most people apply much less than the 1 ounce recommended for adults and most don't re-apply it every 1-2 hours.  I can assure you that, at least when it comes to sun protection for my children I am not a part of this statistic.  Despite being outside for several hours a day every day in the summer, my boys are just as pale as they were last February.  Their pediatrician actually said I deserved a standing ovation for my obvious diligence in their skin protection when I took them for their week visits in July.

    But despite my zeal for broad-UV-spectrum protection, the twice-daily sunblocking ritual is not something I --or the boys-- enjoy. The four-year-old usually sighs and rolls his eyes like a teenager as he plops into our official "sunblocking chair."  Meanwhile the toddler takes off running through the house screaming "Sunblock!  Sunblock! Sunblock!" until I chase him down and all but sit on him to get him slathered in sunscreen (I've actually considered filming this whole process and marketing it as an exercise video). 

   So, last Thursday on the first day of fall as we got ready to head out to the pool in 90-degree heat, I looked out at the north-pointing shadows and decided that the intensity of the sun's rays had waned enough that the boys could survive 45 minutes outside without sunblock. 

    When I told the boys they could head outside without sunblock they exclaimed with delight, and I almost thought I heard the sunblocking chair sigh with relief.

Freeloader Farms

We had big plans for our little homestead this year.  Our hopes, dreams, and expectations for 2017 were beyond optimistic. Just to name a few:

-Continue our successful chicken farming

-Become successful dairy goat farmers. Get buckets and buckets of goat milk, never have to buy milk again, make our own goat milk yogurt, maybe even make our own soap. Sell the baby goats and make some money for more livestock. 

-Harvest enough garden produce to can and freeze to feed our growing family through the next year with enough leftover to sell at farmers markets. 

-Start a vineyard.

-Add more trees to our orchard.  Harvest some apples, peaches, and pears 

-Add a pig named Christmas Ham and maybe some turkeys to our little farm. 

This was just the homesteading goals.  Also on our to-do list were things like "refinish the kitchen cabinets," "add a mud room in the garage," and "knock out two windows in the living room and fill in the existing one." 

Oh, and raise three children. And there's that place my husband has to go to every day so we have money. 

So let's take a look at how all of our goals panned out so far this year. 

-We lost 21 chickens this past winter in three separate horrifying coop invasions, including a few chickens that were beloved pets. We replaced them with chicks that grew into chickens that refused to lay for so long our toddler would chase after them shouting "You bunch of freeloaders!"

-Mr. Goat died under our care. (We actually lied about this to our children because they were already too traumatized by the chicken massacres.  We just said he went back home.  I thought it was worth lying to save their little hearts.  GD figured it out though.). One of our own goats died. We got one cup of goat milk total. We kept the baby goats because they're cheaper than therapy for the boys.   We now have freeloading goats.

-We got a late start on our garden. It got flooded three times. Then it got overtaken with weeds. Then we didn't get rain. Then we got bugs. Then the baby goats ate half the stuff. And then we stopped caring. We froze a couple bags of beans. I thought I would miss the excitement of canning. But I didn't at all. Walmart has plenty of frozen vegetables. 

-Everything else failed so we didn't test our luck with a vineyard. 

-We had about 50 gorgeous bug free peaches we were so excited about. Some critter came and ate all of them just before they were ripe enough to pick and left us nothing but a pile of peach pits. And we had lots of pears but they tasted bad. 

-We were too traumatized by the chicken massacres to add edible livestock to our plate (pun intended). 

The only produce our farm harvested this year was 100 lbs of apples we picked out of ditch down the road. Just call us a bunch of freeloaders. 

The Table Slide

I actually wrote this in February.  I never posted it because I was trying to add a video that just would never load.  So as you're reading it remember this was in February, and we were tired of winter.


This is what happens when you leave three engineer-minded males alone:

This table slide was actually the result of a brainchild of the two-year-old engineer. But the backstory starts last summer.

Last August I noticed some standing water in our basement. Our basement had always been dry so I mentioned this to my engineer husband expecting him to promptly diagnose and fix the problem. Evidently he thought my "the basement is flooded" reports were just the over-reaction of a pregnant woman because he didn't investigate.  In fact he just reassured me, "It's a basement, it's supposed to be wet" (this is really out of character for him). Until the door to the storage area wouldn't shut because it was swollen with water and there was mold growing on the walls we put up just months before. Then he acted on it rather quickly. Turns out our water softener was leaking.

Side note: You know how with your first pregnancy you follow all the rules and microwave your lunch meat and won't even look at Caesar dressing. Well, by the third when your husband reroutes the water around the filter to fix the water soften for a week and half, it doesn't even occur to you that you shouldn't drink it. And then once the water system is fixed you're like, "oh that's why I was so sick."  But that really has nothing to do with the table slide.

Really, the only thing the basement flooding last summer has to do with our table slide is that it left our banquet table water damaged and unusable for normal table purposes.  We had planned to get rid of it, but hadn't gotten around to the task of maneuvering it through the basement around the toys, up the stairs, outside, and to where ever one disposes of large water damaged banquet tables.

The whole table slide came about because of another basement flood.  I was down doing laundry on a very raining day and noticed puddles again.  I texted G, "BASEMENT FLOOD."  Evidently he's learned to believe me about these things because he came home over lunch to investigate (this was the first of two times that week I sent him urgent texts and he had to home over lunch, the other time was a few days later when we had the chicken massacre).

GD was in little engineer heaven.  He put on his rain boots and headed downstairs with G to solve the problem.  They discovered it was not the rain that caused the flooded, but our 20 year old water heater had rusted through and it was time to replace it.

One piece of advice my mom gave me growing up was, "Marry someone who can either fix things, or afford to pay someone else."  I married the former, and then gave him two little assistants.  Within four hours we had a new water heater up and running, partially wired by a four-year-old.

And a cardboard box that it came in to play with.  The cardboard box was turned into several different things before, about a week later, GE had a eureka moment that it would make a great slide coming off of their plastic play fort in the basement.  The cardboard wasn't quite strong enough to hold two boys trying to slide down it.  So their father brought out the twice-water-damaged banquet table and, tadah, we now have the latest and greatest innovation in mid-winter indoor fun.

We've had minimal injuries on it. So far.

How NOT to Milk a Goat In 40 Easy Steps

     We have been milking Tractor for about a week and a half now and, let me tell you, the excitement and glamour is definitely waning.  The "buckets and buckets" of goat milk GD was planning on getting is in reality only 1/4 a cup a day.  I probably could get more, but Tractor doesn't like to be milked.  According to a couple different blogs I should be able to milk-train my goat in 3 days or less using such methods as feeding, talking calmly, caressing, and psychic powers.  Although I haven't tapped into my psychic powers yet, it's been 10 days and I'm still getting kicked.  Since there are over half a million google hits on how to milk a goat, I thought I would tell you how NOT to milk a goat.

  

Goat Milking

     If you've ever read or watched Curious George you know there's nothing that little tailless monkey can't do. George pretty much knows everything.  Or at least that's what GD thinks. So he was pretty adamant that he didn't need to be taught how to milk a goat; he already knew how because he watched curious George milk a cow    (GD also claims the Berenstain Bears taught him how to ice skate without him ever stepping foot on the ice.). I tried to reason with him. 

      How do you know George knows how to milk a cow correctly?  Does he have extensive dairy farming experience?  Is that the only way to milk something?  Are cows and goats the same? Is George even real? 

Basically it was all met with "but he's George!"  GD has never believed in Santa clause but he is convinced Curious George is real. 

     Eventfully I convinced him to watch a YouTube video of some random hillbillies showing how to milk a goat (side note, I recently taught him how to click on other videos in YouTube and he is utterly amazed at the amount of videos my computer contains. He really has no idea. ). Turns out George didn't really do it right. I don't think George even cleans off the teats or sterilizes the bucket when he milks The Rankins' cow Daisy.   GD was kind of crushed that George's pedestal was taken down a few notches by backwoods YouTubers; I guess to him YouTube is even more omniscient than George. Honestly I did kind of question the reliability of such a video but I figured it was a more accurate goat milking demonstration than a cartoon personified monkey learning to milk a cartoon cow in 12 minutes or less while teaching kids to love STEM.  

     Anyway, the moment the boys had been anxiously waiting for finally came.  Mower was two weeks old and Tractor was ready to be milked. The boys built a stanchion, we gathered up milking supplies, and we headed out to the barn in the rain. 

     The first issue was that the boys forgot to account for Tractor's horns in the stanchion dimensions and we couldn't get her in without taking some of it apart. The second problem was that Mower had been nursing recently and Tractor had no milk to be milked. After GD, G, and I all tried without a drop of milk in the bowl, GE said exasperatedly, "Let me do it."  I kind of expected the two year old to end up being the successful one. He definitely has a way with animals so I wouldn't have been surprised if he had been the one to finally coax some milk out. But he didn't. And Tractor was totally over it. 

     The next evening the boys went out to try again but were again unsuccessful. I decided, having substantial lactating experience myself, that I was going to take control of the situation and get some goat milk. I happened to be wearing KM at the time and , So I milked a goat while baby wearing. It was an interesting experience and probably not the best idea but I did get a little milk out and felt like a real pioneer or super crunchy or...something. And then Tractor stepped in the bowl and got manure in it so the milk was a little crunchy too and we had to dump it. 
    The next night we put KM in the stroller and got just enough for the boys to each have a taste. The verdict from GD was that it tastes like coconut milk but G said we need to work on it tasting less goaty.