Commando Farming

This is our new used Port-a-hut , that our friends Gretchen and Jim gave us Saturday along with a heating mat and some little piglet feeders and waterers. We'll move Winston into this because Sarah should be farrowing any day now.

Gifts like these are such a blessing when you're in commando farming mode, doing only what is necessary for survival. It's that time of year when there are a lot of expenses and zero income from the farm. It almost becomes a game, the Farming Super Challenge, to see how little we can spend and how creative we can be with our resources.

Two more blessings this weekend - Matt's new nephew, Jake, born Friday evening in Texas. Congratulations Rick & Sandy, we can't wait to see him!

And another calf born Sunday morning, a black baldy bull calf, no name yet.

Q&A: Blood Spots

Since we don't candle our eggs, people that buy our eggs may notice more blood spots in them than what they'd see from grocery store eggs. Several people have asked me lately about these blood spots - what are they and are they okay to eat? I didn't know the answer, so this is what I found out from the Iowa Egg Council:

"Blood Spots, also called meat spots. Occasionally found on an egg yolk. Contrary to popular opinion, these tiny spots do not indicate a fertilized egg. Rather, they are caused by the rupture of a blood vessel on the yolk surface during formation of the egg or by a similar accident in the wall of the oviduct. Less than 1% of all eggs produced have blood spots.

Mass candling methods reveal most eggs with blood spots and those eggs are removed but, even with electronic spotters, it is impossible to catch all of them. As an egg ages, the yolk takes up water from the albumen to dilute the blood spot so, in actuality, a blood spot indicates that the egg is fresh. Both chemically and nutritionally, these eggs are fit to eat. The spot can be removed with the tip of a knife, if you wish."
© 2002 Iowa Egg Council - All rights reserved

Photo Friday "Rural"

My entry at Photo Friday for February 18th.

Watch Horse

Another day, another new adventure. This morning when I glanced out the kitchen window (which I apparently do a lot without realizing it) I saw two strange dogs coming up through our pasture. I grabbed the binoculars and could see that it was a black lab and a Husky. Now I'm not the type to get wound up about people's dogs running loose, as long as they're not hurting anything. Lord knows ours does it when he gets the chance. But Huskies have a reputation as livestock killers, and with my hens free-ranging and a day-old calf in the pasture I got pretty nervous about it.

So I grabbed Ike and headed out to turn him loose in the pasture. But by the time I got out there the dogs had turned and gone back the way they came so I took Ike back up to the house and tied him out.

Our horse, Kickapoo, saw the dogs before I did and didn't like it one bit. He's a better watch dog than our dog. Whenever someone drives in he lets out a loud whinny that we can hear clear inside the house. He stood at the fence and watched those dogs make their way back through the pasture, flickering and flattening his ears the whole while, and didn't move until long after they had disappeared from sight.

Maybe I should be tying him up outside the door instead of the BWD.

And everyday losses

Both sides of the coin in one day. Yesterday afternoon the cow that's been so sick went into labor but she was too weak to push. Matt pulled the calf but I guess it had been in the birth canal too long and was already dead. He tried to resuscitate it to no avail. So sad. Guess we can chalk up another three or four hundred dollars into our "Cost of Lessons Learned" column.

Everyday Miracles

No matter what species it is or how many times it happens, the birth of a baby is always a miraculous thing. This morning Matt told me to watch a certain heifer that was standing off from the rest of the herd. Half an hour later I looked out the window and she's licking her newborn calf. Wow. The first SCF calf of 2005.

A few hours after that Matt called from work to see if the calf had stood up yet. Amazing, isn't it, how some animals are expected to get up, walk, and find their food at 2 hours old? He hadn't yet, so Matt talked me into going out there to see if I could get things moving along. I really wasn't keen on this. I think cattle are beautiful animals...from a distance. And I'd just recently heard about a farmer killed by his bull.

But I decided to give it the old college try and walked out there. Mama was laying down so I got her up first. She walked over to her baby making those short, low little moo's they use to talk to their newborns. So baby started to try and stand up on those weak, wobbly legs. He was still wet and shivering and shaking which made it even harder for him to get going. It's only about 25 degrees this morning.

After a few ups and downs he finally got his legs under him and started trying to find an udder. The bull happened to be standing next to him so the calf started there first. This could be trouble, I thought, but I was amazed at how gentle that bull was with that tiny calf, gingerly trying to step away from him without stepping on him. Within 20 minutes the calf found his mother, found the udder and latched on.

An everyday miracle.

One of these things just doesn't belong here,
One of these things just isn't the same.
Can you guess which one of these doesn't belong here?
Now it's time to play our game, time to play our game.

(Yes, I grew up on Sesame Street.)

Round 2

I hate this time of year, with regards to feeling like you have to don a Haz-Mat suit whenever you go out in public for fear of catching the flu. Both girls woke up in the wee hours of the morning with the stomach flu. And by woke up with of course I mean were awakened by their stomachs violently emptying themselves of their contents. This was the real thing, too, not like the faux-flu that Rafe had last week.

Is it just me, or do you start to feel queasy the instant your child comes down with the puking flu? So you start to be very careful about what you eat, judging each food item on its vomitability. Angelfood cake? Yes, that sounds nice and easy to bring back up, I'll have that for breakfast.

But later in the day things kind of take a swing. Oh, I just need to eat more. That will settle my stomach. It just needs food to stop it from rumbling like a freight train. And suddenly deviled eggs and pepperjack cheese sounds like a perfectly delightful lunch, despite how low they rank on the vomitability scale.

But maybe that's just me.

When my kids reminisce about what it was like to stay home sick, the image that will surely stick out in their minds is one of me with a can of Lysol strapped to my body in a hip holster. Not very motherly, I think. More like germ-phobic maniac.

On a completely different note, Matt finally noticed that I've been writing some of my favorite quotes on our egg cartons. The egg cartons are just blank, gray cartons. They needed a little livening up.

"Are you writing little sayings on the egg cartons?"

I got that roll of the eyes which means, "I am going to catch all kinds of crap about that when I take them to work and try to sell them." Linemen, apparently, are not down with the beauty of little sayings on their egg cartons.

My Buns are Burning

Awhile back I bought Goldbond's Triple Action Lotion. *MOISTURIZES EXTRA DRY SKIN * RELIEVES ITCHY SKIN * PROTECTS, COOLS & SOOTHES WITH ALOE & VITAMIN E * Sounds great, doesn't it? Poor Rafe has been suffering from some nasty eczema on the backs of his legs this winter. I'm thinking this stuff will really help him. I rub it on him. He screams.

Turns out this stuff also packs a very Ben Gay-esque burn, as I found out when I applied it to my own very dry derriere. Oops.

Being one who hates to be wasteful, I've been using it anyway. I won't use it in the morning because I don't want to walk around all day smelling like that. If I put it on at night I can shower it off in the morning. Only it's quite unsexy, I'm sure, to climb into bed with a 34-year-old who smells twice her age.

Woke up night before last to the sound of Rafe throwing up in his crib. When I think about it, this is the first time he's ever been sick like that. It freaked him out and he was crying and screaming, "Hold me! Hold me!", like he'd had a nightmare. I'm thinking "Hello, flu. We've been expecting you".

Turns out, though, that it wasn't the flu. He only threw up the once, then stayed up for the next 4 hours watching videos as Matt and I drifted in and out of consciousness, finally slept a few hours, and was up and at 'em and back to his normal self the rest of the day. My theory is that it was sour milk. He has a habit of leaving sippy cups in out-of-the-way places, finding them three days later, and then finishing them off. Gross, I know. I won't even tell you other things he likes to eat.

Matt took the day off to stay home with Rafe, so they set up the toddler bed in Rafe's new room and dismantled the crib. I've been saying, "Get this kid out of our room!" for months now, but still I'm a little bit sad. Going from crib to big-boy bed is one more milestone on the road that's going to take him into adulthood and me into old ladyhood. Mr. Unsentimental said, "We should sell the crib." Not until you have that vasectomy scheduled, buddy. As much as Matt likes to talk about being done having babies, he's all talk and no action. Anyway I'm keeping it for when we have grandbabies come to stay.

And in hours the weekend will be here. Hooray! Mom & Dad are keeping the kids tonight and tomorrow (thank you!) so that Matt can go to class with me tomorrow. Looking forward to having 4 hours alone together in the car and lunch out!

BWD

My BWD - Big White Dog. Our second Great Pyrenees, Ike. He's almost a year old in this picture. In the afternoons he stations himself in the hallway outside my office. If I go downstairs to the bathroom he follows me and stations himself outside the bathroom door with a big sigh that says, "If you would just stay in one place my job would be so much easier." I'm not sure, though, what he thinks his job is. The other day someone knocked at the door, and I had to step over his sleeping body to get there. Good thing it wasn't a landshark.

Houseguest

There is something living in our house. Every so often I'll be awakened by the sound of something gnawing on what sounds like wood in our closet. I get up and stomp my feet and bang doors to frighten it off. To this point I've chalked it up to a mouse, though you would think with 4 barn-cats-turned-garage-cats we wouldn't have mice. But mice happen. It's just one of the more lovely perks to living in an old farm house.

Then yesterday morning I was lying in bed, willing myself to get up, when I heard something scampering up and down the hallway. It sounded just like our house cats playing, except we don't have house cats anymore. Definitely bigger than a mouse.

Haven't heard anything since. Matt thinks I dreamed it. I'm wondering if it's the ghosts of our former housecats. If it happens again I'll be on the phone with the pest control guy immediately.

Chicken Therapy

I'm convinced that if doctors handed out chickens instead of drugs there would be far less depression in the world.

The winter blues usually start for me shortly after New Year's and can last all the way into May. But this year I have chickens.

My chickens get me out of the house every single day. I walk out to feed them and get at least a few minutes of fresh air every day and sunshine when it's around.

They depend on me, and human beings need to feel needed.

They make me laugh as they run about. It's interesting to simply observe the pecking order. One of the White Rock hens has a distinctive and bossy cluck. She seems to be trying to tell the others what to do, but they ignore her.

They add beauty to our farm. I ordered 6 different breeds of chickens so that we'd have lots of different colored hens to watch.

Thanks to chicken therapy, my bouts of winter blues have been much shorter and occurring less frequently. It's a good thing. (I'm sure Martha would agree.)

Calving Season

Calving season has officially begun. Nope, nobody's thrown a calf yet. But Matt has already started his vigil. "I think Mrs. Hamilton might be close", he said last night. I just gave him a look, and reminded him how many times he said that last year. Nevertheless, he was outside at 3 a.m. checking on things. When I got up this morning he said, "Look outside." I looked and saw some cows standing around the bale ring eating hay, and a couple of others just standing around over by the old bale.

"I don't see anything."

He looks again with the binoculars.

"Oh. I guess she was just going to the bathroom."

I don't remember him being this anticipatory during any of my pregnancies. I don't remember him observing me for signs of labor, checking on me at 3 a.m., or asking if my water had broke every time I used the toilet.

Calving season has begun, with or without a calf.