Stitches, Ear Infection, and a Coloring Contest Winner

We had some big adventures this week, especially baby L.  She had her first trip to urgent care for stitches on Sunday night.  She was playing with S on the step down from the kitchen to the den.  I was standing at the sink washing dishes and talking to Dad on the phone.  I glanced over and they were fine.  Then a minute later she was bleeding.  I think S pulled her leg while she was sitting on the step and her head banged against the metal corner cover on that little step.  Here we are afterwords:

 The gorey details:

Then yesterday she woke up screaming from her nap. Luckily now she can tell us that her ear is hurting.  I gave her the garlic-mullein drops and some tylenol for good measure.  She continue to scream and so she also got a popsicle and some TV.  All better.  

 I have not been blogging about it as much, but baking continues around here. The kids are always happy to be making things.

We had lots of friends over this week to hold bunnies. We also did more clay projects.  Brother M has been practicing hard.  I told them that I would only take their best things to be fired.  He learned to smooth and score.  He put this snowman and mug together very carefully so that they can go in the kiln. 

I am the cub scout committee chair and I was in charge of decorating for the "Blue and Gold" banquet this year. The theme was "International".  I had lots of good ideas, but I had to make sure that I was willing to expose whatever decorations I used to the wild antics of our cub scouts. The globes are beach balls from oriental trading.  

 Brother S won a coloring contest for Valentine's Day.  He got a 10$ gift card from the local Dollar Tree.

My Dash: Week 9

As I mentioned last week, there was a park 2 streets down from us and it backed up to woods and fields.  I just checked it on google earth and there are no fields behind it now.  The land has been developed. That park was a central place for us as kids. We went to the "Park Program" there every summer and made crafts or played games. That's where I learned to make boondoggle bracelets and that is where we found out (from older kids) about walking down the creek to "Baby Niagara". It evolved a lot over the years, but we went to the park regularly, even when I was a senior in high school. We also used it as a way of crossing to the Dairy Barn without having to go along the main road.  We were convinced that the Dairy Barn had the best ice cream (soft) in the world.  AND it was the most ice cream for your money. We would look for loose change in the couch and on the shelf by the washing machine to try to scrounge up the 50 cents needed for a small cone. To us it was huge.  Prices went up over the years and it has changed ownership many times.  It's a great place, but I imagine it would be hard to make money on a little country road. We always try to visit it when we are in town. 

Farm Fresh: Rabbit Kits with Eye Infections

I brought the kits in every day this week to pet and wash their eyes.  With 11 bunnies in one nest box it got dirty a lot faster than the last group and many of them had nest box eye (like pink eye for rabbits).  I read about natural treatments for it and tea with honey seemed to be the most effective. I cleaned out the nest box and put them in a new one with fresh hay for a couple days. That along with the tea rinses seemed to help a lot.  Then the weather warmed up and I took the nest box out completely.  Mama Alice looked very harassed when I put the 11 kits in with her and no box.  They are all over her now and she has no peace. 

 Here is the first day -- the original nest box:

Here is the second day -- in the nest with clean fresh hay: 

     And here they are today -- day 2 with no nest box:

The eye treatment worked well -- only 2 eyes are still crusty this morning. 

 There are 3 black babies -- those are the orphans from Miss Scarlett's litter.

 They are such cute little fuzz balls. We have 4 families coming over for playdates and bunny holding this week! That will help the babies be friendly.  I will start advertising them for sale for Easter pets in a couple weeks.

Valentine's Day Festivities

We started preparing for Valentine's Day a few days before. We made Valentine's Day mailboxes for the homeschool Valentine party at our friends' house.   I tested out a Valentine's Day banner craft to use for one of the activity stations at the party. The kids wrote and sealed up all their little valentine cards. 

 I cut hearts out of this box to make my "test" banner for the craft station.

Here is the first one that I made:

The kids got cards and treats Valentine's Day morning and then we went to the party in the afternoon.

At the party the kids made this cute yarn monster craft:

 They decorated valentine sugar cookies and ate lots of goodies:

 Here is S getting ready to give out his valentine cards:

My Dash - Weeks 7 and 8

Last week for Valentine's Day I made a little card and treat for each of my kids for Valentine's day.  I am following my parents tradition of making Valentine's day special. There was always a card and little treat for Valentine's Day for each of us at the breakfast table.  I remember getting a cute pencil with a heart shaped eraser one year that I was really excited to take to school. My mom likes to decorate for each holiday and have the right treats. I also remember eating corned beef and cabbage for many St Patrick's days.  I did try to make corned beef and cabbage a couple years ago for my family. My kids and hubby were not very fond of it -- especially the cabbage part... Maybe I will try again as they get older.

This week has been unseasonably warm. That seems to happen every year in late February or early March.  I remember on one warm winter day as a kid riding bikes with my brother P to the neighborhood park. From there we walked through the woods and a field to "the creek".  It was flowing quickly, but there were still some icy patches. I think we must have been around 8 and 10 years old.  P had played little league baseball the summer before and for some reason was wearing his baseball cleats that day. As we played, hopping across on the rocks, P misstepped and fell through a patch of ice into a deep part of the stream. He got all wet and his baseball cleat was washed away downstream.  We tried to catch it and just got colder and wetter.   After that it suddenly felt like a very cold winter day again and home seemed a long way away. We went quickly hobbling along through the woods and field back to our bikes. P said that his foot felt frozen and he was not sure whether he could pedal his bike.  I gave him my shoe and we rode home. We were shivering and so cold that we thought we might die.  Later that night we told Dad about our misadventure and he completely ignored the important part of the drama ("We almost died of cold!") and was angry about the loss of the baseball cleat. We tried to tell him that we were lucky not to have frostbite, but he kept going on about how expensive those cleats were. P and I still reminisce about that day - so many funny adventures together.

Family Schooling Summary: Pottery and Playing School

My pottery teacher had to close shop for most of the last year, but has started offering classes again.  I have been working on a series of tiny clay windowsill pots.  They are shaped like houses from around the world. This is what they looked like when I left class last week.

Here is a bread cloche that I was working on while we were living at my brother P's house. 

It was kind of an engineering project.  I wanted to see whether I could make a kitchen counter cloche to store the bread in as it cooled.  I was hoping that the unglazed clay inside would absorb some of the moist steam and keep it a little crispy. It is not working exactly according to plan.  Too much moisture is still in the cloche.  I probably need to try another model with unglazed clay inside AND some holes in the top.  I also want to make it wider for the other kind of loaf. 

 Here is a bowl that I made. It was supposed to look like pleated fabric. I loved it. Then I glazed it and now I am ready to throw it away. I should have used clear glaze.

As part of my class, I purchased an extra bag of clay from my teacher so that my kids and I can play with it at home. It is great because unlike "airdry" clay, it never goes bad. When the kids leave it out or it starts to dry out we just put it in a ziplock baggie and add some water.  I told the kids that they need to keep practicing and when they make something really special I can bring it to class to get fired in the kiln.

 Last week a summit meeting of delegates from around the world was held under our dining room table.

 We held classes outside in the gazebo one day when the temperature got into the 60s.

Also A finished her diorama of Al-Andalus for history class (we are studying the middle ages this year):

My Dash: Week 6

Today being fast Sunday I was thinking about how nice it would be to have dinner all ready for me when I got home from church. That reminded me of how we used to go to my grandma G's house for dinner after church every Sunday.  I am not sure what ages I was while we did that. She moved to our town when I was about 2 years old.  I remember hopping out of the car and racing through the garage to G's back door into the kitchen. She, wearing her apron, gave us each a warm hug.  It always smelled delicious.   My first stop after hugging G was to look in the big bottom drawer in the kitchen next to the refrigerator.  She was a secretary for the custodial staff at the high school and invariably had interesting little trinkets and note pads for us, all of which always appeared in that special drawer. We had dinner at her kitchen table. Often a baby was in the sassy seat that connected to the table or in the jumperoo that hung down from the door frame. Sometimes we played Upwords after dinner and if we were very lucky and stayed long enough we could watch the "Wonderful World of Disney" movie that played every Sunday night at 7pm.  Another special treat was getting to spend the night at G's house.  Lucky for us, she had off work on all the same holidays that we did.  She always had special treats for us to eat for breakfast or a fun outing planned for us the next day. It was lovely having her only a few miles away for most of my childhood. I feel so blessed to have had her there for all of my important life events.

Farm Fresh: Muscovy Ducks

 A friend of mine wanted to rehome her pair of Muscovy ducks and we happily adopted them.  Their names are Goose and Affleck.

 Muscovy ducks are a meat breed and much larger than my laying ducks.  They will only lay about 180 eggs a year whereas my khakis average around 320-340 eggs a year.

Muscovy ducks are supposed to be much better at setting (incubating) the eggs and take better care of their ducklings.  Affleck is 2 years old and has not been allowed to set her nest yet, so we will see how she does in the spring.

They got all dirty in the poultry cage on the way to our house.  It was so fun to watch how vigorously they cleaned themselves up when I gave them a big basin of warm water.
Here are all the neighbors come over to meet the new arrivals. Goose and Affleck will stay cooped up in the duck house until March. Then I can trust them to stay close by while letting them out to free range.  This is also a good way for them to slowly get acquainted with our other animals.

Farm Fresh: Rabbit kits sadness and survival

Our two rabbit does kindled on the 30th and 31st of January. Since she has twice previously failed to make a nest in her nest box we put Scarlett in a guinea pig cage in the garage.  The idea was that it would be slightly warmer and that if Scarlett failed to make a nest I might still be able to save some of the kits. Scarlett did a much better job this time and made a nice warm nest in a corner of the guinea pig cage. Alice (pictured above) is a stellar doe and kindled in her usual nest box without any fuss.  I counted about 7 babies in her nest, hard to tell because they were very energetic when I peeked under their fur blanket.  And they looked roly poly and fat from her feeding them in the night.  When I went to check on Scarlett's 5 kits that first morning I could see that they had not been fed.   I spent some time thinking about my options. Finally, I decided to take 3 of Scarlett's kits out and put them in with Alice's litter.  I had to put some vanilla on Alice's nose so that she would not reject the ones that did not smell like her own.  The vanilla wears off after a day or two and by then all the babies smell the same. Here they are all snuggled together in their nest. The little black face in the upper left corner is one of Scarlett's kits.

  I decided to try to "force" nurse the remaining 2 of Scarlett's kits on her belly.  That means I held her while she was laid her on back and placed the 2 kits on her belly to nurse. They were eager to eat and Scarlett let them.  For two days that worked well.  Then on the fourth day, Thursday morning as I went about my morning chores, I was devastated to see that Scarlett lay dead in her cage with blood all over the floor and a large bloody blob between her legs.  Sometimes a kit gets stuck or reabsorbed and then the doe gets an infection and dies.   I think that is what happened to Scarlett. That means that her remaining 2 kits are orphans.  I decided not to add them to the 10 kits that Alice is already working hard to feed each night. We tried to give them rabbit formula, but it was messy and they did not seem to want to eat much of it (it has a low success rate anyway).  Finally, I hit upon the idea of having Alice "force" nurse them during her off hours (middle of the day since they feed their babies at night).  That worked well yesterday. I am giving Alice oats to help her have produce plenty of milk and also carrots for a treat.  She is a gem.  I am so glad that nothing happened to her.
Here are the 3 remaining kits from Alice's first litter (all bucks). They are about 3 months old now.

 Very curious fellows.