My Dash: Week 16

It's getting hard to remember which stories that I have already told. :)
I have been thinking this week about the kids' perspective on mom being different than a mom's perspective on how she did or is doing. It is hard to know which of the many moments that we spend together each day are making an impression.  What is their overall understanding from all these tiny daily events going to be?
Looking back, my overarching perspective on my mom as a kid was that she trusted me. She let us be independent in a way that helped us find ourselves.  One early memory is of making mud pies at the E family's house with no bad reactions from mom.  Also gathering "beautiful" shiny black rocks (tarred asphalt of some kind) from the newly repaved roadside, which I washed in the sink - that was at the landau house. I remember her letting us make experiments in the kitchen.  Messy experiments like trying to figure out how to make Reese's Peanut butter cups with chocolate chips and peanut butter.  Now I think of what a big pain it must have been to clean up all those little bowls of melted peanut butter with various mixins.  She let me try out my sewing with her scrap fabrics and later with her quilt fabrics. I wanted to take a quilting class with my friends so she took me to it.  She let us paint our own rooms and pick out our own outfits. My sister S had some very dramatic ones. One in particular I remember, involving a black cape and red swim cap. She let us have friends over all the time and took us to friends houses. We made good friends because she did lots of driving around. I spent several weeks one summer at my cousins house 2 hours away and she drove and picked me up both ways. And when my best childhood friend moved away in middle school she drove 2.5 hours each way to drop me off for many long weekends with them.  She let me get a job before I was able to drive and trusted me to ride my bike there and back. She trusted us to be good examples, like when P said he would not watch an R-rated movie at one of his school friend's houses. And later as teenagers our house was a favorite place to hang out because she trusted us to make good choices and also bought massive amounts of teenager foods like hot pockets, oreos, and ice cream. And she did not micromanage our eating.
I also remember thinking a lot that my mom was proud of me.  I know we always rolled our eyes, but mom was our best cheerleader and "bragged" a lot about this or that great thing that we had done or award that we had won. (Still does :) She wrote us little encouraging notes. She is dramatic and made a big deal about successful report cards, honor rolls, student of the month, and our first everything...
 Love you Mom!

Family Schooling Summary: Holi Party and Hiking

The kids were invited to an amazing holi birthday party this week and had a blast.  Here they are getting instruction on the rules - don't throw in people's eyes etc.

 The first minute - getting started...

 Then all out in a cloud of running kids and color powders:

 Baby L leaving the fight to come hide in a safe place.

 The big kids were nice to the littles about it.

 Baby L decided to bomb my boots - probably knowing that I had no powder to attack her with.

 

 

 Popsicles instead of birthday cake - All the kids cheered!

Big sister A went on a hike for activity day girls this week:

Last day of A's cake decorating class this week:

Farm Fresh: New Goslings, Turkey Poults update, and Old Rabbits

Our Toulouse Goslings arrived in the mail this week along with some Blue Swedish (for brother S and his obsession with all things blue) and Cayuga ducklings.  We are very excited to have blue and black duck eggs from these new ducks. The goslings look a lot like ducklings, just larger. There are 16 currently, but 8 belong to another farmer.

 The all black ducklings are the Cayugas.  The great thing about getting them from the hatchery is that I was able to specify that I wanted 3 females and 1 male.

 Here is a good picture to show the size difference between the goslings and ducklings:

 Here are big sister A's ducklings. 3 weeks old and huge compared to the new babies.

 The turkey poults are growing well.  We are down to 6 now that everyone has picked up theirs.

And on the rabbits... I finally decided I really HAD to do some butchering.  The three left from our first litter were getting old (and tough). I used the method my farm vet suggested as top 3 most humane for rabbits. It was to stun with a captive bolt gun - a shot through the brain and then cut the jugular just like with a chicken.   All of the videos make it look very straight forward, but I was feeling very ill about the whole plan.
 I think the first two went as well as could be for a novice. They were truly stunned and I was able to cut the jugular fairly smoothly. The third one was bad. The stun must have gone through the wrong part of the brain. He screamed :(  I was traumatized, but obviously had to break his neck and finish the job.  I have decided that while I could competently butcher rabbits, it is too sickening for me to butcher mammals. Especially ones that were gently raised to be sold as pets first choice. I am not going to do any more rabbit butchering.
 I love raising them. Their poop is doing amazing things for my garden and it has been so fun seeing them go to good homes as pets. We hopefully will have some 4H rabbit shows in our future. And yes, there will be extra rabbits and I will have to take those to one of the local butchers. (One quoted me 3$ a rabbit another $2.50.) At least I can be sure that he will do a quick job of it and no rabbit will suffer unduly.  

Family Schooling Summary: Co-op School Spring Party, Flower Arranging, DIY Tea Party

Big sister A has been gathering and arranging wild flowers! This makes me so happy.

 We had our Spring picnic for co-op school this week at Patapsco State Park.

 They waded and threw rocks in the water.

 They found tadpoles.

 They got a little sandy and muddy.

 We had a yummy picnic lunch.

 And we played on the playground.

 We met one of the bunnies that we sold as a pet and were glad to see him running around happily on his leash.

Big Sister A organized, decorated for (using leftovers from Goomie's party), and baked cupcakes for a stuffed animal birthday party. 

 Look at that delicious blue frosting with sprinkles. Such a good little baker!

Farm Fresh: Turkey Poults Arrive

Another rush to the Post Office this week! We picked up our order of turkey poults on Thursday.  While we were getting the brooder ready the power went out for no apparent reason. We left the poults in the warm car while we waited for it to turn on. 

 Luckily it came back on after only a couple of hours.

  Not all of these 27 turkeys are ours. The 15 Bourbon Reds belong to one friend and 5 of the Narragansetts to another.  That left us with 7... except we already lost one.

Baby L snuck out of her bed on Friday night and played with them. She brought one upstairs to me and said "Turkey sleeping. He is sleeping Mommy."  His neck was broken. I cried.  Poor turkey.  at least the others were all fine.

My Dash: Week 15

Today we had our Stake Conference broadcast.  I was in and out with baby L, but I heard genealogy and family history mentioned several times. I was especially impressed with the story Sister Bonnie Cordon shared about a young boy enjoying searching for his ancestors names. I made a mental note to do an FHE lesson on that soon.  Now big sister A is old enough to read easily on her own - she can start using Family Search and making her own genealogy book.
That made me think back to my first experiences with family history. I know I learned to enjoy it at a young age and was trying to think how that happened.  I remember giving a talk in primary about my clock making ancestors and dad helping me make the cool plaque of tools hanging in my boys room now.

We also had a bunch of their tools and a jeweler's lathe in our basement for awhile.  I remember pulling out the drawers of a little desk and looking at all the tiny tools and parts.
We had an FHE lesson on genealogy and mom gave us each our own book with family tree pages that we could use to copy everything down from her book.  I always loved thinking about other countries and I was so curious to learn about the places that my ancestors came from. I went to the genealogy library and looked at microfiche with Sister Stermer once.  I remember that seemed complicated and was pretty overwhelming.
 Goomie told me lots of great stories of her family that I was able to write down in my scrapbook. My favorite one was about how when she was a little girl she set a goal to go down the sledding hill 100 times.  She was determined and did not give up or go inside until she had done it! I also loved hearing about her Grandma Horst. She laundered and mended clothes to earn money. She was also a midwife and delivered 49 babies. She did not have much money and worked hard for what she had, but she loved to treat her grandkids (Goomie and Aunt Janice) to an ice cream cone for 5 cents.  Once again I realize how lucky I was that Goomie lived close by so that we could hear all her stories.  Goomie took me once to a cemetery where some of our ancestors were buried (on one of our road trips) to New Jersey or Pennsylvania.

Recommended Reading: January-April

Looks like I am very behind on my recommended reading posts.  I am always tempted to stop doing them, but they are important for tracking our homeschool reading.  And since I have to report on that soon (May 3rd is our homeschool review)... I better get crackin'. I keep adding to this draft post.  Sorry to skip writing much in the way of reviews!

My books:

1. The Mapmakers Children - A beautifully told historical fiction about John Brown's family, the abolitionist movement, and infertility. Grown-ups only.
2. Longing for Home and Longing for Home Hope Springs - Another "Proper Romance" love story. Lots of interesting characters and a nice long plot evolution. It delves into the issues of Irish immigration and the potato famine. 
3. Anthology - spring, summer, fall proper romance
4. My Family and Other Animals - Gerald Durrell
5. The Human Super-organism  This is an awesome read about the different roles that microbes play in human health. I love and am kind of afraid of the thought that my body is made up of different habitats, worlds within worlds, of microbes working along side my cells. 
6. Dangerous by Shannon Hale; lovely author, great grown up read. Totally sucked me in for a day.
7. Brandon Sanderson - Alloy of the Law series- All the Mistborn books are great reads.

Kids:

1. Tuck Everlasting - I was not sure how the kids would like this.  They did not understand the philosophical parts about death and the circle of life, so a lot of the plot was lost on them.  Probably more of a 10 and up book. 
2. The Hobbit - Hubby read this to the kiddos.
3. Bull Run - children's history of the civil war
4. Just So stories by Rudjard Kipling
5. Fairest and Ella Enchanted- Gail Carson Levine
6. Johny Tremain by Esther Forbes - awesome historical fiction that brings the revolutionary war to life. The kids listened with rapt attention to the entire story.
7. Arabian nights as told by Jim Weiss
8. Wrinkle in Time - enjoyable and fairly deep, has levels of meaning for all ages.
9. Rebecca (American Girl) 1914
10. Wondla
11. Judy Moody I hate listening to these books in the car, but the kids love them, so I conceded.
12. River Secrets by Shannon Hale -Book 3 in the Goose Girl series.
13. Goose Girl
14. The War That Saved My Life - by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley; historical fiction set during the start of WWII through the Battle of Britain and ending at the Blitz.  Great for teaching kids about determination and accomplishing goals. Some rough themes about verbal and emotional abuse. 

Abi's Books

1. Harry Potter book 1&2
2. Tin Tin