Freestyle Homemaking

Sunday, May 14, 2017

Pro Photos from our visit to NY

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.