Presentation options! What would you rather your organic, artisan, ewe’s milk chevre look like? Wrapped in a traditional cylinder, or a little chunk? (Sticker size was larger than I had thought it would be once I actually stuck it on 120 grams of cheese. Might get smaller ones next time, perhaps white on black.)
TUBE OR CHUNK?
Miss Mang-O (as Bob calls her) is now one whole year old. We had a great little party, told everyone best wishes only, and were up to our eyeballs in prezzies anyhow. All good, all the kids helped Mags open her presents and candles were lit and relit so everyone got to blow them out.
It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to!
Here’s a bunch of pictures from the day of her birthday. Sharing strawbs with Bob (she’s no longer sensitive to them, hallelujah), napping on Daddy, partying hard.
Lately I’ve been glowing over my easy to please babe. Thinking about how easy babies are compared to toddlers (for me, and despite colic!) Then wouldn’t ya know it last night, she starts THIS NOISE. An “I want” noise. I remember this with Bob; his noise was a fairly innocuous guinea pig wheep-wheep. Maggie’s brand new “I want” noise is an ear piercing, high volume, full force SHRIEK.
This is really motivating me to get my butt in gear with the sign language, something we’d been lagging on. I do the potty sign, eat and more…. but LAGGING NO LONGER. Baby signing, here we come! The horrendous shreiking must end!
Made a giant whack of chevre this morning with my Rennet Rebels pal Brandy. Off to make more lip balms and package my soaps in preparation for the Saturday morning Farmer’s Market. WOO!
So, we have guns in our house. We have a tidy little collection of a variety of actual firearms, and my kids have quite the arsenal. There’s a slew of wooden guns: pop, handgun, long gun and there’s even a (plastic!) cap gun.
And this is why I’m fine with both:
1. Guns can be really fun. Real guns (RG from now on) are fun to shoot. I feel like most people who say things like “guns have NO other purpose than to KILL” have probably never gone target shooting. Something for which I personally prefer the ever-controversial hand gun. (Long guns are heavy. I’m little. That simple).
Toy guns (TG from now on) are also fun to shoot. Bob quite enjoys “pow-ing” imaginary birds from the sky and making them into soup for his sister.
2. Guns can harvest the happiest food on the planet. I greatly appreciate the fact that the healthiest meat available is that taken from a wild animal, who foraged in the wilderness and died with the sun on it’s face and a song in it’s heart.
3. Guns are useful. For processing your own farm raised meats. For dispatching any rabid or otherwise suspect or problematic varmint. For the purpose of protection in case the Mayans were right or the zombies come or thanks to all the BPA and pthalates we wind up in a Children of Men state. I’d like to be able to hunt my own food and protect my family if the world falls apart.
4. Guns aren’t decidedly deadly. A gun is a tool. Like a power drill. Or a knife. Or a Sawzall. A gun is only deadly if the person wielding it makes it dangerous. A person who doesn’t know how to properly handle a gun shouldn’t handle guns. Nor should drunk or otherwise disorderly people. Those same people also should not operate power tools or drive cars either.
SO. Guns and kids. I don’t think toy guns are going to make my children grow up to be violent. Because we’re trying very purposefully to raise engaged, compassionate children. We also have no cable, no video games and there’s no guerilla group in my back forty waiting to recruit my kid into a world of crime. I’m pretty darn confident Bob and Mags aren’t very likely to become sociopaths.
Not every game is BANG-YOURE-DEAD. Guns can be any object and any object can be a gun when you’re a kid.
I do tell Bob, if he shoots his sister, he has to eat her. Snotty nose and all. He is after all, two and a half and snot is a pretty good deterrent for someone his age. We are teaching him, of course, that you would NEVEREVER shoot your sister, or anyone else for that matter. And that Real Guns make Real Owies. Age appropriate and all that. And, OF COURSE, any firearm here is always properly stored and the keys are hidden out of sight. Common sense and some conversation.
I will say, I didn’t always feel this way about firearms. I never thought I’d be perfectly fine with toy guns in my house. Like many people who swear against firearms, I too can share horrendous stories about what can happen when guns turn into weapons. I didn’t grow up around guns, but I got into them over the years. And I quickly realized that my fears about guns were speculative and that, when handled properly, there is nothing to fear.
(I’m not advocating real or toy gun ownership for all.
I am only explaining my personal feelings about firearms
and my children.)
We participated in the annual Teddy Bears Parade this past weekend. It was pouring on Saturday, so it was held on the rain date, Sunday. Only since the police are so pressed for time upholding law and order around here, they couldn’t make it on such short notice and thus there was no police escort for the parade to march down the street. So we marched on the sidewalk. BESIDE the slow moving vintage firetruck blasting out “Walkin’ on sunshine, WHOA-OA!”.
Teddy bears, 1. Police, 0.
Bob, when asked to smile for the camera, makes this face:
He is in the local paper making this face, comme ca:
Annnd the only dog more ridiculous than Puppercini on the planet Earth is a pug with bear ears and a Hawaiian costume:
Maggie is going to be one whole year old on Sunday. I can’t flipping believe it has gone by that quickly. A year ago this time I was grotesquely preggo, waddling, sweating and SO god damn excited to go into labor and meet my kid. Meeps is such an awesome creature right now. She’s in that enraptured by everything phase. My belly button amused her for a good 15 minutes today. She uses her Green Toys Tea Set daily, with glee. Slurping away at imaginary soups that her brother cooks for her. She likes booby, and lots of it. And dirt. But doesn’t really care for food. Her kisses are huge, open mouth slobber jobs, full contact smackers. She is a noodle. Her legs are like two little wobbly fettucinis that just disappear into her equally petite bottom and bitty waist. Maggie stands at the side of the chicken tractor, yanking out grass and cramming it through the wire mesh for the birds. She doesn’t care that they don’t eat it. She feeds the goats the same way, and they do eat it. Which she thinks is awesome beyond belief. I can’t stop kissing her face. Because it’s always in my face. Because she wants really nothing more than to be in Mama’s arms. Which is something, while occasionally trying, that I would never wish away.
In other news, I made cheese today with my girlfriend Brandy. We made chevre, feta and ricotta. We’ll be turning some of the chevre into St.Maure, spraying it with white mould and letting it sit for a couple of weeks. Which will practically double it’s estimated street value. Here’s the feta after 4 hours of draining, about to be cut into chunks:
NOTE TO SELF. Stop wearing your Birkenstocks when out feeding goats and chickens. It is both painful and disgusting.
After three years of tattoo prohibitive pregnancy and constant breastfeeding, I finally got tattooed! Sweet wonderful, joyous tattooing. Any concern I had about the spiceyness of getting my neck tattooed went right out the window as soon as the needles hit my skin. ‘Cuz of two words. NATURAL. CHILDBIRTH. Hahahaha. It was a great sit. I didn’t even clench my teeth or tense up. After feeling like my entire body was splitting in two with every contraction, starting from my butthole… the discomfort of tattooing suddenly pales.
Can’t wait to get it coloured in and do the other side. I feel terribly asymmetrical!
So. I waited until Maggie was 12 months old and eating more solids to get tattooed. I never personally recommend nursing mothers (whose nurslings are getting nutrition PRIMARILY from the breast, ie 12 months and under) get tattooed because of the heavy metals. A contrary position to the LLL; from the very simple research I’ve done using MSDS info & the ingredient labeling on tattoo pigment, have found that the molecular weight is small enough to pass through breastmilk. Unlike the LLL, I don’t believe getting tattooed while breastfeeding can be called SAFE, though I don’t think it is particularly risky either.
Exercise COMMON SENSE & PERSPECTIVE. Tattoo pigment is not FDA approved, there are no studies. BUT I don’t want or need the government to slap a safety label on everything I eat, touch or wear, I can figure it out myself, thanks!
So - I don’t sit for hours for tattooed while my nursling is primarily on the breast. In our shop, the decision is up to the woman’s discretion (unlike tattooing a pregnant woman - an unequival NO) and I would think it would be perfectly reasonable for a woman to decide to get some tattooing while nursing. The risk is theoretical, and very small.
There are SO MANY TOXINS in our natural world, in our living spaces. There are chemicals everywhere and while yes, it is (I feel) important to reduce our risk levels by reducing exposure, you get to pick your poisons. Our Britax Boulevard carseats off-gas, but that doesn’t mean I don’t use them. That ice cream cone on a hot summer day from the stand may not be organic, but it is sure delicious. And the heavy metals found in SOME tattoo pigments MAY impact my health if I pound enough of them into my flesh, but by gosh they sure do make me happy! Basic research and the powers of deduction show it’s certainly not akin to smoking butts or eating McDonalds daily, unless you’re talking about being tattooed from your nose to your toes, inside and outside, internal organs and all.
And EVEN THEN… The potential for health impact has essentially no negative impact on my choice to continue to get tattooed. It is a risk I am willing to take personally and I think it’s a pretty small one. I am not going to expose my tiny little babies to that potential risk, but I am not going to be worried if/when they decide to get tattooed as adults. I’d be seriously upset if either of my kids became smokers!
ALSO. You can still make wise tattoo choices. There is no way that you should be getting tattooed with ink that contains formaldehyde or gluteraldehyde or anything like that. If your tattoo artist cannot have a dialogue with you about what is in their pigment, the choice is yours to find another artist. There are also a variety of pigment sources for a number of colours in the spectrum and some are definitely safer than others. You don’t have to be a scientist to realize pretty easily that glow in the dark and black light tattoos are probably not a hot plan.
Another also. The consensus seems to be “well it’s safe in the short term” (for most people, some do have allergic reactions) but what about “the long term” they ask. And about that perspective thing: one of the earliest evidence of Man on this planet, well he had tattoos. Born in ol’ 3300 BC. His body and the pigment placed into his skin were frozen in time. My point? While tattooing has only become really mainstream recently, it has existed for eons in sects of American, Polynesian and Japanese cultures (just to name a few). We’ve seen that this is absolutely one of safer activities man has taken up and has evolved appropriately over the last 53 CENTURIES!
Like anything else, make an informed decision. Use common sense and put things into perspective.
Scott and I spent a romantic anniversary dinner in the E.R. with our darling pneumonia riddled daughter. We noshed on cold take out pizza, and washed it down with… oh wait, we forgot to get beverages.
Meeps had a chest X-ray two days ago and was prescribed some liquid ABX to take by mouth. I tried explaining to the doctor that my daughter has an impressively overactive gag reflex and cannot take medicine by mouth. She barely takes food by mouth. Being a doctor and having been in the presence of my kid for approximately 5 minutes and therefore Clearly Knowing Best, he brushed off my insignificant insight and told me surely she’d keep it down. Well, she did as she always does, which is either spit it right back on contact with her palate, or commence gagging and vomiting until her stomach is completely empty. And then wretching and puking bile for a few minutes after that just to be sure the contents are all gone.
So covered in vomit and with an increasingly sicker baby, we returned to the ER. (My GP takes a few months to get in with, and did not return my phonecalls). This time we got a doctor who listened and put in a little leg work to find us a solution for Meeps. And so Miss Maggie got her very first injection; a teeny 1 mL shot of ABX in saline into her little thigh. The howling was fierce, but she quickly forgave us. We return tonight and tomorrow for the same. She’s feeling a bit better already and is presently feeding her puffs to the dog.
My girlfriend Brandy and I are going to be selling some chevre and feta at the local Farmer’s Market the first weekend in July. We wanted our brand name to be unique, something other than Boringville Farms Fromagarie. Inspired by Russian prison tattoos and with the help of my hubby, we came up with the following:
A cheese cave has been offered up to us which is awesome. I had been aging my cheddars in my unheated laundry room, but it is useless in the warm months. Very much looking forward to new adventures with cheese!
Made a nice batch of soap earlier this week too. I used olive, coconut and palm oils, and added honey, cedar and tea tree. I can’t wait for it to age so I can try it out. I’m hoping it’ll be a nice antiseptic soap for washin’ new tattoos with. (Of which I presently have and am waiting for a new card reader to come so I can blog about it!)
In other news, we have recently fallen off the local food wagon. It’s all thanks to my friend Chrystel, who started this totally awesome organic food box program here in Kincardine. It’s called Ideal Organics, and it’s great. We’re getting lots of local veg now from industrious greenhouse gardeners, but I just can’t say no to the fruit box. If you live in Bruce County and are looking for organic produce at a great price, you should get in touch with her!
Bob loves to make them little homes in the buckets and always returns them “to their friends” in the front pasture/pond. Which reminds me, I think there’s a pot of tadpoles around here somewhere that needs dumping too…
My mom called the other morning to say there was a dead doe in her front yard, and we came and got rid of it for her. My folks live above a pretty busy road - there are stairs up their back hill to their house. This poor creature must have been struck down there and come up looking for a quiet place to lay down and die. She had a pretty gnarly healed leg from a previous injury - I can’t imagine what it was like to walk around on that.
The mini-vanasaurus is a loaner from the car accident the 4runner was in. Hafta say, not a fan of the van. It uses less gas than I thought it would, but it’s still a pig. I can see them being highy useful if you had more than two children to haul around on a daily basis, but driving two kids around in that beast feels like HAULING and not driving. I like zipping around in my little Focus hatchback and it holds plenty. Our other vehicles each seat four kids, so unless we’re escorting around a team of children, I think we’re pretty well taken care of.
Something I love: Goat eyelashes.
I put Bucky in with the girls yesterday as his testicles had shrivelled up. Things went better than I thought they would (on Sooki’s first night, the other three chased her relentlessly). But I think it’s because they’ve seen and heard him for the last few weeks from his quarantine pen. I took him out last night (I know they won’t let him in the shelter) and will put him in with them today for good. The little ninnys have been playing “goat on a hot tin roof lately” and it’s a miracle there’s not been any broken limbs on account of their raging obesity. (Little Buffy on the ground there is actually pregnant and not just fat).
Maggie is sick, I’m a bit sick, Scott is sick. At least one of us looks cute despite it:
Our little ratball has been getting showered with tummy rubs since his return:
In other news, we lost a baby chick this morning due to over crowding. Squashed under the waterer. They really need to get outside, so I think instead of tattooing me Scott will be building a chicken tractor tonight. Foiled again!
Gardening. I love it. And I hate it. Because no matter what I do, nature has her own plans of course. Everything was trucking along pretty swimmingly. Way better than last year. I made even taller raised beds to save my plants from drowing, had lots of manure and peat tilled in, and felt really… lucky about it all. And then. And then the JUNE frost turned about 1/3 of my tomato plants into crispy blackened twigs and demolished 1/2 of my peppers.
Everything else seems to be OK. Sunflowers are popping up, corn is popping up, strawberries are covered in flowers. The rest of the tomatoes and peppers look great, as do their replacements. The brussels sprouts, cabbage, chard, broccoli and cauliflower all are fine. The flowers for cutting are ducky, as is the basil. The peas and spinach are growing as fast as they can. Though there is only one lone bean sprouting through. No sign of carrots yet either. Or beets. But they’ll come. I had written one of the cherry trees off as dead, but low and behold there’s some nice new green leaves sprouting so all is not lost.
Oh gardening. The emotional roller coaster.
In super awesome good news, Dave Allen has just joined the crew at my husbands tattoo shop! It’s going to be great having another artist around this summer. Scott is really looking forward to having someone else to tattoo, fish and drink scotch beside.
We’ve decided we should name our farm The Super Annoying Animal Farm. Dibly, in grass-is-always-greener fashion, keeps getting her head stuck in the fence. I see a hot wires in their future. The baby chicks are at that highly smelly, manky stage… too big to be cute, too small to be out on grass. Daisy Duke does about 37,002 annoying things every day in her rabid quest for love and attention. NoNo Goo Eyes only wants to play loudly once the kids have just fallen asleep and are more prone to waking up. CatCat chews plastic bags - a quiet noise that wakes me up from a dead sleep. Puppers riles up Daisy. Daisy continues to be annoying. And the laying hens refuse to use straw in their nesting penthouse and therefore get poo all over their eggs. And yet somehow, we are planning to add MORE animals to the mix.
?!?
Bob’s Bird House (Sparrows have already made a nest!)
Group hug!
I post so many pics of my kiddleywinks I figured I’d post a recent snap of myself for good measure. Unlike the self portraits from the past, this one includes a nursing bra and potty seat in the background. ENJOY!
Scott has homework almost every night. He works a full day, comes home, puts the kids to bed and then drags his barely conscious self down to the kitchen to draw for clients. Some mornings when I come down to see the previous evenings creation, I feel like sneaking off with it and keeping it all for myself! I love this piece he just put on our friend Rob.
I love that the sheeps wool looks like Tibetan clouds and I love the livestock ID tag in its ear. And the intestines. I do love intestines. Not that I’m planning on getting any of those things in my next tattoo (hoping to get some big roses on the sides of my neck before we start my back) but a girl can dream, can’t she?
Pussy. CAT.
I had our rescued Himalyan cat sheared for the summer. Even with brushing, I still have plenty of mats to remove (I use a seam ripper, since I am always afraid I will cut his skin when I use scissors). I figured between the hot weather and my increased lack of spare time in the summer, the Lion Cut was the way to go for ol’ NoNo Goo-Eyes Duncan.
Puppercini thinks NoNo’s new hair cut is dead sexy and has not left the cat alone since he came back from his Wild Adventure. The cat, who outweighs him by at least ten pounds, hands Puppers his ass on a platter quite regularly in response. The D Day for Pupper’s balls has been set with our vet. He’s got no idea what’s comin’.
If gardening with your goat is normal, than you could say everything is back to normal around here. My three kids and I had a nice day in the sun yesterday planting beans and eating clover. Bucky is still in his quarantine pen on account of his lice (which are almost gone) and his having testicles… and while he is within yelling distance of my girls, he gets lonely. We have stopped having to drain his giant abscess and his testicles have descened from within the mass, so hopefully he’ll be getting his balls removed shortly too. Hopefully things will go better for the dog and the goat than they did for my husband.
So far in my 100′ garden of glory (and groans) I’ve planted (from North to South): two cherry trees, 18 raspberry canes, sunflowers, corn, garlic, strawberries, spinach, peas, assorted flowers for cutting, tomatoes, peppers, brusells sprouts, red & green cabbage and beans. And I’ve planted a bunch more bulbs including a whack of ranunculus in a pot (which I cannot wait to see bloom). I have two huge black currant bushes waiting to go in, broccoli transplants, cantaloupe, gourds, pumpkins, cucumbers, zuchinni, basil, carrots, onions and potatoes left. The rest are waiting on 4 more trailer loads of manure to arrive from a neighbouring farm, a few bales of peat (I feel bad for the bogs and the miles traveled, but only until I try to stick my shovel into my cement pad of a garden plot).
And now the pictures.
