The 3 cherry trees and 2 plum trees were dug into the garden yesteday.  This years collection of raspberry canes were planted too.  (Last years 2 cherry trees and all of our canes died).  Hoping for a better year this year!  I figure if each year I kill slightly less than the year before, well, it’s a raging success.

Maggie’s Super Amazing Amauti Style Parka came yesteday.  It was meant for her birthday, but I wanted to try it on her in case we wanted to send it back to the seller for alterations.  Not needed.  But… I can’t get her out of it!

Scott put both children to sleep by himself for the first time last night.  When I snuck back into the house I expected him to be consoling himself with single malts, but he said everything was… FINE!  Not one single tear.  Maggie just curled into him and went. to. sleep.  AMAZING.  (Caitlin, here I come!)

And what did I do with myself you ask?  On my monumental First Night Out of the House Past Bedtime Alone in Nearly Four Years?

I went to my girlfriends barn.  Where we hawk-eyed her MamaGoat for signs of labor and watched her pigs have sex.

Yeah, I sure know how to have a good time.

Tuesday I seeded our front pasture in anticipation of the rain coming.  It rained three drops and then the wind came.  I hollered at the sky.

Last night it rained.  I left the car windows down last night.  But I don’t care.  It rained in my seed and I distributed the rest on the back pasture this afternoon.  And the rain has come again.  Wonderful, wonderful rain.

Scott is home from his weekend trip to Montreal, where he got tattooed by Dave Cummings.  Holy, WOW!  Monkey King rib piece in effect.  Scott canceled one of MY tattoo appointments to go… so I’m hoping we’ll finagle a sitter and I we can get started colouring in my Kali soon.

Learned a lesson in soap making this week, thought I’d share.  When you mix lye & water, it’s like 200′F and highly caustic.  Like chemical burn city, y’all remember that scene in Fight Club, CAUSTIC.  SO.  I mixed my lye & water in the garage, away from children and dogs.  I shut the door to the house, everyone was in.  I was in “waiting for the lye to cool” mode.  Nice and calm.  Then Scott left for Montreal.  Having opened the garage door from the outside before he left.  In slipped La Cochonne. It took me a while to figure out that she was locked in the garage with the lye water.

Piggles tried to drink from what looked like a huge glass bowl of water on the nice cold floor of the garage.  Thankfully none got on her tongue.  Just her chin, which is now a fried scab.   Poor Notorious P.I.G.!

Soapmakers: quadruple and squidruple check your creatures are safe when you make soap.  Take NOTHING for granted.

Instead of showing you pictures of a crusty dog face, here’s a cute picture of (The Vicar of) Dibly the Nigerian Dwarf Goat, who is most likely not pregnant, as we had hoped.

I also sold enough soap that I paid off my small batch!

Our friends are up visiting from the states.  The annual Scottish Festival was this weekend, so there’s been lots of tartan entertainment.  We managed to take in the heavy events and the parade.  Hoping to light off a bunch of fireworks here tonight too.

Caught a little mouse in the house this morning.  I usually immediately kill them but Bob started in with the “I love MOUSE!  Mouse so SWEET!”  So I plunked it into his wheel barrow and he pushed it down to the end of the driveway where we let it loose to “play with his friends”.  I dare say I am going a bit soft.

Object in real life was much smaller than it appears here.  It wasn’t even as big as the end of my thumb!

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!

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!

On the cheese front: my feta cheese tastes delicious, but I didn’t drain it enough so it’s a bit soft.  I’ve got a gallon of sheeps milk defrosted to make another batch this morning.  I tried my first cheddar finally (as it takes 3-6 months to age).  In our house we say “Oh I’m just going to taste this to make sure it’s not poison” when something is scrummy and we want to dip in.  Well.  Sure brought a whole new meaning to that with the cheddar, as the unpasteurized milk cheese which had sat in my laundry room for months very well might have BEEN poison!  But it was not.  It was delicious.  Very sharp, highly satisfying.  I’ve got two more massive bricks of it aging in wax right now but I don’t think I’ll make any more until I can make myself a cheese cave.  (My laundry room is unheated, so it’s fine for aging cheeses in the cool months, but it’ll be useless in the summer).

And I made soap!  And I think it worked!  It was touch and go for a while, as it took hours to get it to start to trace.  Endless stirring.  The soap contains: olive oil, sweet almond oil, apricot kernel oil, jojoba oil, kukui nut oil, palm oil, coconut oil, hemp oil, calendula oil, grapefruit seed extract and shea butter.  I scented it with orange essential oil, patchouli, sandalwood, and amber essence. I just cut it into bars this morning and so we’ll see how it works after it cures for 1-3 months. It smells SO GOOD.

The pictures below are as follows:  some of my oils, my stove set up, melting the solids with the oils, my wax paper lined wooden soap mold and lye action, the soap wrapped in towels setting and the cut bars.

So soap making was a good experience.  Easier than I thought it would be.  I’m really glad I had a girlfriend over to hold Meeps while I mixed the lye and water.  (Which IS really smelly and I am glad I did it in my laundry room with the window way open).  I had dragged my heels about making soap, as I was a bit intimidated, but I’m glad I jumped in!

Had a really nice time at a friends baby shower this past weekend and a great time getting to know one of my internet mommy friends Gillian and her family.  Saw lots of old friends and marveled at the size of their children.  Speaking of big kids, look at this picture of Bob – he looks HUGE!  Where did my baby go?

When he’s not pounding his sister he is really, really sweet with her.

Planted almost 100 strawberries.  2 cherry trees.  18 raspberry canes.  Hoping that we get over to the neighbours to pick up a load of composted manure so I can get in some peas and spinach shortly.  There’s an open house at a local organic farm this weekend and they sell transplants so I’ll be paying top dollar to rectify the fact that I fried almost all of our transplants in the oven…

We got a new bunch of laying hens as ours went into the freezer last fall.  They are very happy little hennies and Bob is really enjoying gathering eggs again. Maggie doesn’t know what to think and I am realizing just how much I missed their little chicken noises.