september mama

i have acquired another totally practical-yet-impractical skill which i am reveling in... spinning! as in, yarn. my vote for "next animal to join the farm" is obviously sheep, now. :D

it sort of happened by accident, despite me wanting to learn for a while (but never caring enough to invest the time or money)... i found a friend on ravelry who incidentally runs a yarn/fiber shop on etsy, she wanted makeup and i wanted yarn, so we traded. in the process, i ended up with a few drop spindles and some wool as part of the deal, and she showed me how to use them. BAM!

that day, we went to visit a nearby alpaca farm, the owners of which i have connections with, and not only did they hook her up with a crazy deal on raw fiber, they explicitly told me i can come get some for free anytime. *drool* alpaca feels like clouds. so i've got about 5oz of fluffy, jet-black heaven in a bag, which i am not going to touch until i know what i am doing with that spindle! i'll practice with plain old wool until i have a more consistent product, then on to the fancy stuff ;). i've actually been considering brushing the rabbits when they start their spring shed to blend in some non-angora-but-still-soft-rabbit with my wool or alpaca. this is really dangerous, because my knitting projects have slowed down dramatically... i want to spin all the time. i know it's a phase and it will pass, but still. i've been trying to rationalize a la telling myself i need to use up my stash of yarn and then i will have an excuse to spin :)

ah. i just love making things, and similar to the process of taking milk from the cow and turning it into something...more complicated...knitting from spinning from wool from the animal is just so satisfying. i dub it "slow crafts" off the top of my head. did i make that up??

speaking of rabbits, the distressed doe is still hanging in there. i don't know how, but she's alive, and it's hard to say whether she is still in labor. her breathing is weird and that lump (aka fetus) is still in there, but she seems ok. the sitting hen was disturbed for a day by matt stealing too many of her clutch, but she is back to sitting... though i don't know if the eggs will end up being viable or not, now. i told him in no uncertain terms to leave her the hell alone, so hopefully she recovered her broodiness quickly enough and will manage to hatch at least a few. we'll see.

we had a mystery crop of something from the garden last week--after much debate and research, it turned out to be daikon. (yes, matt failed to keep a record of what he planted.) it was then a mystery to both of us WHY he planted a massive amount of daikon... ? not the most useful vegetable, and he couldn't recall buying the sees, but we did some new things with it and it was tasty. stir-fried greens, and a potato-parsnip-daikon soup. he pickled some in the traditional way, as well, but i haven't tried them yet. the rest is basically rabbit and cow feed at this point, because it wilted really fast and we just didn't want to eat that many radishes. lol.

liam, rowan, and matt all have colds and i have a scratch in my throat that i deny is the onset of my very own sniffles. i got about 2 hours of sleep last night (thanks, liam...and matt...) and spent the morning in a nursery full of wild little boys followed by a funeral lunch... weird stuff. all i have to say is thank the stars for crock pot dinners because i have no desire to cook at all. i should be sleeping now, as a matter of fact, but i couldn't resist using naptime for knitting and spinning instead. oh well. coffee's brewing.

rowan has been difficult lately. she does things she knows will get her into trouble (albeit very little trouble) and has been pinching herself and me, just to be mean. never liam, thankfully. matt thinks she's bored, and i think he's right. so i've got to find some friends for her or something more interesting to do than sit here with me and/or invade grammy and grampy's home every day. would be easier if matt didn't take my car every day. i'm going to go hunting online for toddler activities...

i know i mentioned the rabbit tragedy already, but it got worse. the next day there was another non-living baby in the cage. it looked like its legs were hemorrhaged so i'm thinking mama smushed him or he was stuck in the birth canal for too long... sigh. then it got worse again. mama bunny ("fatty") was gasping for breath and not moving around at all, with her eyes mostly closed. there were strage pinkish drops of blood(?) around her whiskers.

we did some 'research' online and couldn't find anything, though i am versed enough in the hazards of birth to guess that she was either 1) still in labor, 2) hemorrhaging, or 3) suffering from an infection. we could only assume whatever it was must be birth-related..? but of course the vet was going to charge upwards of $200 for a visit and--cold and hard as it is--we just can't pay that for a rabbit we can replace for $15. i didn't want her to die or to suffer, but there's a limit to the extravagance we can bestow upon livestock at this point.

i decided the best chance she had was to get some penicillin from the feed store and give her the proper dose; if she did have an infection it would either cure it or not, but it was either that or nothing. (by the way it's not fun to stick bunnies with needles :(...) the next day she was the same, but we managed to check her out on the underside and there wasn't any unusual blood or other ick, which was a good sign.

today she actually seems slightly better--she is not so droopy and her breathing sounds a tiny bit easier. i'm really hoping the meds help because i hate losing animals! we're keeping a close watch on her. the more i see her the more i think she might actually have a purely coincidental respiratory infection...

in other animal news, i have cracked open five eggs with double-yokes in the last two weeks. five. that's almost a world record! being that the chances are 1 in 1000 for that to happen in the average dozen, i'm thinking one of our chickens is a hereditary double-yoker. it's novel and fun, but unfortunate because that means her chicks won't hatch. oh well.

and finally, mama is tired because babies are NOT SLEEPING AT NIGHT! why?!?!? liam woke up every hour last night. rowan woke twice. repeat for the last several days. these nights make me want to say things like "i hate my life" even though i don't. i'm just exhausted and not getting a break. in liam's case, i fear he is waking because it hurts to pee (more on that later). or he's teething. rowan, i cannot explain. it's so, so frustrating to finally climb back in bed and just drift off only to be startled out of it by wailing children. *cry*

i need a day off.

...since i last posted?! terrible.

liam is 3 months old and very much a big boy lately. physically and in terms of his interactions with other humans. i swear he will be talking by 6 months old... and he's really stable with his torso so i expect he should be sitting around when rowan did (20 weeks), if not earlier. his bedtime routine is like clockwork; we do bath and bed right after rowan goes down, and both kids are out by 630. it's amazing. but he has been waking a lot recently (every 4 hours, down from about 8 hours a few weeks ago) and i'm not sure why, but i'm hoping he settles down soon. he's also drooling a lot and eating his hands so we may have entered teething phase #1... *cringe*


rowan is using multiple-word phrases and pronouncing things very well lately. she is all about coloring, watching movies, and riding her toy unicorn all over the house. her hair is long enough to pigtail and some days she even lets me :). she recently had a few tumbles and scored some serious scrapes on her nose AND a massive ugly bruise on one cheek... it was a rough week.


matt is starting a 4-day, 10-hour shift for the next 3 months which will have him home friday, saturday, and sunday... it's nice, though i worry about how bored i know he will be. matt+boredom=annoying. and of course he never wants to do any of the projects i suggest he fill his time with, so it's kind of hopeless. i just have to resign myself to the fact that he will be monopolizing the computer for at least one full day per week, watching stupid movies on netflix instant play. ugh.

butters still hasn't had her calf, and she's huge. i worry about how much bigger she can get before that belly just plops to the ground. and day by day marge is looking rounder too... we'll see what happens. the downside to having a "farm" was evidenced to me this morning when i went out to feed the chickens: one of the rabbits decided to birth without a proper nest, so i was greeted by two dead baby bunnies in her cage. not a nice way to start the day :(. one looked like he might have come out that way, but the other was still soft and had likely died less than an hour before i went out there. it's really depressing... he was probably just too cold. the odd thing is that she only had two. rabbits like her usually have 8-10 kits per litter... ?? the point is, dead bunnies are really sad and it sucks to have to face harsh realities and deal with them sometimes. sigh.

we are getting 8--yes EIGHT--eggs every day, such that our fridge is overflowing with them. i try to use about 3-4 a day, but we still have surplus. hoping to trade someone for them, but not sure who/what for/how to go about that. i think i might start with craigslist... the garden is full of greens and root veggies because matt plants in the opposite season by accident every year, but they are growing beautifully so i'm not complaining. looking forward to lots of, er, turnips. and beets. and kale. in the spring. lol.

i'll try to post more often. i've been using my free time to knit...