Follow-up

As a quick follow-up to my One Small Step post...

Top 10 Things that Amelia Suddenly Likes to Eat by the Pound:
(in no particular order)

Beans
Most kinds of soup
Stir fried bell peppers
Anything with lettuce or greens
Almost anything with pasta
Almost anything with rice
Lentils
Sweet corn
English muffins
Pizza

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One small step...

[Right: Amelia, wearing all of her favorite clothes at once, at her request. Some of the bottom layers can't even be seen. She wanted more, but we had to stop - partly because we couldn't stop giggling long enough to keep going. ]

One of the things we asked Amelia's school to work on with her was food. She has sensory issues that go well beyond "picky eater" - her diet was limited to foods of certain textures, and to a lesser extent, colors. We tried a wide range of approaches to expand her horizons, with only the tiniest glimmers of success. She was firmly stuck in a small sliver of the food spectrum: pretzels, cookies, chips, crackers, popcorn, Cheerios, and chicken nuggets. If it didn't look or feel right, she wouldn't even touch it, much less eat it.

We practically force fed her yogurt and/or applesauce every day, just because we were desperate to get a tiny bit of real food into her. We spiked it with NanoVM, a vitamin powder designed for kids like her, that doesn't give any off flavor or texture to the food.

But it was hardly a solution we were comfortable with. We tried serving her the same dinner everyone else was having. We tried taking her to a feeding clinic. We tried something they call food chaining - basically finding foods that were very similar to those she liked. We really weren't able to make much progress with that approach. We cringed at the thought of how slow the pace was for accepting new foods, and how little progress we were making toward the kinds of foods we actually wanted her to eat. What we had was a recipe for an overweight, diabetic, malnourished mess.

Notice the clever use of the past tense in this post so far. That's because a little over a week ago, we started getting notes home from the school: "Amelia ate some pizza today." Then, "Amelia ate her whole lunch, including a cheeseburger." Then, "We couldn't feed Amelia her ravioli fast enough today."

Wait... Did they say ravioli? As in, wet, slimy, not at all crunchy, ravioli?? Granted, school lunches are hardly a great diet, but compared to where she was before, it was huge.

The next day, I gave her a spiral noodle from some pasta salad that Lori had made. She touched it, then put it down. She picked it up. She carried it around for about five minutes. She touched it to her chin. Then to the tip of her nose. Then... she ate it. I went into the kitchen and picked out some more noodles. Her hesitation was gone. She ate them all and requested more.

At that point, I thought, what the hell - I gave her the pasta salad as is, complete with olives, broccoli, salami, the whole bit. Again she brought me an empty bowl. She ate everything? This was big. This was Revolutionary.

As it turned out, she didn't eat everything. On the floor under her chair, I found a small pile of olives and salami. But you know what? I don't really like olives all that much either. The key for me was that the little reject pile contained absolutely no broccoli.

Vegetables. She ate vegetables. And asked for more! My world was turned upside down. Lori was literally getting teary-eyed. I started making phone calls, screaming "Amelia ate broccoli!" to unsuspecting (and slightly bewildered) friends and relatives.

Since then, Amelia's tried all sorts of new things. As many as six or eight new things in a day. Not all make the cut, but I'd say we've had a (stunning) 75% success rate with new food acceptance.

Lori wrote a note to the school, thanking them for working their magic. We didn't know what they were doing, but whatever it was, it was working. Funny thing though - I ran into her teachers a couple days later when I was dropping off her glasses. They told me they hadn't really done anything. It just happened. All at once, Amelia started eating. It was all her own doing.

And beyond the obvious, it gives us hope that progress doesn't always have to be painstakingly slow - hope that every now and then, Amelia can make a great leap forward. It gives us hope for potty training. Or even... what if... what if one day she can learn to talk?

Of course, she may not pull this kind of trick again. And that's ok. We know the odds. But for this one we are thankful... happy... stunned... relieved.

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Makin' Lemonade

One of the challenges of trying to do this small farm thing AND have a day job is that there's not always time to finish projects. I'd venture to say that most people who try this don't end up with their properties looking like the cover of a magazine. The partially finished projects combine with the scraps leftover from completed projects to create a lot of debris.

The problem with trying to sell your house in this case is that most home buyers don't appreciate the, uh, "working farm aesthetic."

I've been giving Freecycle, Craigslist, and our local recycling center a workout, but they have their limits. And even the trash man won't take a broken down old goat shelter. Also, it turns out that when it comes to rotting lumber, even free is not a low enough price.

So, I decided that to commemorate, um... our move? The Pumpkin Show? Our upcoming 10th Anniversary? ... I decided to commemorate all those things at once. It was time for a bonfire.

A surplus of cinder blocks for a firepit. Some water-damaged cardboard boxes as a firestarter. A teepee of unusable lumber, a failed attempt at a bookshelf, a flimsy wooden chair, and we had ourselves quite a little fire.

The boys danced around it, helped gather the scraps, and tossed in woody stems (Thanks for helping with the weeding! Keep it up!) Amelia, confined to the other side of the back yard fence, decided to get in touch with her primitive side and get naked. And Lori took advantage of the situation to grab a few rare moments of solitude inside.

Fun for the whole family, and a nice little soil ammendment for next year's garden.

Throw in an overnight shower to put out the last of the coals, and it was almost serendipitous.




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Parenting and perspective

Earlier this year I had lunch with a friend I hadn't seen in many, many years. We were catching each other up on our lives, our families, and what we'd been up to all that time. The subject of my daughter's medical & developmental issues came up. She was asking questions and I was answering, trying to paint a picture of the complexities of Amelia's world. And then she said something strange: "It's so tragic."

It's probably not strange, really, but was strange for me to hear. Anybody who has ever met Amelia knows she's a happy kid. Even strangers can't resist her contagious giggle. Put her in a on a beach or in a swimming pool, and she is purest joy, personified.

Sure, there are bad days, and more often, bad nights. I've complained about them here on occasion. But there's no sense of loss, of grieving. There are plenty of tragic stories out there, but ours is not one of them.

I don't fault my friend for thinking what she did. It's probably pretty common for those who haven't been around kids like Amelia very much. For us, she's just another kid; another family member; another person to share the love. We deal with the challenges of an autistic kid the same way we deal with the challenges of our other kids. We struggle, we whine, we adapt, we fail, and succeed, we laugh and cry, and we keep going.

All of this is really just to reinforce Sharon Astyk's great post from today:

Asked, most of these parents probably would have said they could not handle a child with autism. I suspect I would have as well. And yet, when a child with autism came their way, they were not only able to “handle” it, but to make a life of joy and beauty, and moments of pure happiness and celebration out of that reality. It can happen to all of us - and almost all of us manage, not just to survive, but to find new ways to be happy and grateful and feel that they got lucky.

(All this after a vacation which was most certainly not made easier by the presence of our pint-sized, mess-making insomniac. )

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Favorites, Part 5: Baby Signs

I don't even remember where I first heard about the idea, and I was slightly skeptical at first, but I'm a convert now. I love baby signs. If you're not familiar with this, it's a simplified form of sign language for babies. Babies often have the brainpower to communicate before they have the developmental ability to actually talk. If a baby can wave bye-bye, they can learn other signs and gestures too.

The most useful signs are things like: more, all done, food, drink, nurse, and diaper change. Other signs that are easy, fun, or useful are things like: mommy, daddy, bath, sleep, cat, dog, bird, etc. You can get pretty elaborate with vocabulary. At our house we mostly stick to the basics.

But let me tell you, it's SOOO nice to be able to find out what the poor kid is crying about. Throw in yes/no and pointing and we can have a very useful interaction: What do you need Owen? Food. Ok, let's go to the kitchen and get you a snack. Do you want this yogurt? No. How about applesauce? No. (Points to sauerkraut.)

Sauerkraut?! I wouldn't have guessed that in a million years. But he ate a bowlful and then asked for more. And then a drink. All without talking. And probably more importantly, he stopped crying as soon as we started moving toward his goal.

It's also cool to see combinations emerge. My favorite example was one day when I was taking Owen out to the car. I was just getting ready to put him in his seat when I realized only the driver's door was unlocked. So I walked back around to the other side of the car to hit the "unlock" button. Owen got really upset because he thought we were going back to the boring old house. So he starts crying, and signing more and waving bye-bye. More bye-bye. That's just cool.

We used the book Baby Signs, which I think was the original, or at least an early proponent. There are a ton of imitators and variants out there now. Not surprising I guess, since it's so easy and so useful.

There's no evidence that it delays speech or confuses kids when they do start speaking. The opposite seems to be true. The research shows that it apparently gives them a bit of a cognitive head start on language skills. And once they do learn to talk, the signs become less efficient than words, so they fall by the wayside.

The book was interesting, going over the research that's been done, examples of how it helped different families, and quite a few potentially handy signs. To be honest though, you don't need a book. The actual signs don't matter. They just have to be simple enough that a baby can do them. Whole hand gestures are better than anything requiring finger dexterity. Intuitive signs are useful (pretend your finger is a banana and imitate peeling it), and anything that's similar to ASL is good too if you ever have any sense you might want to learn it. And signs for words that are hard for little kids to say can come in handy as well.

Infants probably won't get it, but you can start early if you like. I think we started trying to work them in around 6 months and that may have been a bit too early to sink in. But it got us in the habit.

Owen's starting to talk now. Or at least blurt out the first syllables of various words. (Every animal is a dog. Or a "dah!") But it'll still be a little while before he really gets going. (His brother won't let him get a word in edgewise anyway...)

For such a small effort, the payoff is pretty sweet.

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Gratuitous baby photo!

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Things that are awesome

There are a lot of things that suck out there right now, and sometimes I get fixated on them. But today I want to fixate on the things in my life that Don't Suck. So here are ten (count 'em, ten!) awesome things from our world.

1. Owen is taking his first steps. He also managed to touch a chicken for the first time. They were gathering around him in the back yard in hopes that he had something edible to share. He swatted at one and brushed its wing. Then he cracked up. It was funny the second time, and the third, and so on until the chickens figured out to keep their distance. Owen also had a long conversation with Meadow, which also made him giggle.

2. Lori helping with the gardening this year. She's helped in the past, but this year she's really digging in. She's taking a shot at Square Foot Gardening for out seasonal, herbal, and kitchen needs. This has left me free to focus on a shorter list of high volume pantry crops. Fun for all concerned. She was out there shoveling topsoil into the newest raised bed with a baby on her back! If that's not dedication, I don't know what is.


3. Lori's chicken-resistant garden beds. (You probably can't see it, but there's bird netting draped over that frame. It could also be draped with clear plastic for a mini-greenhouse, or shade cloth to keep greens from bolting too soon. Or canvas for that Oregon Trail look. )


4. Off-duty hours. Lori and I revived an old tradition from when the twins were little. Each of us has designated hours during the week, where we can go off and do what we want - read a book, work on projects, do something frivolous, etc. - guilt free. The other person's job during that time is to wrangle three crazy kids while retaining as much of their own sanity as possible. Raising a special needs kid, a high maintenance kid, and a baby while trying to learn about small scale farming from scratch, while also holding down a day job in the midst of an economic crisis, can get to be a bit much sometimes. This is a great safety valve to get time for what you really want every now and then.

5. Craigslist. Picked up a dirt cheap riding mower. Well, one and a half actually. The guy had a spare parts mower of the same model, with working engine, larger mowing deck, etc. that he begged me to take away. The back end of it is missing. I'm not sure what I'll do with it, but hopefully I can swap out for the larger mowing deck. In my spare time. I do hate the thought of having yet another old engine to maintain, but it does increase my odds of having at least one functioning at any given time. It cost less than a new push mower. I still can't understand how people can spend $5,000 - $8,000 on a zero turn mower - especially when all we have around here are giant, flat, treeless empty lawns. But I digress.

6. Lack of illness. It's been at least two weeks since anybody in our house was sick. It's about to change, based on e5's cough, but still.... After a long winter of colds and infections and viruses (and hospital bills!) it's nice to have a breather.

7. The YMCA. It's fun to stay at the YMCA... for swimming lessons for the kids, beginning karate lessons for me, for the fundraising they did for Amelia, and so on.

8. The Anti-Coloring Book. It's got a bunch of creative coloring ideas for kids, with very limited designs and lots of blank space. "You've just discovered a new planet. Design a flag for your new world." (E5 drew a modified American flag. One star (since it's a new planet and doesn't have states yet), with vertical red/white stripes. "You just discovered a new bird in the jungle. Draw a skecth of the bird to send back to the museum." (E5 drew a remote-controlled robot bird.) It kept him busy during Amelia's recent visit to the genetics specialist. On the blank dinner plate, he drew a brown blob, with a yellow rectangle next to it. He whispered to me that it was poop, with pee to drink. Ahh, five-year-olds. But later when the doctor asked him what he was drawing, he looked sheepish, and then told her it was meatloaf, with a glass of lemonade.

9. Spring peepers. Here's a little audio clip recorded on my front porch one night. Sorry that the audio quality is not great...

10. Amelia taking the term "garden bed" a little too literally.

DONE

I hereby declare this blog a Cynicism Free Zone
for the rest of this calendar year.

4 Paws for Amelia
Fundraiser

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A list - with baby pics

Foods Owen likes

Applesauce, bananas, apples, lima beans, black beans, pinto beans, green beans, corn, peas, rice, buttermilk biscuits, scrambled eggs, toast, cranberry sauce, tiny pieces of grape, Cheerios, Fruit Loops, pasta, peas, pretzels(!), tortilla chips(!), flour tortilla, ice cream, french fries, mashed potatoes, boiled potatoes, graham crackers, goldfish crackers, chocolate, guacamole, pudding (chocolate and butterscotch), yogurt (vanilla, blueberry, and apple), cooked carrots, cooked pumpkin, lentil soup... [ Lori, what am I forgetting? ]

Foods Owen dislikes

[ . . . ]

Not bad for someone with only two teeth. We have not bought a single jar of baby food, and we've barely even used our little hand-crank food mill.

It's also a good thing we turned our coffee table into a temporary fireplace barrier:

"Look what I can do!"

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More stuff

Today's topic:
Global Financial Armageddon!!! AAAAAHHH!!
Cute Stuff About My Kids

After our computer literate five-year-old son used up most of the time on a software trial period, we had to establish a new rule. He took it upon himself to make a sign so nobody would forget the new rule:



I had to tell him each letter, but he composed the message and wrote all the letters. For some reason, this made me smile...

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*** WARNING: Cute Baby Alert ***

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And in the interest of equal time, here's a picture of Amelia after an all night party in her room:


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I got nothin' - now in bite-sized chunks.

You know that capitalism has run its course when you learn, through a baseball-oriented blog no less, that there is an entire series of NASCAR-themed Harlequin romance novels. Go on. Click Here. You know you want to.

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For all those who are wondering what I decided to do about our cow issue... After consulting with two different vets and one choose-your-own-adventure poll, I did dry off the cow. For those who care about the details, here's what I did: I stopped her grain and kept milking for 3 more days. Then after milking her out completely, I treated her with a dry cow treatment. Then I waited 3 more days and milked her out again and treated her again. For future reference, I also found that changing technique can alleviate carpal tunnel problems - the key, apparently, is to use more wrist and arm instead of relying mostly on finger and hand muscles alone. I made some adjustments just after I posted that poll, and it did help some, but not enough for the moment. Next time I will definitely start that way from the get-go. And keep an eye out for a good deal on used milking equipment, just in case.

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My older son has determined, using a line of reasoning available only to those five and under, that the person doling out punishments is to blame for all the problems of the recipient. Punishing is mean and unfair. He'd behave better if only we wouldn't punish him any more. So, yeah...

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My daughter has determined, using a line of reasoning available only to her, that all clothing from the waist down is considered optional. It is her solemn duty to remove shoes and socks within 3 minutes of having them put on. It is also her solemn duty to remove all pants, skirts, dresses, overalls, pajamas and diapers at every opportunity. I'll spare you the story that really pushes this over the top, but let's just say she's practicing to be the Michelangelo of fecal matter. The Picasso of Poo. The Dada of Doodoo.

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Speaking of special needs and artistic talents, check out this guy, dubbed "The Human Camera":


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Our youngest, Owen, is well on his way to taking over the world by the force of sheer cuteness. He's almost 7 months, and bursting the seams of his 12-month clothes. His latest skills include crawling, saying "Mama," and eating everything he can get his hands on. He gets really mad when you don't share your food with him. Beans, peas, carrots, rice, cookies, crackers, pasta - and none of that pureed crap. He wants the real thing. In fact, when I tried to spoon feed him some bits of apple scraped off the one I was eating, he rejected it in favor of gnawing on the apple itself. Those one-and-a-half teeth don't do much, but apparently there's a lot of satisfaction in being self-sufficient.

He also imitates cat noises. Seriously. When we take him out on the front porch to sit on the swing, Kiki, our resident barn cat, almost always comes running. She greets everyone with her squeaky little meow, and Owen replies with a fantastic cat impression. If I can capture it on video, I'll post it. Assuming I can figure out how. I'll also try to capture his absurd laugh. It sounds like a cross between a baby dinosaur and someone choking. I don't think he can top this laugh though:



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In other news, Lori's blog is back from the dead.

Our tractor, however, is not. I guess I'll be headed to the parts store one more time...

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Craziness all around, and my first ever poll...

Right. So we made the brilliant move of starting a big fundraising project on the day after a major hurricane and the day before a major stock market meltdown. Thank you very much to all who contributed, or even considered it. I'm hoping to do some fun stuff both locally and online. More on that below.

We had the odd experience of hurricane force winds in Ohio, as the remnants of Ike joined forces with a big cold front. We apparently had sustained winds of 50+ mph and gusts up to 75 mph. Lots of places around the state have been without power for days, and some places actually have gas shortages because so many gas stations have no power. We were lucky to have only brief outages, and no real damage.

Amelia had a blast sitting out in the wind, giggling like a maniac as her hair streamed out behind her. For some reason, I didn't take any pictures.

I'm really worried that we may have to get rid of the cow. I seem to be developing carpal tunnel syndrome in my right hand. The cow thing has just been very frustrating in ways that nobody could have foreseen. I'm not giving up yet. Just venting. It doesn't help that the tractor died in her pasture, and she's been mercilessly trying to eat every cable and wire. She pulled the ends off two spark plug wires and pulled out two or three smaller wires (some several times). And every time I try to work on it, she starts eating my clothing, licking me and/or my tools, and just generally being a pest. I tried putting a tarp over the whole thing, but she just dragged it out of the way. So now I have a temporary fence made of cattle panels surrounding the tractor.

My attempts at taking advantage of getting to know my neighbors isn't going very well. The guy who helps me fix my tractor from time to time isn't returning my calls. He works night shift I think. The other guy who was going to cut our hay and bring us some loaner cows and a loaner bull and all sorts of other good stuff has also disappeared from the face of the earth. He did cut our hay once, but it got rained on about a half dozen times before it was baled. And it's pretty stemmy and weedy stuff anyway. Meadow won't touch it at this point.

Other than that, everything is under control.

Okay, not really. But let's just move on anyway.

Back to the service dog thing... I'll probably mostly post about this stuff on the 4paws4amelia blog, but it doesn't have much regular traffic yet, so I'm going to subject you to my fundraising brainstorming session:



Thanks for your input!

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A humble request

Greetings, imaginary friends...

I call you imaginary because I talk to you a lot, and yet I can't see or hear any of you. I hear voices in my head too, but they are not my friends... You are.

Over the two-and-a-half years I've been writing here, I've brought you an odd mix of farm follies, bad jokes, scary predictions, crazy schemes, kooky projects, and pure, unadulterated silliness.

And a lot of fragmentary sentences. And a lot of sentences (and quite a few paragraphs) beginning with conjunctions. I know this is wrong, but I do it anyway, at least here on the blog. Here, I like to think of punctuation and paragraph breaks the way a composer uses rests within a piece of music, rather than by the actual rules of English grammar. I want to establish the right cadence in the reader's mind. And it's my blog, so I'm allowed.

And now I've totally lost the thread of this post. Where was I?

Right... So a fair bit of my writing here is about my family. They are what this is really all about. Okay, maybe not the bad jokes, but most everything else, is either directly or indirectly about my family.

In particular, our daughter Amelia is a rich source of material, from the joyful to the cheesy to the downright whiny:

• Agent of Chaos
• Amelia's Best Day Ever
• Living with Amelia
• Little Miss Sunshine

Now, we have an opportunity to do something very special for Amelia. And I'm asking for your help. Your help could come in different forms or at different times, and we'll appreciate any you feel is appropriate. We're just getting started, but we hope to get creative with this endeavor as time goes on.

So finally, after too many irrelevant and poorly constructed paragraphs, I arrive at my request...

Please visit this web site:
http://4paws4amelia.blogspot.com
Feel free to follow along as we start what should be a very interesting journey.

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Radio silence

Sorry for the unplanned hiatus from blogging. Life overwhelmed me a little bit for a time. And after that I got busy with something new that absorbed much of my blogging energies. More to come on that mysterious hint in a post very soon.

In the meantime, I've got a couple of posts up on Hen & Harvest. Green Fatigue has been up for a bit, but I had a good time writing it. I've heard from a few people that it really struck a chord, which is always a nice kind of feedback. And just posted is Black Magic, which may be familiar to readers who have been here for a while. I put a lot of time into that one, and I hop it can reach a wider audience over at H&H.

Hmm... Green Fatigue, Black Magic. I guess it's all about the colors. What color should I tackle next? Any suggestions? Raw Umber doesn't get much love.

Baby Owen has been a busy boy. Just since my last post, he's learned to sit up, mastered the art of sitting up, cut a tooth, and is getting really close on the crawling front. He can get up on his hands and knees. He can move backwards and turn. He just hasn't found that forward gear yet.

More on the way. But now I must try to sleep....

Gratuitous baby picture

Feet. It's what's for dinner.

He's got the rollover mostly figured out, and if he's on his tummy, he can hold his head up and prop himself up with his arms for quite a while. He's getting closer to sitting up unassisted. Lori's projecting that he'll be in 12-month clothes by six months.

And he can make grown men and women swoon with his smile. Let's hope he only uses his powers for good and not evil.

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Two stories

Funny story...

As I mentioned before, Amelia hasn't been feeling well. And when she doesn't feel well, she gets very insecure and clingy. She wants Daddy in the chair in the corner, and Mommy at one end of the couch. If either of us gets up to get a drink, use the bathroom, get stuff done, Amelia will start to cry and fuss, and physically try to force us back to our designated posts. And if you dare to go outside the house, panic sets in.

Now, the good news is that Amelia is feeling much better. We cancelled the CT scan, and she hasn't really cried uncontrollably in several days. And the clinginess is subsiding.... which is good because today was my day to get up early and drive to Cincinnati. I was worried how she'd react when I wasn't there all day.

She did pretty well. But she did need a little help. She dug around in the laundry and found one of my shirts. Then she brought it to Lori and made her put it on. Then she led Lori over to the corner chair and made her sit and cuddle. Throughout the day at various points, she'd sit Lori down and pat her shirt.

When I finally did get home, she let out a squeal and did a little dance.

Needless to say, this is a vast improvement over most of last week.

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Not quite so funny story...

So I told you that on Friday, I discovered that somebody had stolen my debit card number and racked up $1500 in online purchases with it. Luckily, I noticed the same day, and called the bank's security department. They shut off my card. So no debit card for a week or two. But they told me to wait and see if the transactions posted, and if so, that I needed to go to my local branch and fill out some paperwork to reverse the charges.

I went to the bank the next morning. I explained the situation, and pointed out that I had no way to tell if the transactions had posted. They had not. So I was instructed to come back on Monday. I was also told that it could take up to 30 days to get the transactions reversed and the money put back into my account. Thirty days?! What, are they still using punch cards back there?

I asked what I was supposed to do about the inevitable overdraft charges? Try to keep it above zero, they said. Seriously? I can't get the fees reversed? Well, I could, but I have to go to the branch office where the account was opened, they said. I'd had the account for at least ten years, I told her, and had no idea which branch office that was. Oh, they could tell me: It's the on East Main... you know... 25 miles away. So they hadn't discovered telephones yet? Had they realized there were transmission methods beyond pneumatic tubes? Well, maybe the local branch manager could help me call the Main Street office and try to work it out without me having to drive up there.

So yeah, if you live in in or near Ohio, and you want this level of fraud protection and customer service, Fifth Third Bank is where you can get it.

I have some kind of free identity theft protection service that I got from the State of Ohio (because my name was on a laptop that some state employee managed to lose). Yeah, haven't heard anything from them yet. Glad I didn't pay for it.

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Life this last week or so has made me grumpy. I'm glad my kids were all being sweet and cheerful tonight.

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UPDATED: Well, I take back some of my complaints about my bank. Because I caught the problem on the same day, two of the bogus transactions were caught in time, and two more were reversed. Of course it took several days before all this was clear. But at least we got our money back.

And our cow seems to FINALLY be mastitis free, so maybe we're turning the corner. Woohoo!

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Another quick post

I just can't manage to get some of these posts that take time and thought out of my head and into the keyboard. So in the meantime, I guess it's more sporadic photos and goofy farm stories.

Here's what happens when I showed e5 how to use a couple fun Photoshop tools...



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Fun with a rainbow

Looky! A rainbow!

A rainbow and lightning

You'll never get me pot o' gold!

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Adrenalin

I'm not an adrenalin junkie. Don't get me wrong, I like thrills up to a point - roller coasters, sporting events, the occasional suspenseful movie or life-changing decision... Heck, I even went white water rafting once, and loved it. They put a photographer on top of some big nasty rock, and take a picture of your raft just before you smack into it. In the photo of our raft, everyone was either paddling like mad or hanging on for dear life, concentrating on that rock. Everyone except for me. I had one hand off my paddle and a big grin on my face.

But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. (I just used the word "thing" twice in one sentence. Somewhere a shudder runs up an English teacher's back.)

First, our daughter was playing on the front porch, which she loves to do. Between the porch swing, the sky chairs, the water that collects on top of the rain barrel and the shady fresh air, I can see why. But in order to let her play out there somewhat unsupervised, I had to build a gate to close it off.

I was going about my business inside, when I realized I didn't hear Amelia's singsong chatter. Probably a nap, I thought. No - they said she napped at school. I went out to check on her, but she wasn't there. I checked in all her favorite napping spots, and still no Amelia.

Then I went back out on the porch, and saw that the gate latch was popped. She'd pushed it hard enough to get it open despite the locking pin. The hinges swung it shut again, so I didn't notice right away.

How long had it been? Was she out in the barn? By the water bucket? In the shed? Near the dirt?

Shit.

Every parent's worst nightmare. And for newer readers, Amelia is five years old, she's autistic or something like it, she has almost no language skills and no sense of danger.

I got in the truck and drove the length of the driveway. I looked up and down the two (50 mph) roads that border our property. I called Lori to find out how soon she'd be home (any minute) and keep an eye out for Amelia because I couldn't find her.

Lori went one way up the road and I went the other. How long had it been? How far could she have gone? Did I check everywhere inside the house? A flood of worst case scenarios were racing through my head as I tried not to crap my pants.

Then after what was probably a short while, but that seemed like an eternity... I saw her.

She had wandered across the road to a house that was under construction. It's a good quarter mile away at least. Thankfully, the workers had let her play and kept her out of danger.

And I felt like the worst parent on the face of the earth. And not like the "Bad Father" gag from my last post. I felt like throwing up.

That experience motivated us to start filling out the paperwork for something we'd heard about not too long ago: Service dogs for special needs kids. (I'll write more about this at a later date.)

While we were filling out the forms, not two hours after Amelia's Bogus Journey, she started choking on a mouthful of pretzels. Her mouth was open, but no sound was coming out. Her arms were flapping and she looked panicked. Lori did the Heimlich Maneuver, or something approximating it, several times until Amelia threw up her pretzels and started crying.

Everybody is ok, and Amelia is no worse for wear. I'm not sure about her parents.

Amelia prudently chose a different snack, and went back to her happy routines.

Meanwhile, as I implied above, I think I've had more than enough adrenalin for one day. I've probably had enough everything for one day. But sleep seems far off right now. I wasn't sure if I should write about this, or if I wanted to. I'm still not sure, and I don't know what purpose it serves except to get it out of my system. But here it is.

Not very fun emotions to revisit. I'm scared all over again, long after the fact. But it's over. Life can resume it's normal course.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go put on some clean underwear. Again.

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Finally catching up...

Help! It's going to harvest my brain!!!

AAIEEEE!

A lot has happened in our lives over the past few weeks. Some good, some not. So this post may be a bit like drinking from a firehose.

Let's see...

- We had one late night emergency room visit (for something neither serious nor interesting)

- Our 20+ year old cat Pepper was put to sleep. He had a good, long life.


- One of our chickens died - not from predators, but some other malady. The rest seem fine.

- Our cow got mastitis. She got it pretty bad and we had to medicate her and dump her milk for about 10 days. (A big thank-you to my wife for playing vet.) I was actually surprised that it hadn't happened earlier, what with my inexperience and all. But still it's a pain. As with many bacterial problems these days, it flared up again after the medication wore off, so we're back to new medicine and dumping milk for several more days.

- I took the twins to the county fair over the weekend, where much fun was had and my wallet was beaten to a pulp. And Amelia tried to escape that ride where your back is against the inside of a giant rotating drum, which then tips up vertically. Her escape attempt was basically to sit down, but that put the little safety strap above her head. My brain knew enough about physics to realize she wasn't in any danger, but I still held her arm with a death grip until the ride was over.

- Our hay was cut - though our neighbor who was doing the cutting couldn't fit his equipment through our 10-foot gates. Another neighbor stepped in and cut it for us. Unfortunately it's been rained on like five or six times since then. So, uh... hooray for compost!

- We harvested our first blueberries! They don't really grow well here because they are so picky about acidic soil. But I have such fond memories of picking blueberries with my grandfather in Connecticut (and my grandmother's endless blueberry concoctions) that I had to plant some. So I got three dwarf varieties and planted them in a big planter box full of peat moss and mulched with pine nuggets. Mmmmm. I hate to say it but they're even better than my grandparents' berries...



- Our gooseberries are almost ripe. Let's hope we get some before the chickens eat them all. The blueberries have bird netting over them. I may need to do the same for the gooseberries. And the currants. The grapes are coming along nicely. We'll have to wait another year (or maybe more) before we get apples, peaches, blackberries, or raspberries. Probably two more years for cherries. I'd guess even longer for any of our nut trees or paw paws.


- On the other hand, our "garden" is literally knee-high with weeds. I guess between the baby, the cow, and all this other stuff, something had to give. Thank you CSA for providing our garden veg, since my own efforts are doomed.

- I decided to abandon our worm bin. The chickens end up getting most of our kitchen scraps rather than the worms. A neglected worm bin generates fruit flies and the like.

- Speaking of which, I moved our "compost bin" (quotes because the chickens eat it all so I never have any compost) from it's old location between the house and the barn to a new spot right under the kitchen window. So now when cooking is done, you just crank open the window and dump the veggie scraps out. The chooks didn't have any trouble adapting to the new location.

- We saw our first eastern bluebird today. They might be my favorite bird, just because they're so rare at this point. Here's a really poor photo...



- We made strawberry jam for the first time. We got about 7 pints. Then we followed that up with five pints of black raspberry jam. Oh. My. Goodness. My mouth is watering as I type this.

- Our cow's been bred (artificially) to a Jersey bull. Our neighbor with the loaner Angus was taking too long. We're already a month or two later than we'd like. At this point I may be milking well into January. Next time we'll know better.

I did see something rather interesting the other day. I wandered out to the pasture to find Meadow. Usually when I go out to milk she's already waiting for me, with her head in the stanchion, looking expectant. But for some reason yesterday she wasn't around. I soon found out - she had a new friend. There was a red-winged blackbird perched on her back, gobbling up flies.

The flies have been a nuisance. but the home remedies didn't do anything, and the store-bought fly spray didn't do much either (and is a possible suspect in our chicken death). So instead of spraying anything, I've switched to closing up the barn to keep it as dark as I can get it. I also try to shoo the flies off her before she comes into the barn. Of course that doesn't work if she's already in there tapping her hoof waiting for me. I also hung some 3-inch wide strips of screening material in the doorway (which will make more sense after a future post). The idea was that as she walks through the strips, the flies are brushed off. It does seem to help a little, but I didn't have enough strips to go all the way across the doorway yet.

Another trick that Meadow came up with the other day, which was pretty successful, was to gallop and buck a little while swishing her tail, just before she runs into the barn. The flies all take off and she runs out from under the cloud. It's interesting what can happen when you leave the work to Mother Nature.

Speaking of which, I was talking to the vet about her mastitis problem. She said one thing that can help is to run cold water on the udder - it can get very hot and feel feverish. I thought, well, that explains why Meadow's been in the pond so much - right up to her udder.

And finally, a photo I took of Amelia one day while Lori was out all afternoon with the boys.

I call it, "Bad Father":
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