Nine months baby

For my nine month birthday Daddy let me hold the remote control and I knew just what I wanted to do with it.

Mommy told me the funniest jokes that made me laugh...

and laugh...

I watched the pelicans dive in the ocean and saw a helicopter too.

I played with a cute little boy who was also named William. And saw the dolphin show at the aquarium from above ground and below.

I swam in the pool, soaked in the hot tub, swam in the pool, soaked in the hot tub and swam in the pool again.

Then I watched the sun set with my family in the hammock and had watermelon for dessert. What a great nine month birthday!

Soda can robot

 After a recent excursion to the science museum, Savannah wanted to build a robot, and why not, her dad is an engineer? So I got a starter kit for her with the idea that this was something she and her dad could bond over during the weekend. One nice thing about homeschooling is that it can take place at any time.

But the weekend was filled with farm chores, family time, pond snow removal, and finally ice skating. So that meant Mommy had to be the assistant engineer. I placed the parts list in front of Savannah (who received the soda can from a neighbor since we never have any) and she had to locate and name all the parts and help assemble them. Little fingers sure come in handy when tightening nuts to bolts in tight places! Her robot can move forward and backwards on its "belly" or upright and most importantly, it has a survival feature, namely, it can outrun her little brother! At least it can this week.

Can you tell she's proud of her creation?

We learned about batteries and motors, axles and cams and had some fun in the process.

Love

Love has many faces, but you know it when you see it...

This evening while I was making dinner, William crawled out of the kitchen where I usually keep an eye on him. I was worried that I couldn't see William and worst of all, it had become quiet.

When I ran into the living room to check on him, I found big sister with an arm snuggled around her little brother. She had shared her apple with him and she propped her pillow up behind him so he didn't bang his head. And best of all, no one even asked her. Ahh, love...

Tick bytes

Through necessity, we've had to learn a lot about ticks and Lyme disease since moving to upstate New York. Like many New Englanders and Pennsylvanians, we live in an area that the CDC considers to be high risk for Lyme disease. High risk means that a tick bite here is more likely to infect you with Lyme disease than a tick bite elsewhere, mainly because so many of the ticks are infected with the disease-causing organism, Borrelia burgdorferi. There is still much scientific debate about a variety of aspects concerning Lyme disease, so I feel it is important to be more conservative when dealing with bites. After our daughter's first tick bite, with an attachment time of just less than 24 hours, she became Lyme positive in the middle of winter even though she received prophylactic antibiotics. (She received a second course after her blood titer was positive.) Also while Lyme disease is the most prevalent tick-borne illness in the US, there are others to be aware of, including babesiosis and ehrlichiosis, transmitted the same way.

Here are some of the things we have learned and implemented to help our family.

Preventing a tick bite is the most important thing you can do. Here are the prevention techniques we've found useful:

1. Keep deer off of the parts of your land that you use regularly. No matter how sweet and docile these creatures are and how useful their manure may be to your lawn, they are among the primary carriers of Deer ticks (aka Black-legged ticks). In every study where deer populations were decreased, the incidence of Lyme disease significantly decreased as well.

2. Deer can be deterred naturally through deer-proof landscaping. No matter where you live, there will be a garden or landscaping center in your gardening zone that carries or is knowledgeable about deer-resistant plants. The goal is to keep deer away from your house and front yard so replace any plants that deer usually eat with those they find less appetizing. Bird feeders and salting your driveway in winter can also attract deer.

3. Maintain a clear lawn area without long or tall grasses, piles of leaves, or suckers growing around the base of trees (mulch, mulch, mulch your trees!). This will both deter deer and leave less "habitat" for ticks to wait in while hoping for their next blood meal to brush against them.

4. If you have other rodents around your house, barn or garage, get rid of them too. Rodents can be carriers of ticks and keeping their populations down is just as important as keeping the deer away from your house. In many areas, the white-footed deer mouse is the primary carrier so do what you have to do to remove mice from your garage, shed and barn, and around your home.

5. If you have a cat or dog that goes inside and outside, the cat or dog can carry ticks in that can bite you. Do regular tick inspections on your animals and have a kit nearby to remove any ticks found on them. We are partial to the tick twister for removal from animals and humans alike. We keep a tick jar (a small glass canning jar) filled 1/4 with rubbing alcohol to place ticks in. It helps us to identify the ticks we find on our clothes, or embedded in our skin so we know when to call the doctor or be concerned.

6. When you're outside playing, hiking, doing yard work, or cutting trees, wear long sleeves and socks pulled up to your calf. Then remove your clothing for washing when entering the house. We keep a laundry basket hidden near the front door for this purpose.

7. If you live in or will be travelling to an area that is considered moderate to high risk for Lyme disease (or any other vector-borne disease including those carried by black flies, mosquitoes, chiggers, etc) try the line of clothing by Buzz-Off Insect Shield. We have been very pleased with the results of their long-sleeved shirts, hats, bandanas, and socks for keeping insects away for 70 washings. The clothing is treated with permethrin, a manmade chemical that mimics a chemical found in the chrysanthemum plant. You can order it through many outdoor clothing companies including LL Bean, REI and directly from the manufacturer. Even the very sensitive skins and noses in my house aren't bothered by this clothing and it prevents all sorts of bug bites while making me feel safe-r when sending my daughter out to play. But don't take my word for it, read other customer feedback.

8.  Learn to recognize a female and nymph deer tick. Humans are accidental hosts for ticks. They attach to us when they sense our heat and carbon dioxide as we brush by them. A blood meal helps them survive but they require the white-tailed deer to complete their lifecycle.

9. Inspect your body once a day. Remember to check your neck, under arms, groin, behind the knees and ankles and in between your toes. Also check your neck and in and around your ears. I check my children's hair but to check my own, I use a fine-tooth comb. Remember that you don't have to find a tick to get Lyme disease. Ticks will attach for varying amounts of time, feed, and then drop off, possibly without being seen.

10. For tick removal, follow the instructions from a reputable agency. Any method of removal that requires rubbing, agitating, heating or applying a substance to the tick may cause more saliva from the tick to enter your body, which is not good if the tick carries a disease-causing organism. We stick to the tick twister mentioned above or use forceps, fine tweezers. Here are three sources (of many) in agreement for the proper tick-removal process, CDC, Lyme Disease Foundation, and my personal favorite, the U.S. Army's Center for Health Promotion and Preventative Medicine (this one is a nice one-page PDF that you can tape inside a cabinet for easy reference). Swab the area with alcohol after tick removal to kill any possible bacteria on the skin.

11. If you're the farming or homesteading type, consider free-ranging chickens or guinea hens for tick control on your land. Our girls happily patrol the brush along the edge of our mowed land snapping up any insect morsel their keen eyes come across. We went from finding lots of ticks on our skin and clothing to none after letting our chickens free range during a year when local agencies studying the tick population found large increases in the tick population.

Life in the country (and suburbs) is filled with the joys and beauty that nature has to offer. Let's hope for many outdoor adventures that are free of tick bites.

Reflections 2009

This has been an interesting year for us in our new house turned homestead. I think one saying rings especially true for us this year:

Good judgment comes from experience. 
Experience comes from bad judgment.

And apparently, we are still learning from our bad judgment.

Even though I don't always feel that I have youthful enthusiasm, I can say without a doubt that some of that youthful enthusiasm has been thwarted. Every time we try to take two steps forward and stick to a schedule, we are reminded that life doesn't work that way. Life is meandering. Life is organic. And messy. And has other ideas for you. Especially on a farm. Especially in the country. Especially when you've moved there after getting soft from a cushy life in the suburbs. The country knows you've been away and has lessons to teach you.

Some of the highlights of our blunders this year include the time we kept saying, "Pee-yew! It smells like a skunk died in the barn," when in fact a skunk had died in our barn, it just took us two weeks to figure it out. (Yes, two weeks, although to our credit, it smelled so bad we didn't spend much time "exploring" the issue.) The poor thing crawled behind the wood piles for shelter and some logs rolled off and crushed it. It was the pile of wood stacked in the darkest, farthest corner, behind two more rows of stacked wood, and the hardest for us to get to, but finally Kevin had to remove what was left of the skunk carcass and wonder of wonders, the smell actually dissipated after that.

And then there was the time I was hanging laundry in the backyard on a beautiful sunny Saturday, breathing in the fresh air, admiring the Great Blue Herons, and thinking how idyllic the day, the land, the morning's activity, when my husband comes running down with a nearly dead chicken in his arms, my daughter crying at his side. He had guillotined the chicken, ironically after I'd spent so much time teaching my five-year old how to properly attach the sliding chicken door to prevent just such an incident. The nearly-guillotined chicken earned the name Lucky and spent the day in our arms. Lucky's voice box was transformed in the incident and Lucky has a hard time seeing properly out if its left eye and doesn't lay eggs and is skittish of people now, but is fine.

Oh yes, and Lucky who always had the prettiest green tail feathers I'd ever seen on a Rhode Island Red, turned out to be a rooster! So of my seven "girls" I now have four roosters! Seriously! So much for my ideal coop full of happy, fluffy free-ranging hens who lay an abundance of eggs. Year one, our girls turned out to be more of a misadventure. And this says nothing of me, with a background in medicine and biology, that I ended up with four roosters and ignored the little hints and signs along the way until they couldn't be ignored any longer.

And there was the time we had an early snowstorm and instead of plowing the driveway, my husband drives behind the barn, under the pretense of emptying the mulch in the bed, and gets it so far stuck in the mud beneath the snow that the transmission decoupled itself from the axle. We watched it snow, and we watched the truck and plow sink further into the ground. It took two weeks for someone with the right equipment to come haul the truck and plow to the shop.

And there were many other of those sorts of times this year but there were also the times where we trudged into the woods together, our woods, and let Savannah pick out our Christmas tree, which she pulled home over a layer of fresh snow. Or the time we released all the dried milkweed into the air and watched the silk starbursts dance away, filling the sky over the pond. Or the times we made a camp fire behind the barn and roasted marshmallows until the sun set and night set in. Or the times we watched the turtles make the trek across the lawn to find the perfect spot to dig a hole for their eggs, lay them, then trek back to the pond. Or the times we picked all the strawberries we could eat and made the best jam that brings us memories of summer when we load it on our winter toast. Or the times we read our books by the big maple tree, Savannah in the tree swing, her legs dangling down, her head bent over her book, while the leaves turned their many shades of autumn around us. Let's hope for more of those times in 2010.

Funny faces

Just in time for the New Year William has perfected a new funny face.

Here's the old funny face:

And the new funny face:

The old funny face:

And the new funny face:

Of course, we think he's quite handsome when he's not making faces at all:

 

But sometimes, it's so much fun to make the rest of the family laugh, who can resist the silliness?

 

White Christmas

We didn't have to dream of a white Christmas this year.

It was a perfectly white day - a fresh glistening coat of frost on the deciduous branches, a dusting of powdered sugar on the pines, a white foggy sky, and a pond of frozen ice that William decided must be the perfect place for his afternoon nap.

Kevin cleared the snow from the pond and practiced his hockey while William and I skated and Savannah played in the snow around the pond, eating as much of it as she could.

  Santa was generous; Savannah received the harp she asked for,

William, who can't yet ask for things other than his Mama, naps, or milk, received a wooden play cube that we think he and big sister will enjoy for quite a few years.

Highlights included William's tractor book from Santa,

 and his dump truck

 (made in the USA from 100% recycled plastics),

Savannah's vehicle construction set and the wooden top and yo-yo from a local artisan (this top never stops spinning!),

 Kevin's blu-ray player, which he has yet to convince the rest of the family is really a family gift, but we'll see! I lucked out with some items from my Amazon wish list and chocolates in my stocking, the good ones that I'm reluctant to share.

I'll always remember this Christmas for our ice skating,

Savannah and Kevin constructing a fork lift together (and caterpillar and robot),

for William's all day snuggles, nap on the pond,

and new funny face.

Best wishes to all for a Merry Christmas evening.

Don't eat too much of the trimmings...

Solar energy

I love our photovoltaic system! We don't have to lift a finger and everyday it generates clean energy that it feeds back to the grid. We just hit the 2 megawatt mark, which is very exciting considering it has been active for only four months and missed the sunny spring and summer months. Having produced 2 megawatt-hours of energy is the equivalent of planting 15 mature trees and not driving 1,609 miles in a standard car.

Without the summer and spring we are just breaking even with our system so I'm hoping that a full year of PV will put us slightly ahead.

Closet Renovation

In the basement we had a closet that was intended to be devoted to wine. However, the amount of wine we drink in a year could have fit in just one of the small diamond cubes of this rather large wine closet. In the meantime I need more pantry space, more room for towels and sheets and more general storage space. So, my mom helped me rip out the old wine closet shelving so I could build a new one.

Here are the four generous shelves I constructed from pine. I was only able to do this because my mom was helping watch the kiddos while I cut the wood and screwed them to the shelf supports on the wall. Because I like wood smooth, I used the sander on all the edges and especially rounded out the front edge. I sized and spaced the shelves to permit two of Savannah's large plastic bins (for organizing her crafts) to fit beneath.

After the shelves were ready, my mom painted it white with Harmony's Snowbound. Harmony is a Sherwin Williams paint that contains no VOCs, so it's fine to paint with it even in cool weather when it's hard to ventilate. Snowbound is the color we use on all of our ceilings.

I love my new shelves and can't wait to put them to work organizing my home. Now that the girls have done their part, we just need Kevin to add the sliding door back to the closet. It was removed months ago when we tiled the floor over the radiant heat, but now that the ball is in his court, it might take a while.

Family Tree a Thanksgiving Gift

As oral tradition becomes a lost art, I think family trees become more and more important. There are times in one's life when the only way to go forward is to first go backwards, return to one's origins. I think it is powerful to see where you've come from, the long line of those who have come before you, each contributing some role towards making your unique life possible. I like the organic form of the tree as well to portray the family lines.

This is my Thanksgiving gift to my family - our family tree. The children appear as apples resting on the tree's roots. They are the "apples of my eye", and in our house it's true that "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree". I can look at the tree and trace my daughter's love for crossword puzzles, reading, and word games and our uncanny knack for finding four-leaf clovers in a field.

Each frame is 10 x 20 because nothing else seemed quite large enough to read without squinting and standing directly in front of it.

His side of the family tree...

...and her side of the family tree.