Heirloom Homestead: bloggy breaks begone

I really hate bloggy breaks. I prefer to be writing regularly; it makes me not disappear into people's neverland list of those-who-don't-update, and most importantly, it makes me happy. But I've been feeling wiped out recently, just as my Magpie has discovered new talents of scooting across the room (note I did not say "crawling"), leaving me with adaptations to make in an exhausted state of mind. This equals sporadic updates, and I'm sorry for that.

However...I am delivering pictures today to make up for the little break, and offering a few new anecdotes of our recent farm life. I'm also introducing a new little feature because I think it will be fun.

So, we almost lost another rooster. This made me really angry, sad, guilty, and about done with our younger dog. Apparently, Maple cannot resist the temptation to get into the chicken run, no matter how many times she's scolded for it. But it's not the chickens she's after. She's after their food. Seriously! Our dog can't keep her paws off the nuggets of processed corn, soy & whatever else that makes up our colorless, odorless chicken feed and she prefers it over the fresh feathered meat around it. That part is good, I suppose, except that our rooster doesn't particularly like dogs in His Run, making His Ladies scream and roost for cover.

Our poor rooster ended up with a wing completely torn off and a stump to show for it, while our dog licked the ground for soy nuggets. I found him shivering and bloody and I cried. I didn't want to lose this rooster. I love his call, I love his color, I love his determination, and I love that when it comes to humans, his fight turns to flight. That's a good rooster, and it's a rooster I intended to breed next Spring.

After crying, and calling a friend, and crying some more, I got myself together enough to call a local vet. Now thing is, around here, he's just a chicken. Just a dumb chicken. I knew the vet was probably going to laugh, and sure enough, they did. I explained that I knew it was just a chicken, but that we did like this rooster and would like to keep him if possible. We would just like his wing to be cleanly cut if needed, and the wound dressed. But even as I was talking, I was watching dollar signs ding! ding! ding! in my head, and I was glad when the vet referred me to another clinic that takes farm animals. I didn't call that clinic; instead, Jeff and I treated his wound that night and hoped for the best.

Well, I don't know if he's out of the woods yet, but it looks like he might be. He's been crowing his early morning call for the past 3 mornings in our back hallway. We had to separate him from the ladies since they wanted to peck his wound, so we've had him in the house. Around here, I think we'd be called something like "crazy." Ah, well.

After the whole experience with this rooster and the last one, I've realized that I can be whatever kind of farm mama I want to be. Historically, it seems if you live off the land, and especially off animals on your land in any way, you're expected to get pretty hard-hearted about them.

One friend told me after the Mr. Macho incident that I was "a real farm woman now."

Perhaps. I did perform a mercy killing, and mercy killing is part of farm work, unfortunately. But my heart's not hard yet. If anything, it's softer.

You know what? I love my chickens. I look at a couple of my expired layers and think, "Man, they're fat! They are eating up a big cut of that food bill!" And I know that when I need more lard, I'll take this one or that one to the poultry farm for "processing." But I won't do it myself, and I will put them gently into the crate for transportation, and give them a fine last meal of expensive mixed seeds and nuts. And that's okay. That's who I want to be, not my grandma, not the cattle farmer grandma who lives behind us. Not even Caroline Ingalls. (gasp!)

I want to be my own kind of farmer mama, the one who spent her pre-reproducing years as a vegetarian and a member of PETA. The one who chooses to eat meat now because her body demands it, but wants to have a hand or and eye into how that meat is raised. The one who nurses a beloved rooster back to health, elevates a very fat old hen to pet status, and won't kill her own animals. And who doesn't give a darn if that labels me crazy.

We're working toward a dairy goat now. Jeff fixed the chickens a new pen right off their coop! They love it, and so do I. Speckles (our rooster) hasn't been reintroduced into the flock yet because his injury is still too exposed. I can't wait to hear his call from this new run when he's back, though.

The old chicken run will now be a run for the dogs. They needed an upgrade anyhow. The old dog run, which is very close to our back door, will be the goat's pen for now. I have borrowed an electric collar for the dogs (big decision for a former PETA member :-), and I plan to start training them to stay away from the chickens, their coop, and their run altogether. Hopefully, that can start this week. For now, we will continue the routine of chickens out = dogs in and vice versa.

And now for the new feature....every so often, hopefully once a week or so, I want to tell you about some of our homeschooling activities from that week. I know some of my family members are curious what we do when we homeschool, so I thought it would be fun to document some of our activities. It will also make a neat keepsake for us from year to year.

I'm not going to do this today. You have to wait! But don't worry, the first post is already all planned out. You never know, it might even be already written just hanging out in my drafts. :-)

I also am often asked what curriculum we are using. Well, as usual, I'm doing things eclectically. (Have you seen my house?) We do mostly interest-based learning, but I also introduce new material and have her do things she might not like but that I feel are important. One of these is handwriting, for example. Another is reading, and another is basic math functions. So I don't think we fit the definition of "unschoolers" although I give Sassy a lot of choice in how she learns and practices these skills. Sometimes she plays Starfall and I count it as her entire reading lesson for the day. Other times we go through her words for the day together. Handwriting could take place as she writes a letter to someone or as she just practices the letter "Z." She has a choice in the how more than in the what.

But we are also not sitting at the kitchen table from 7:30 until 3:00. This is the most common misconception of homeschooling I hear. My grandma, for instance, can't understand how I can homeschool her with a baby and "everything else!" (her words) She's drawing on her 10+ years of experience as a kindergarten teacher, and doesn't realize that helping one child achieve specific goals takes far less time than helping a whole classroom. So much of a classroom teacher's time is spent in group management. I've done both classroom teaching and one-on-one teaching, and having one student is far more time-efficient, much like tutoring is.

So, I think it will be interesting for everyone to hear some of our sample activities so you can see that we are not doing school at home, but instead, continuing on the learning path that started the day she was born.

I have a beautiful, smart, well-spoken, and extremely sociable little girl, and as I watch her grow, I become even more certain that it's the right choice for us. And now I want to share our learning days with you.

Now, finally...the pictures.

The Birds
One morning back in September, Sassy came running into the living room talking about all these birds!
Sofie's barking at the birds!
I can't stay outside -- I'm afraid of the birds!

Ridiculous, I thought, until I went to look out the window, and here's what I saw....

All these vultures. They would land on a post, face the sun, and spread their wings out wide. It was foggy and chilly, but the morning sun was forcing its way through the fog to the East.