The best news of the year for our family, and what's blooming?

Before I tell you the best, mind blowing news we received all year, I want to show you around my garden to get you in the mood to receive good news.  There are california poppies, scented geraniums, columbines, apple blossoms, sweet cecile, watermelon and squash starts growing in the greenhouse, bleeding hearts, bachelor buttons, and more color popping up every day...

Allright, are you ready for our mind blowing, great news?
We went to Seattle Children's Hospital on Monday for Lukas' yearly echo cardiogram.  Since his brush with Kawasaki disease, he has needed regular monitoring of his heart aneurysm.  This week, the doctor said it might have gotten a tiny little bit smaller (one millimeter).  He wants Lukas to do a Cat Scan to get a better idea of the situation, and then we could possibly, possibly talk about eliminating his blood thinning medication.  This is an amazing prospect, because previously, the doctors thought he would be on the medicine for life.
The meds have always freaked me out.  They make his blood thin, so it won't clot and cause a heart attack.  That means when he gets a cut, he bleeds freely and it takes more effort to stop the blood flow.  It also means that he is prone to internal bleeding, which can be very serious (or worse).  Say he falls off a tree and hits his head, or he bangs into someone on the trampoline, or he falls off his bike... the possibilites in an anxious mother's mind are endless and agonizing.

Can you imagine how elated Steve and I are?  This is all not a sure thing yet, but just the possibility of such an improvement gets us giddy.  Ahhhhh, this week has thrown some grace our way.  It feels good to exhale.

On the way to Seattle, Steve let me stop by one of my favorite knitting stores (Weaving Works), and I picked up two pounds of spinning fiber.  It's a bag spilling over with merino and silk goodness, and it speeds up my heart rate just looking at it.

But first, I have to spin up my own handpainted roving.  Below is my newest skein of yarn.

Time away

My sweet, dear husband gave me two days off this week.  In the past, I didn't think I deserved time off, or I thought I was a bad mother when I started feeling sick of my children, or when I felt utmost despair of doing one more load of laundry, or when I disolved in tears at the thought of cooking dinner after a busy day.  Over time, I have learned that every mother needs time off to rejuvenate and get perspective on her life.  So when I told Steve that I needed some time off (meaning I wanted a two hour slot alone to go for a walk, or sit stupidly without talking for an hour) he told me to take two whole days off.  Two days!  So I went to Whidbey island for a mini retreat.

The first day, I bicycled around Camano Island.  I felt high on the exercise and the smell of lilacs, and the thrill of being all by myself, not having to take care of anyone else but myself.  The first 20 miles were awesome.  The next ten miles, my nether regions started hurting, not being used to hours on the saddle.  The last ten miles, my legs were burning, and I was starving.  At the end of the 40 plus miles, even my voice had suffered.  I had been chased by two gigantic dogs, and I yelled at them with all I had, instead of trying to outrun them, knowing my muscles couldn't take it.
In short: I was blissed out.  I headed to Steve and my favorite restaurant "Adrift" in Anacortes, where they serve locally sourced food, prepared in a heavenly manner, and I fell upon my salmon tacos like a starving woman who had biked her ass off.
The next day, I headed to the local knitting store, of course, where I bought yarn to make a sun hat.  I can't wait to start on this project!
Next: Washington Park, which is such a lovely, quiet spot to hike and relax.  I walked, sat, knitted, walked, sat, knitted, walked, sat, knitted, for hours.

Perspective is good.  After a little time away from my normal life, I am so very ready to return to it.  I miss my family when we are apart, and I don't feel whole.  I notice other people's children, and sometimes I tear up when I watch a mother and her little child, hunting for rocks at the beach, missing my own children so badly it hurts.  But then, when I call Steve at home and hear all the chaos and the children's screams in the background, I gratefully hang up the phone, returning to whatever quiet, refreshing, rejuvenating thing I have been doing, and I sigh a little bit with the pleasure of knowing that I still have some hours left to be away from them.

The temperatures this week have been in the high 80's!  That's even hotter than summer!  The kids and I have been taking breaks from the hot gardening work at the neighbor's pond, jumping into the cold, cold water, paddling on it with a surfboard, catching frogs, digging in the sand, and enjoying the luxury of having a pond a minute's walk away from our house.

In the meantime, the pigs are watching us, since they live in the pasture next to the pond.  Don't worry, there is no manure run off.  We have to return one of the piglets because of the hernia, so we'll switch it out for a "new" one on Sunday.

Cheese making fame, drama goat queens, and happy seedlings

If you feel adventurous and spontaneous, I want to invite you to come to my cheese making class this Saturday, May 4. I know it is Friday already, but I'm just saying. Plus, I'm kind of famous this week, since I got featured in the popular New England Cheese Making Supply Company blog.  My ears are burning, and my Ego has inflated even more than usual. You can read about it here if you want.

Famous or not, the pigs still need to be fed, the goats need to be milked, and the seedlings transplanted into the garden. Mucking around in manure keeps me humble. Watching the pigs has been a lot of fun this week. I swear we can see them grow, and no wonder – every day, they are getting a gallon of milk or fresh whey from cheese making. They are so used to us already that they let us sit with them while they eat, and we scratch their backs for them.

Unfortunately, one of them (named Porky) has what I believe to be an umbilical hernia, so we have to return her and switch her out for another piggy. It's strange how much we already feel bonded with all three of them, so letting one go seems sad.

It feels like summer here this week! We are gardening in shorts and T-shirts, and the kids jumped into the (cold) pond yesterday. I have been transplanting all the beautiful little seedlings I raised in the greenhouse, and now they live in the garden, where hopefully, they will be spared by slugs, flea beetles, and other assorted monsters. Asparagus stalks are shooting out of the earth, surrounded by their friends the Jonny Jump Ups. It's not a bad way to live, surrounded by flowers, I think. Eva loves swinging in her swing underneath the dogwood tree. It's not a bad way to live, swinging under a blooming dogwood tree, no?  The goats get walked to fresh pasture every day.  Not a bad way for them to live, either...  The problem is that Quasar, the new goat, hates to walk on the leash, so I often end up pulling and pushing her.  Sometimes, she flops herself dramatically on the ground and refuses to go on.  Doesn't she realize this is the way to lush, green, sweet grass?

In this photo, only two of my goats are present.  Quasar pissed me off too much doing her drama queen show, so she had to stay in the barn.

Many people envy my yearly onion crop. “How do you DO it?”, they ask, and I don't really know if I am doing anything special, but I will show you step-by-step how I grow mine, so you can try it.

In the middle of February, I sow onion seeds (Walla Walla and Copra from Territorial Seeds) into 4 inch containers in the greenhouse. Two and a half months later, they are ready for their new home in the garden. I give them a little hair cut first if they are flopping over. Then I take them out of their containers and put the whole block of soil into a bucket of water, so the soil gets washed away gently. When there are only roots left, I gently tease apart one plant at a time, and then place it into the earth. I fertilize with manure made from my goats, and organic fertilizer. Voila! Nothin' to it.

Kai rescued a humming bird from our living room.  See it in his hands?

Our piglets are here!

 

Our piglets are here! Yesterday afternoon, Steve picked them up down valley after work. He took pet carriers to contain them safely in the cab of his truck, and when he called me on the way home to give me an ETA, he kept saying, “Man, these guys stink!!!” Well. No reason to insult the little babies, because that's all they are. We got three five week old porkers. They did reek a tad bit, but once we released them into their fresh green pasture, things seemed to ease up a little on the olfactory side. The poor things were pretty freaked out and scared, especially since they kept getting shocked on the electric fence.  Every time one of them got shocked and yelped, neighbor Anne jumped in the air yelping with the pig, covering her ears.  She's an empathetic woman, that one!  Eva got a kick out of it!

I feed them nice goat milk, so they are already getting spoiled. They've mostly slept all day today, but whenever they are awake, they do what pigs are supposed to do: root through the soil with their snouts, dig holes with their feet, and oink and snort a whole lot.

We are delighted to raise pigs for the first time ever! Somehow, I now feel like a real farmer!  They are awfully cute right now, and their eyes are eerily human-looking.  However, we (including the kids) understand completely what these animals will become.  Bacon, pork chops and hams, raised on beautiful lush pasture with a mountain view, organic grain and lots of milk and whey.  They will have a good life. 

Why, you may ask, is Eva wearing a tutu fairy dress as a member of the piggy welcome committee? Well, it's because I can't get the darn dress off her, ever since our friends gave it to her. And why should she take it off? She IS like a fairy - frolics through the yard with her fairy dress, collects edible plants and flowers, crawls through the grass, pretends to fly while jumping on the trampoline with her dress swirling around her like a cloud. Boy, am I happy to have a little girl!

This week has been intense – lots of milk flowing to be dealt with, lots of weeding to be done, lots of little vegetable starts needing to be nurtured, lots of seeds needing to be planted, home schooling to be accomplished. And then the dreaded yearly visit to Seattle Children's hospital. Lukas needs a yearly check up for his heart, to monitor a heart aneurysm he got from contracting Kawaski disease. He gets a yearly echo cardiogram, and this year the doctors added a stress test to determine a baseline. This meant that Lukas got to ride on an exercise machine while being hooked up to various machines and breathing through a mask to measure different values. He did absolutely great, and the doctors and technicians were stunned by his high level of fitness. We'll go to the hospital again in a couple of weeks to do the routine echo cardiogram and to talk about the stress test results.

Fortunately, we have wonderful friends who took care of Eva and Kai all day, and then had us over for dinner the same day.  Thanks, Auburn and John!  Their youngest daughter wanted me to show her how I knit the European way, so we ended the day with a knitting lesson, while another friend's daughter watched.  Start 'em young, I say.  There's nothing like creating little knitting addicts as soon as possible!

With all the business of this week, we were able to enjoy a little R and R as well.  I took the kids up to Bellingham, where I lived for ten years in a previous lifetime, and where I still have lots of friends.  Nothing like a hit of culture, bakeries, and friends to lift one's spirits!

And to end this post, I want to share the exciting news that Kai now mows the lawn.  It's a job I love, I really do, but he wants to help so badly.  He literally begged me to let him mow the grass!  And who am I to turn down help when dinner needs be cooked, and the lawn is screaming at me to be cut?

Ducklings anyone? Ancona ducks for sale!

If you have read my blog for a while, you know how much I love my Ancona ducks.  Not only are they incredibly cute, waddling around the yard and garden all day, but they are also superb slug killers.  I usually detect hundreds of slugs in my yard this time of year, but this year?  Not a single one!
The ducks also give us three eggs a day - that's one egg every day from every single female.

I got these ducks from my friend Loren last year, and she has more for sale right now.  Loren does an amazing job raising her animals.  You think I baby my animals?  You should see Loren, with baby ducks stuck down her shirt to keep them warm, hand feeding them, training them to follow her like a mother duck.  Here is the info:

Ancona Ducklings - $10 (Rockport)

Straight Run.  Hatching by the moment...  
These heritage ducklings are from Holderread's original breeding stock 
at Boondockers Farm in Oregon. 

Bond with your ducklings as soon as they hatch. No shipping shock.  
Pre-hatch imprinting to whistle and voice. 
If raised properly, they will follow you and sit with you.  
They may have brown, silver or black patches on white. 

Great sluggers, hearty in colder climates and... they love the rain! 
Excellent for meat, eggs or pets.  

For more information about this rare heritage breed go to this link:  
http://boondockers.sharepoint.com/Pages/Poultry.aspx  

Now taking orders... Please call 360-853-7432