Buttercup and Miss Petunia Sparkles

We've had a pretty busy spring/early summer.  I guess it mostly still feels like spring because it has been so unseasonably cool.  We were so dry for so long that now that it won't stop raining, I feel dirty for wishing it would dry out a little, but we are soaked through and through.  It has rained almost every day or every other day for nearly 2 weeks with rain in the forecast nearly every day of the next 7 days.  Anyway, here is some of the momentous things that have happened.

Our oldest daughter graduated 8th grade.  Yup, this is her entire class.  She's the short one, of course.  She won some faculty voted citizen award thingy.  I don't remember what it was, but I remember being very proud... 

This may not qualify as momentous, but I finally figured out how to grow asparagus. We have it in SPADES! Herself made a Cheesy Asparagus Tart.  It was amazing!  If that sounds weird to you, I get that; it sounded weird to me as well, but it was really good.  So cheesy, creamy, savory. She never ceases to amaze me with a wildly diverse and yet healthy menu... Who would think of such a thing?

This was truly momentous; Buttercup had her (and our) first calf!  She was born on 5-15-15 without any problems.  We voted on her name and came up with Miss Petunia Sparkles.

Miss Petunia Sparkles is typical in that, as a bottle calf, she is very friendly and endearing.  This is a shot of our second daughter brushing her.  Miss Petunia Sparkles doesn't give a toot about being brushed, she only thinks about getting fed.

Milking Buttercup has really proven to be a challenge for us.  In some ways, it seems a lot easier than I expected, and in other ways harder.  She has problems with one teat not producing that we haven't figured out, and are pretty worried about it.  But after growing up with beef cattle, her patience with me is just amazing!  She just lets me do my thing back there, and mostly waits compliantly until I am completely done before trying to move on.  She has been producing about 3.5 gallons, twice a day, and just out of 3 teats!  Herself has been experimenting with yogurt, cottage cheese, and pretty soon cheese. 

Is she not the cutest thing ever?  I was a little disappointed that she was a heifer, because now I'm tempted to keep her; if it was a steer, we would have butchered it once it got "of age."

Buttercup in the cover crop; I thought it was just too picturesque.

Sometimes we aren't able to drink the milk for various reasons, like if it gets contaminated with manure, etc, or we just can't drink it or use it fast enough.  We just turn it into bacon; the hogs don't mind if its a little "off", they go nuts!

Our second oldest is our farm-girl!  She loves this stuff, and she loves Miss Petunia Sparkles!  She feeds her almost exclusively, and I have even got scolded once for doing the morning milking without waking her up.

Sometimes farming is pretty dirty work, though.  Here is Oldest and I after Buttercup majorly  splattered us cow poo.  When that happens, you just got to grin and wear it!

On Halter-breaking Buttercup

Donkey vs. Cow: Donkey wins!

Buttercup is our Soon-To-Be milk cow.  She is kind of a "spaz".  She is really nice, and mostly gentle, but as is often the case in animals 10 times the size and weight of me, she goes where she wants to, when she wants to.  The solution? Tie her to something more determined than her, and even if the animal (a Donkey, in this case) weighs roughly half of Buttercup, apparently determination counts for more than weight does, because they go wherever that donkey decides to go! When the donkey is hungry, they go eat.  When the donkey is thirsty, they go drink.

I left them tied together for a week and I'll be darned if old Buttercup wasn't the most halter-broke cow ever after that.  Now the kids can lead her around!

I've decided that having large animal livestock is right up my alley.  "Breaking" an animal large enough to eat me (if they were inclined) or stomp me to death gives me just enough challenge to make it fun, and really rubs that itch inside of me to be a bully.  Its okay to be "mean" to a cow if you are halter breaking her; its just never okay to tie one of your kids or someone you dislike to a 800 lb donkey.  Or, recently I wanted to get so I could approach the Jack Donkey, so I tied him to a hedge tree (the only thing more stubborn than a donkey) for a week so that he could get used to me getting close to him.  Then I tied an concrete block to his halter and turned him loose.  It was just heavy enough to slow him down because he didn't like dragging around that thing.  I didn't keep it on too long, because it was really rubbing him across his nose, and my Inner Bully is not that strong...  Anyway, my thinking is, if I have these animals to be mean to, maybe my kids, my hired help, and Herself will be able to catch a break.

on Parenting

Sometimes, I feel its impossible to keep up around here.  Not with the animals, projects, and chores; but with 4 kids!  In our world, four kids is not very many at all; I think the family average between my siblings, even just with my four is Seven kids.  I really brought the average down, in fact, my brother and sister have so many kids that nobody is really sure how many there are any more.  But in my house, 4 seems like a lot when they are little Dynamos of Destruction.

For example, my eldest requested a basketball.  No problem, get online and order a basketball; 6.99 from Walmart.com, wait until you have 50.00 dollars worth of dog food, peanut butter, etc in order to get free shipping, and four days later, Viola! Basketball!  Just one problem, it comes deflated, and we don't have a pump. No problem, 4.99 from Walmart.com, wait until you have 50.00 dollars worth of dog food, peanut butter, etc in order to get free shipping, and Seven days later, Viola! Basket ball pump!  Only problem, I didn't air it up RIGHT THEN AND THERE, so my oldest gets impatient (if it would have turned out better, I would call this "self-motivated") and tries to pump it up herself.  Most 14 year old kids know how to air up a basketball, but farm life has never really pushed me in the direction of any. sport. ever.  So she didn't know about switching out the balloon-blower-cone end out for the needle, and CRAMMED it into the brand new basketball, thereby forcing the little black rubber thing completely into the deflated ball, ruining said new ball.

To top it all off, we learn of this by getting a text while on a date, complete with video of her doing it, all the while complaining about (albeit politely) how dumb her parents are because we don't know how to buy decent sports equipment.  Grrrr.

So, I order another basketball, 6.99 from Walmart.com, wait until you have 50.00 dollars worth of dog food, peanut butter, etc in order to get free shipping, and ? days later, Viola! Basketball!  Just one problem; in the meantime the Captains of Chaos have figured out how to install the needle onto the pump and installed it.  In the process of waiting for the new ball to show up, the youngest decides that the pump looks just like a little crutch, and begins stumping around on it.  You got it; SNAP goes the needle, about the same time the new, deflated ball arrives.  At this point, it occurs to me that my brother and sister have, in order, either 2 times the amount, or 3 times the amount of kids as I do.

How do they ever get their basketballs inflated?

Another new addition to the Farmlet

I would like to welcome our newest member of our porcine family; our first full grown (almost; he's only about 6 months old) boar. (above in the red)  In the above picture he is already introducing himself to one of my gilts. I bought him and one more open gilt yesterday.  He and the new gilt are Red Durocs.

Lamb Roast

This year I decided to host a "Lamb Roast" by butchering and Rotisserie-ing a large lamb.  I invited nearly everyone I thought would be available and interested in doing something a little experimental. It turned out "Okay", but I did learn some things, some of which I will recount here so that I can remember them.  Here are a few photos:

Here are my helpers.  It went so well, we just impulsively decided to do another one that same morning.

Stitching up onions, garlic and lemons inside the cavity

Setting lamb over grill.

Basting every half hour. 

Finally getting done! 

So, the long and short of it is this; It took a lot longer than I expected.  I am sooooo glad we butchered the second lamb and just tossed him into the smoker, or we would have had a lot of angry, hungry people driving to Burger King.  I sure could have lowered it down on the stands earlier for one thing, and another is I guess I needed more fire in general.  I would say next time I would allow at least 8 hours of cook time for a 120 # live weight animal, and certainly start it out lower.  Even when done, it wasn't very tender, so it could have used a few more hours still.

Pepperoni

I know, you're thinking: "Really? More pictures of meat?  Really?" But this was just too much fun and too new (to me) to not blog about, even if just briefly.  Above is what 10 #'s of home grown, butchered, ground, processed, mixed, stuffed, smoked, dried and sliced pepperoni looks like.  Really, really fun. And yummy!  I think it turned out great; it isn't that weird gummy slimy stuff like what you buy at the store.  It tastes like sausage, just pepperoni flavored.

And, just FYI, if anyone ever wonders why I do this stuff; it's because its fun.  I know the labor I've got invested is off-the-charts high...  I don't even want to know how many hours I've got in this pepperoni alone.

Sleepy girls and lazy parenting

So we have this elaborate system of "self balancing" bed-times and wake-up times in our house that are supposed to encourage morning responsibility in our children.  Herself and I are not micro managers, so essentially it is like this: we have a few absolutes vis: 1: Children must have a certain amount of sleep time available to them, 2: Chores must get done.  3: Children must be ready for school by 6:20 (breakfast time) Everything else is variable.

For instance, if the chores do not get done one morning, then obviously they did not have enough time to complete them, so they must be responsible for waking up 15 minutes earlier the next morning.  But since they must have a certain amount of sleep time available to them, that usually means that they need to go to bed 15 minutes earlier the night before.  In this fashion, they are actually making decisions each morning (how hard they are working) that directly affect their bed time later that night and what time they are getting up the next morning. It really is about 2 parts Intentional Parenting and about 98 parts Lazy Parenting.  I see the advantages of children who realize the direct consequences of their actions, but mostly I just hate nagging them to do their chores.

At various times we have had one child that was getting up at 4:something in the morning, and going to bed at 6:30 (ish? I'm not good with details) which means she had to scramble to get supper eaten and cleaned up (Herself and I also don't really do dishes anymore- again: Lazy Parenting).  I told this child at one point that if she continued to fail at chore completion, and if I needed to, I would come to school and pick her up and take her home early in order for her to get to bed early enough... How embarrassing for a Jr. higher!  It didn't come to that, though.

This posting wasn't really meant to be a parenting lecture; I was just trying to give a little background for my funny story.  But anyway, we ran into a little snag on our elaborate Lazy Parenting Scheme: sometimes the girls just lay in bed with their alarms going off for 10 minutes, sleeping through it while others in the household who have earned the privilege of sleeping in are woken up.  Herself came up with a Win/Win solution for this: Daddy likes to wake girls by squirting them in the face with a squirt bottle/ Girls getting woken up by getting squirted in the face with a squirt bottle wakes them up and discourages them sleeping through alarms!  Genius!!  You see why I married this woman???  We set up a 2 minute rule; if the alarm gets shut off within 2 minutes, no facial squirting.   It fit in really nicely with our Lazy Parenting Style, since regardless of when the girls are supposed to get up, I am almost always up anyway.

Okay, on the first morning we implemented this new idea, I'm sitting in my chair in the wee hours of the morning reading my book with my squirt bottle filled and ready, listening for alarms.  Hark! At 5:00, I hear that musical BEEP, BEEP, BEEP- silence.  Oh, drat! She shut it off! So I am left, alone and disappointed.  But about 10 minutes later, I get up to get a cup of coffee and glance back to her bedroom and notice there is no light on!  I instantly assume that she shut off her alarm, but crawled back into bed and went to sleep!  Oh joy! Here is righteous opportunity to squirt a girl awake with my squirt bottle!!! I grab my bottle, tear down the hall, rip the door open, flip the light on, and begin hosing down Second Oldest Daughter in the face, and proceed to rip off bed covers and squirt any and all available skin showing; feet, legs, neck, etc.with cold blasts of water.

I don't know if those of you who actually know Second Oldest Daughter realize this about her, but she is what is commonly referred to as a "SPAZ."  By this I mean that when she gets startled or suddenly realized something, it is always followed by wild gesticulation, usually hand/arm tossing, leg pump (whether she is sitting or standing) and her whole body moving.  This was the case that cheery morning as I was spraying her down in bed.  It looked like she was doing horizontal calisthenics while in bed.  And as I'm spraying her, she begins to shout nonsense stuff that makes no sense at all to me at first, but slowly my brain finally puts together that she is saying that it wasn't her alarm going off at all, but her sister's, downstairs.

"Oh... sorry... I'm gonna... go outside... your room now... Have a good morning"

Awkward!
I went out in the hallway, and looked downstairs and saw the light on of Oldest Daughter, and could hear industrious sounds coming out of her room.  Hmmm.  I went back to Second Oldest Daughter bedroom and stood outside her door for a moment.  Then I knocked, came in and said "So, I'm going to squirt you one more time, just for fun, I think."  She said "Okay" and so I did.  Then left.  End of story.