News and views

Good pictures of Eytan...

 

And of Ed.

 

Ed the goat is still with us.  But Zorro and Atreyu have gone to a new home...  Another one of these craigslist coincidences where the guy who bought them happens to have worked with Mike's coworker's brother-in-law as well as with the guy who lives the next house up in our canyon.  Ernie and Bert have prospective adopters too, although it's not for certain, again coincidentally the wife and four kids of a doctor that I went to once in Wenatchee.

Meanwhile, adventures with Eytan continue.  We've been taking some bundled up colder weather walks (the fall leaves have been beautiful this year, but I didn't manage to take any good pictures of them)...

and diaper changes have become his new favorite activity.

We all went to a swim meet in Spokane last weekend, where the huge lights and cowbells and starting beeps were loud enough to keep naps to a minimum, resulting in a crazy amount of sleeping that night.

And we managed hoof trimming/de-worming/vaccinating the goats with the help of Mike's dad and stepmom, Larry and Sandy, who are really good at vaccinating and just sped up the whole process.

Larry and Sandy, plus Kevin, Leah, and Jack (Mike's brother, sister-in-law, and nephew), also earned some good baby time during their visit in exchange for said goat services.

And they picked elderberries.

 

And they processed chickens.

Speaking of which, we've thinned our flock. Egg production had been going way way down -- in part due to the change in weather/daylight hours, in part due to the age of the chickens (they usually produce well for 2 years, then it gets spottier), and in hindsight probably in part due to too many chickens fighting over the same food and space.  Mike and his bro and dad killed 6 chickens for the freezer, and we were pondering how to do some others when we got a call from a lady responding to our craigslist ad for goats.  She just figured she'd check if we also had chickens for sale.  We thought she wanted them as egg layers, and although we hadn't planned to sell chickens, we figured we might as well.  

Mike had a long and convoluted conversation with her in which both sides repeatedly misheard and misunderstood each other and finally agreed to meet in a park nearby us because the ladies were worried about getting lost on the way to our house.  And just before hanging up the phone, the lady on the other end said, "Oh, and you'll bring the chickens dead, right?  We'll pluck and clean them, we just don't have a box we can carry live chickens in without them escaping in the car."  "Umm.... " "You can just wring their necks and we'll do the rest."  In the end, Mike brought the chickens down live because it was too hard to do otherwise with only two of us here and one of us holding a baby at the same time.  And when Mike got to the park, the two ladies who met him there, who turned out to be from Guam and were searching high and low for fresh chicken, showed Mike how to wring their necks, Guamamian-style (he had only done it before with a knife) and took six dead chickens home with them.  

Interestingly (thus the chicken in-fighting as a factor in decreased egg production theory), our egg production hasn't gone down all that much even though we went from 36 chickens to 23... So the plan is to see if we can get some friends to help with another load or two of chickens, and reduce our egg sales this winter, and get a few baby chicks (but not quite so many this time) who can start laying in the spring.

Meanwhile, maternity leave has evolved from being a little too quiet and stir-craziness-provoking to a little too busy.  The work I've been doing for that small-farm-promoting, produce-selling nonprofit got pretty time consuming this fall (although I think it's settled down again) and I've had to do some work from home as well for work work... mostly data crunching for reports, which I have found is way way more entertaining if you strap a 10 pound weight to your front (yes, Eytan is in fact over 10 pounds now) and sway back and forth repeatedly while punching numbers on an spreadsheet... or if you turn on music and dance while punching numbers, and challenge yourself to see how long the baby in the carrier will sleep while you change 1s into 9s or 7s on the spreadsheet.  I have to remember this for when I go back to the office.

Eytan and I have also been doing yoga, as one of the ladies on the swim team gave me a yoga video where babies get integrated into the poses.  Sometimes, though, we do yoga together for about half the video and then I finish it up on my own.

What else is new?  A few changes in plans.  You might recall that I had been hoping to go back to work part time.  It is looking, though, like it will be full time when I go back, although I still hope to see if I can work a couple of days from home (see above for improved ability to crunch numbers without being insanely bored if done while carrying a baby).  In part this is because all the grants I had been involved in, any of which might not have come through, did get funded.  And in part because Mike's job, whose program funding was supposed continue for a while, got de-funded, and so he was laid off as of Nov 1st.  Now, it's usually unfortunate to get laid off... and that's a little true in this case.  But we're actually kind of excited about it too.  It means we can put off daycare a little bit and Mike can get some time to stay home with Eytan until he finds a next move.  And while he had initially been excited about the job, in the end it wasn't as good a match as he had hoped, and so it doesn't feel that disappointing.  So we both get to be home in November, and then try on a new arrangement in December.

What else?  We built this year's iteration in a string of creative (but not-so-kosher) sukkot.  It followed in the footsteps of last year's sukkah on the corner of the fence with corn stalks for a roof and a prior year's sukkah on the dog/goat kennel with spruce branches on top.  This year's was a sukkah built onto a clothesline with dahlias for a roof.  The one advantage was the speed with which it could be built.  It was a little short and narrow for spending much time in there, but nevertheless...

And meanwhile, Eytan is growing.  We've even pulled out some of the three-month clothes to try (most of them are still too big, but some definitely fit).

He's picking up his head more (one earlier and one more recent photo below)....

And he's awake more often, which does lead to some overstimulation-induced angry sad crying that seems best calmed by turning on the vaccuum cleaner.  Almost as if having something else to make enough noise to block the world out for a bit lets Eytan chill out because he doesn't have to block it all on his own.  Sometimes the noise works well for sleeping too (although not always).  Mike climbed on the roof the other day to scrub out our wood stove chimney (with a long metal brush) so we could start heating again, and the noise from it was so loud that it prevented any conversation with the neighbor who was visiting and put Eytan right to sleep.

For the most part, he is still pretty easy on us.

(even if he's not such a fan of stuffed dogs).