Spring 2012: Sheep

March 18, 2012 Posted by Issa under Uncategorized
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Spring has sprung! No doubt about it. Once again, The Wallow is awash in babies and to-do lists that grow with the lengthening days. This week I’ve planned a few posts to tally up where we’re starting from this spring.

First up, sheep!

We’ve had sheep for right at a year now. We originally bought a ram (Buck), two ewes (Big Mama and Mary), and the ewes’ babies, a ram lamb (Jake) and a ewe lamb (Baby Jeebus). Buck got injured right off the bat, and one time the sheep all escaped. The escape adventure ultimately led to Joshua (and friends) installing an electric perimeter fence around our whole property. In June, Jake went off to slaughter, and then in July Baby Jeebus unexpectedly died during the heat wave. That left us down to three sheep, but life goes on, and in September, Jeebus 2 was born, then February brought two more lambs, Fuzzy and Wuzzy. Mary appears to be late in a pregnancy again, which means she got pregnant almost immediately after the troubles with Buck back in November. We now have 6 sheep, with another one on the way.

UPDATE: I wrote this post on Friday, but then Saturday Mary gave birth to two lambs! We have 8 sheep now! Pictures of the newborns are at the bottom of the post.

On Friday, the sheep got let out onto grass for the first time this year, which we captured on video:

And some lovely photos by Joshua:

This image is taken from above while Mary licks her first newborn clean:

Next time I peeked into the barn, surprise! Two babies!

We now have a ram, two ewes, three ram lambs, and two ewe lambs. One of the lambs is destined for our freezer, and at least 3 of the other lambs will be for sale at some point. For now, we have a lovely flock of 8, and we’re especially enjoying having so many babies at once, because they frolic together in the new spring pasture. So cute!

Dylan: 9 Months Old

March 16, 2012 Posted by Issa under Parenting
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Dear Dylan,

You walk! Okay, the rest of you is pretty amazing, too, but I’m just sort of in shock every time you walk towards me with your arms out and your huge smile on. You started cruising in January, and now you just take off here and there, so excited to go, go, go. We’ve taken some trips together, too, you and me. Back at Thanksgiving we flew to Iowa for a weekend, then in February we went to Blissdom, and last weekend we road tripped to hang out with some of my friends in Chattanooga. You love the change of pace, and I love spending that time with you.

Okay, it’s true, I love all the time we spend together.

Just today, Joshua looked around your stairs play area and said to me, “You guys just hang out here all day, huh?” I mentioned that we play outside and hang out in the kitchen with him and go to the store and so on. But also, yes. We just chill out and hang out all day. This is my life. This is your life. Those are the same thing right now, and we seem to be having a nice time of it.

Your favorite books are “What Do Penguins Do?” and “What Do Sheep Do?” I don’t even have to have the book handy. I can just recite the lines to you in that way that I do, and your face lights up with recognition. Sometimes I change up the words of the sheep book to match the reality of our own sheep. Sometimes I call you a sheep because when we’re outside you’ll often end up with a mouth full of clover.

You don’t make talking sounds much. You still do your zombie growl sometimes. Your sweetest sounds are when you’re super tired, and little coos and babbles fall gently out of you while you wiggle around and try to fall asleep.

I adore every single moment we have together, even the ones with way too much poop in way too many places. I love feeding you and sleeping with you the best. I love pictures of you, and I wish there were more pictures of the two of us. But, our sweetest moments are the ones that can never appear in photos. Yesterday, you crawled over to me and rested your head on my belly as I lay on the floor, and a peace passed between us, and I wished I could capture the moment forever. Something else will have to capture it, though, not a photograph but something deep inside me instead.

I read somewhere that parents don’t make eye contact as often with boy babies. Especially when you’re nursing, I like to gaze into your eyes. At first I found it a little awkward, wondering what kind of expression to have, so I started talking to you, too. I say, “I love you so much. You are so important.” I repeat those sentences a couple of times, and then you giggle and pop off, and we laugh together and I tell you I love you some more.

Because I do. Unwaveringly. Wholly.

I love you.

I love Joshua, and I love you. I love our house and our land, our pigs, chickens, ducks, and sheep. I love our truck and our two cats. We’re having a really good time, and I’m ever so happy that you’ve joined us here.

Certainty

March 15, 2012 Posted by Issa under Parenting
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I didn’t expect to like breastfeeding. I thought it would be a chore, something I did because I should.

Instead, it holds me up, carries me through, and connects me to what matters. It’s the essence of motherhood, the most important parts distilled down to the simplest terms.

My days have ups and downs. My moods have ups and downs. There are things I worry about and things that confuse me.

But every single night, the last thing I do is lay down next to my tiny baby, and his head tilts up towards mine, and he sucks my nipple into his mouth, and I relax, everything relaxes and floats away. And a single, solid thought slams into me with 100% physical certainty, as clear and as real as my knowledge that I exist:

“I am a good mother.”

Bright Summer Salsa Recipe

March 14, 2012 Posted by Issa under Kitchen
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Bright Summer Salsa is my newest favorite food. It’s spring and summer and fresh and color and yumminess all swirled together in a beautiful, deliciousness. You can eat it as a salsa with tortilla chips or as a salad, eaten straight with a spoon.

Ingredients:

  • 11 ounces whole kernel corn (drained if you use canned, I prefer frozen)
  • 4 ounces sliced black olives (drained if canned)
  • 4 roma tomatoes, diced
  • 3/4 cup red onion, diced
  • 1 red bell pepper, seeded and diced
  • 1 large jalapeno, seeded (optional) and finely diced
  • 1 avocado, peeled, pitted, and diced
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • the juice of two limes or 2 tbps lime juice
  • 1 tsp salt or salt to taste

Directions

  1. After all the dicing, put everything in a bowl together and stir it up.
  2. Intend to let it sit in the fridge for a few hours to let the flavors really mix, but instead try some with a spoon to see if there’s enough salt, and then stand there in the kitchen and eat it all.
  3. Go shopping to buy more ingredients so the rest of your family can try some.

I keep making this, and I keep not getting all the ingredients right, so I can tell you that there’s some leeway in how you put this things together. Once I forgot red onion, and that was kind of sad. It really needs the red onion. Once I got diced olives instead of sliced, and that wasn’t great, either, because the olive taste got everywhere instead of being little bursts of olive. This last time I forgot to buy an avocado, and that was okay. Avocado is a pretty mild flavor, so I didn’t really miss it.

You could probably modify in other interesting ways, like adding black beans, garlic, maybe some cilantro. If you try this, let me know what you think, and tell me about any ways you change it up.

Baby Ducks Arrive at The Wallow

March 13, 2012 Posted by Issa under Animals
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Yesterday I bought 8 Pekin ducklings. They are set up in a brooder in my bathroom right now. When they lose their fluff in a couple of weeks, they’ll go outside. When they’re big enough, they’ll be free ranging, and I’ll make them a little pond. I plan to let them free breed. Whether there are more baby ducks at The Wallow later on is entirely up to these 8 and whatever they feel like doing. There are duck eggs in my future, and eventually some duck meat. Right now, I’ve got about two weeks to build them a home outside.

Peak Oil Already Happened – Now What?

March 9, 2012 Posted by Issa under Think About It
13 Comments

I first ran across the phrase “peak oil” somewhere around 2000. At that time, it was pretty fringe, and I filed it away in mental folder of things that I believe are true but don’t talk about in polite company. Fast forward 12 years, and I’m feeling pretty smart. The phrase “peak oil” appears in the mainstream media and no one really argues that there’s a problem. They only argue about how big a problem it is.

Given how big a problem the lack of oil is going to be to our culture, the headlines are remarkably calm. Unless you’re an economist or an environmentalist, the words “peak oil” still might sounds distant, ill-defined, and not that important.

And they might sound like something that’s still in the future.

Peak oil happened in (roughly) 2005. There’s going to be a bit of what they call the “bumpy plateau”. And then it’s all downhill from here.

I know that in matters this profound, I’m entirely a spectator. There’s nothing I can do but hang on, really.

Still. I read things like this:

As oil is the “enabling” energy source, which makes it possible to deplete all other resources at a high rate, a stepwise decline in the availability of oil would halt the process of depleting (almost) all other resources (firewood in rural areas and a few others are the exceptions). So, the further the collapse is delayed, the less there will be left to start over with, making any attempt to prolong the oil age quite unhelpful. This is an ecological argument: the greater the overshoot, the more the eventual carrying capacity is reduced.

And I wonder if I should be doing something to hasten the end of our failed cultural experiment.

I wonder if I should be preparing somehow. Even though I know there’s not really any way to prepare.

What about you? Do you think about peak oil? What do you think about peak oil?

If You Care About Child Hunger, Leave ConAgra Out of It

March 8, 2012 Posted by Issa under Think About It, Uncategorized
2 Comments

My least favorite sponsor at Blissdom was ConAgra. I tried to avoid their booth all weekend and not make too many snarky comments about them on Twitter. They convinced Blissdom attendees that making 20,000 tweets about ConAgra and child hunger actually did something about hungry children instead of just building a huge swell of publicity for ConAgra. Seriously. Ostensibly savvy social media business people did an enormous amount of marketing work for free for ConAgra. Sounds like just a con to me. Now the company wants you to buy its food, enter packaging codes on a website, and they’ll donate more food.

Annie at PhD in Parenting has a better idea:

Hunger Equations — What Is The Best Way to Help Fight Hunger?

Infographic by Annie @ PhD in Parenting. The code for the Hunger Equations INFOGRAPHIC can be found at the PhD in Parenting Blog.

If you have $20 to spare and want to feed hungry people, use your money where it will do the most good.

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