A loss of innocence

Occasionally some non-comprehending troglodyte will question us as to why we homeschool. The implication, of course, is that we're raising a couple of stunted misfits who will never amount to anything.

For us the reasons we homeschool have never been about religious instruction or academic superiority or anything like that (though of course those are serious considerations). No, from the first, the primary reason we've chosen to homeschool is because of...socialization.

Which is pretty funny when you think about it, because that's the Numero Uno argument the public school defenders always bring up. "What about socialization?" they'll bleat, as if socialization were the sole and exclusive reason children attend school in the first place.

Just this morning I read a news article about the use of inhalants by 12-year-olds. Twelve! My youngest daughter will be twelve in two months!

"When their kids turn 12," says the CNN article, "parents are concerned about peers pressuring them to smoke cigarettes, drink and use drugs, but it turns out 12-year-olds are doing something else: getting high on inhalants.

"A new national survey from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration report finds that they're using inhalants more than marijuana, hallucinogens and cocaine combined.

"Some young people are sniffing -- inhaling -- a wide variety of products to get high. Inhalants are legal, cheap and everywhere. They can easily be found in most homes: spray paint, shoe polish, glue, air fresheners, hair spray, nail polish, gasoline, aerosols, computer cleaners, even the refrigerant from air conditioners."

So...does it still strike you as abnormal that we prefer to keep our daughters away from this kind of "socialization"?

Schools today are so damned obsessed with sex, political correctness, and academic mediocrity that I question how anyone could, in good conscience, subject their innocent children to this kind of sludge. The emphasis on children today is to grow up too fast. That's why such outfits as Ambercrombie and Fitch have clothing suitable for "prosti-tots."

But why? Why must children grow up so fast? Why must their innate innocence be stripped away so rapidly? My "tween" daughter is mature for her age (I'll specify that's mental maturity) but she retains an air of sweetness, wholesomeness and (dare I say it) childishness I find wonderful. And why shouldn't she act like a child? She IS one.

She also shows remarkable discernment about young people her age. It's become something of a standing joke with both our daughters. We'll pass a teenage boy who looks, well, like a typical teenage boy...and one or the other daughter will whisper, "Hey mom! Is that the kind of boy you want me dating?" I consider this superb practice for when they really are dating.

Watch out for those trolls...

A friend sent me this. This isn't one of those internet rumors - this actually happened!

[UPDATE: Whoops!! Yes, it IS an internet rumor. Oh well, still funny...]
_____________________________________
So today a friend (Steve) told me about this....

Steve's friend called him, distraught, because her 20 year-old son who has Down's Syndrome called her at work and said "Momma! I caught a troll! I caught a troll!" The young man has always had a very active imagination so she didn't think a lot about it. She told him that was nice and that he could tell her all about it when she got home.

When she got home her son was STILL going on and on about the troll he'd caught. He took her into the bedroom and opened the closet door and there was... A WOMAN. A DWARF WOMAN.

She apparently was selling something door-to-door and the young man with Down's thought she was a troll.

Oh man.

I don't know if there will be charges filed. Whether there is or not, can you imagine how horrifying this experience must have been for this woman?! OHMYGOODNESS!

Quote of the Day

"I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born."

--Ronald Reagan

Pearly pix

Here's Pearly, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.





Awww, ain't she cute?


Don has a chat with Matilda...



Pearly meets some of the rest of the herd...




Youngest daughter squeezes a few drops from the Enormous Udder.


Actually, the Enormous Udder is looking much less swollen as Matilda adjusts to her calf's needs. The calf still can't nurse from the back right teat because it's just too low, and the back left teat is dead (thanks to a hideous bout of mastitis last year). Tonight I fitted Pearly with a halter (oooooh was she mad!) and tied her up next to mama while I milked Matilda for the first time. I concentrated mostly on the back right quarter and got nearly a gallon just off that teat. The milk is still too rich in colostrum so I didn't save it, though I'll freeze tomorrow's milk with colostrum in case a future calf needs to be bottle-fed.

All in all things are going well.

Ewwww yuck!

In our rural county, garbage service is nonexistent. Instead, our taxes pay for garbage dumpsters in various locations around the area. You can drive there and dump whatever garbage you have, in whatever amount.

This is actually rather nice because, in our case, we don’t generate a whole lot of garbage (mostly plastics such as toilet paper wrap, that kind of thing), so paying separately for garbage service would probably be a waste of money for us.

This afternoon I cleaned up the placenta from Matilda’s calving. The chickens were starting to peck at it and the neighborhood kids found it grossly fascinating, but I knew it could attract coyotes as well as start to smell, so I took a pitchfork and sort of scootched it into a plastic garbage bag (I couldn’t lift it because it kept sloshing back to the ground – “Like picking up an egg yolk,” my older daughter noted).

I tied off the plastic bag and lifted the lid to the garbage can and put the bag on top the dead rooster who had finally expired a few days ago after getting severely attacked by our other two roosters.

And it occurred to me you really don’t want to know what’s inside a rural person’s garbage cans.

It's a girl!

Well after all that fussing and worrying, Matilda had her calf without us even seeing the birth. Grrrr.


I mean, really. I had just checked on her around 2 pm (Sunday). She was lying on the ground, chewing her cud, no obvious contractions or distress. Not fifteen minutes later, Older Daughter comes tearing into the house, shouting "The calf is here!" Honestly - couldn't she at least wait for us to get there? How inconsiderate.


So at least we saw the new calf moments after she was born. Yes, she. It's a little heifer with hooves as white as snow. Younger Daughter had planned to name her Bessie, but as we watched her struggle to her feet for the first time, someone said, "Look at those hooves! They're pearly white!" We decided that was a splendid name - Pearly...though the hooves are now reddish brown, just like the rest of her. She looks so much like Gimli (our red Dexter bull) that it's astounding she came out of a Jersey cow.

The birth turned into a neighborhood party. In great excitement, the girls called all the neighbors and about twenty showed up, and most of the kids stayed to enjoy a spontaneous game of Obstacle Course in the driveway. What a day.




Trying to stand and making hash of it.








Enchanted kids.


Is that udder massive or what?


Happy cow.


The other cows knew something was up, but weren't quite sure what. The red bull, Gimli, is the calf's father - and boy does she look like him!


We had quite the audience since everyone in the neighborhood had been waiting for the Big Event...


Searching, but not quite sure for what...


Since she came off a commercial dairy and was never allowed to keep a calf, this little girl will be special for Matilda. I love the low, cozy "moo" cows give at this time - a sound only heard with a new calf. (The rest of the time they bellow like something out of Jurassic Park - in fact, that's how I half-jokingly refer to our place: Jurassic Farm.)


Our Dexter matron Jet wonders what all the commotion is about.


The chickens loved all the goopy mess left behind...


...and curious, they hovered and clucked around the newcomer as well.


Our neighbor Ethan can claim to be the first to pet Pearly as she stumbled toward him, still wet.


Our neighbor Miss Calamity meets the calf.


As you can imagine, Matilda was pretty thirsty!



Nursing is a trick because Matilda's bag hangs so low. Those who know cows know that Matilda has a poor udder attachment, but we have to work with what we have. Matilda wasn't bred for superb udder attachment, merely milk production.


Younger Daughter fell in love with Pearly right away and wants to be the one to lead-train her.


Here are four of the neighborhood kids, watching Matilda and Pearly tucked into their stall for the night.

The Great Escape

As you know, we’ve spent the past week waiting with breathless anticipation for our Jersey cow Matilda to have her calf. As the days crawled by, we've had a number of false alarms. Meanwhile the poor girl was looking positively misshapen between her bulging belly and her enormous udder. There was so much mud in the wooded area where we keep the cows in the winter, often knee deep, that I brought her into the fenced driveway area just to keep her on dry land until she had her calf. “Driveway” is a misnomer, since it also includes our entire side yard, probably half an acre total.

I didn’t think to close the driveway gate since, after all, poor Matilda could barely waddle, much less make a dash down the 400 foot length of the driveway toward terra incognita.

Until this morning. It was as foggy as anything and visibility was limited to 100 feet. Still, as I was upstairs getting dressed for church I could see her walking – okay, waddling – briskly down the driveway. Unconcerned, I went downstairs and told the kids, “Let’s get going so I can get Matilda back in the driveway and close the gate.”

We hopped in the car and drove down the fog-shrouded driveway. But no Matilda. Baffled, we got to the end of the driveway and had three options: left (to go to church), straight (up our neighbor’s driveway), or right (toward some other neighbors as well as a ravine leading to the canyon). No Matilda in sight.

Entirely randomly, I went right. “I don’t see her,” said Oldest Daughter, peering into the fog.

“She can’t have gone far,” I said crossly. “She can barely waddle.” I drove further than any cow – much less a Jersey with a nine-month calf inside her and an enormous beach-ball udder between her legs – could surely walk in the two minutes between seeing her heading down the driveway and us getting in the car.

Suddenly there she was, high-tailing it down the road toward the ravine. I jerked the car to a stop and hopped out. “You little twit!” I exclaimed. “Get back here!” So, attired in church clothes and unfortunately without a lead rope, I hauled her up the hill and back into our driveway, where I closed the gate behind her. She was not amused.

What a dastardly person I am, thwarting her Great Escape.

“She probably wanted to find a secretive spot to have her calf,” observed Oldest Daughter.

“I’m sure you’re right,” I replied. “But can you imagine having to search high and low for her after church, trying to find a secretive cow and calf down the ravine?”

We were late for church, of course, but our pastor thought our excuse was hilarious.

Cleaning the $#@^%& barn

Well once a year, whether it needs it or not, I feel compelled to clean the barn.

It's not a terribly big space. Our weird outbuilding isn't the least bit barn-shaped. It's just long. It's divvied up into shop, hay storage, and barn. The "barn" consists of a single room plus two stalls.

I muck out Matilda's stall every day because I need a clean space to milk (when I'm milking, that is... -- which I'm not doing right now because we're still waiting for her to have her calf).

But it's the pending birth of this first calf of the year that compelled me to get off my lazy duff and clean the barn. We need a nice clean place for mamas and calves to get out of rain and wind.

It's strictly a wheelbarrow-and-pitchfork job and this time took me three days to complete.

Here I've started nearest the door and got the first four feet done.



Here Matilda is hanging out with Younger Daughter and a neighbor boy, watching me labor.


The barn floor is covered with a foot of compacted straw and manure. It's sheer hard work to lance it up, pitch it into the wheelbarrow, and trundle it around to our compost pile. This long mess is this winter's barn compost. In about two years it will be unbelievably beautiful stuff for the garden.


The chickens, of course, think the compost pile is put there specifically for their benefit.




After three days of picking away at it, I finally got the barn floor down to gravel.

Now spread some clean straw, and we're all ready for calves. And I'm ready for a shower.


Matilda says "Thanks!"