Happy Mother’s Day

from all the mamas and their offspring at Farm School!
Callie the calico cat and some of her kittens,

Laura’s 4H cow-calf pair, Bunny and Benny,

Oreo the Speckle Park calf,

Hopefully

“To plant a seed is a hopeful deed.”
– unknown gardener
It didn’t take more than a week, living with the new enormous south-facing window in the master bedroom, to realize that what I had was not a large sunny window seat but the perfect seed-starting greenhouse. I planted some seeds in early April — from [...]

Nine is fine

Today is Daniel’s birthday and it’s a fine sunny Spring day.  The frogs are singing, the birds are twittering and making nests, and the gophers are poking out of their holes.
One of Daniel’s presents this morning was the Marty Robbins CD Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs (1959) which we listened to with breakfast (pancakes, bacon, [...]

Poetry Friday: A little trust and encouragement

An anonymous but appropriate and still fairly well-known bit of American doggerel, near as I can figure from the 1940s or thereabouts. From our small, battered copy of the Arrow Book of Funny Poems, collected by Eleanor Clymer and published in 1961 by Scholastic:
The wind riz
And then it blew,
The rain friz
And then it snew.
Spring [...]

Four words

Snow*
Blizzard
Cold
Spring?
* 12 inches since Saturday. Four more to come today supposedly. The only way we can get into our corrals is with the tractor, since ever more snow keeps falling and drifting in over the road; it’s over four feet deep in places. Two baby calves born, one last night and one [...]

Call of the wild

One of my Google Alerts picked up this article, “German Tots Learn to Answer Call of Nature” from The Wall Street Journal earlier in the week. From the article,
Each weekday, come rain or shine, a group of children, ages 3 to 6, walk into a forest outside Frankfurt to sing songs, build fires and roll [...]

Home from the hill

Well, home from three days at the peforming arts festival (piano, voice, and speech arts), which was a hill of its own.
We returned to find that it’s finally, really Spring here in our corner of the prairies. I’ve had pussy willows in a vase for a few weeks, the geese have been flying overhead [...]

Mud pies and bibliobituaries

One of our favorite books, especially for Spring, is Mud Pies and Other Recipes: A Cookbook for Dolls by Marjorie Winslow, illustrated by Erik Blegvad, whose Great Hamster Hunt, also out-of-print, is still on my shelves.
So I was delighted to see it receive a lengthy “salute” from independent bookseller Alison Morris on her blog, Shelftalker. [...]

Our newest little April fool

Laura’s 4H heifer finally had her calf the other day. We arrived at Bunny’s pen to find her in labor. If you look carefully, you can see the calf’s front hooves poised to make an exit.

Laura the midwife with her beloved Bunny.

Here’s one of the first glimpses of Giacomo Benny (Benny for short), [...]

Early Spring snaps

The only thing green things in my garden (where the snow has melted) — nice young stinkweed. And oh what a healthy crop already. It figures it would be a weed!

The farm team (so called because they’re in their coveralls and tractor dealership gimme caps):

Sadly (ha!), the box of ice skates has [...]

A breath of fresh Spring air

U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, in India last Friday.
Some of the very few words that filtered through my consciousness while in bed that day:
If freedom-loving people throughout the world do not speak out against China’s oppression in China and Tibet, we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights [...]

Happy Easter from Farm School

(The picture is from last summer, but the good wishes are current!)

Under the (Spring) weather

After three nutty busy days at the beginning of the week (library board committee meeting, semiannual teeth cleaning and checkup, and music lessons, and that was without two meetings I couldn’t squeeze in), Daniel and I got sick. For me that was aside from the three consecutive days of headaches — first migraine, next [...]

Something new for the vernal equinox

While ordering our favorite children’s Spring solstice book — Ellen Jackson’s The Spring Equinox: Celebrating the Greening of the Earth — I noticed that another favorite seasonal author, Wendy Pfeffer, has a new book out this year, A New Beginning, illustrated by Linda Bleck (January 2008, Dutton). It’s on order throughout our library system; [...]

Poetry Friday: Forcing Spring

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: it’s in the -20s, with blowing snow. A very, very nasty day.
The kids are baking apple pies today for a contest tomorrow. If we can’t get out to deliver them and get them judged, well, we’ll just have to stay home and eat ‘em.

The other day [...]

Poetry Friday: A good example

The mercury has finally moved out of the bottom of the bulb and we’re enjoying a relatively balmy, sunny, and snowy -24 C today.
I have to admit the week has been rather like Christmas, minus all the baking and gifts, which is fine by me. Yesterday afternoon’s art lessons and evening’s rehearsal were [...]

Now this warms my heart, if not my feet

It’s still cold here, so cold the mercury is in hiding

(of course, you can run but you can’t hide with the newfangled digital technology)

but the good news is the snow has stopped falling and the wind has quit blowing, so it could be worse.
Worse as in as bad as it was on Monday, in fact, [...]

Speaking of cold blood,

cold hair, and cold skin, this is what 46 below zero C looks like.

An arctic ridge blew in yesterday, bringing the cold, blizzardy winds, and more snow. The wind and cold are supposed to stick around til the end of the week. You can get an idea of the general blizzardyness here,

And here are [...]

Backlog: Winter fun 3: Toboggan party

The kids had a toboggan party after Christmas with some friends at the nearby provincial park, which has great big hills. Davy made it just to the edge of the (frozen) river at the end of the toboggan run, considerably past the end the of the hill.
Davy (red hat) and Daniel (dark jacket with [...]

Backlog: Winter fun 2: Christmas Eve

The kids went skiing and tobogganing at my inlaws on Christmas Eve afternoon. Tom and the kids groomed the ski hill and cleaned out the chalet at the top of the hill. I arrived around four, just as the sun was setting; I believe that’s one of my children on the way to [...]