Bless You
Bless You!
An eventful week this was, a gross understatement. Lecia, my sister, had her first baby at 4am last Sunday morning. She and Ben named him Kai Roberts Johnson and he is beautiful! She and the and baby are well and now at home after a long stay in the hospital. Matt, Jess and I are now aunty, uncle and cousin to little Kai and are thrilled to bits, but sad to be too far away to cuddle him. On that note, Matt will be able to give him a cuddle in a few weeks during his visit to the States to teach at his University in San Francisco. This is another reason why the week has been so eventful. Matt got an email urgently requesting him to fly back to SF to fill in for Matt Fox, the founder of the school where Matt received his doctorate, who was supposed to teach a one week course at the end of March. So Matt has been spending most of his time after he gets home from the bank preparing 15 hours of teaching an Intro to Creation Spirituality class. He has one week left now, so you can imagine the work he has ahead of him. Less exciting but making for an interesting week, Jess and I got head lice, yikes! It was yet another opportunity to try out homemade herbal remedies and succeed. Now she has a cold, so here we go again. I had my first knitting group here at the house, on a Monday morning. I took Jacinta to yoga and had her watch and play quietly (it worked for about 20 minutes) followed by the beautiful swimming hole which was very different after our week of rain.
Here on the land we had a great time getting into the new rhythm of feeding the calf morning and night. After disagreements over what we should name her, we still call her, “Baby,” because Jess calls her Baby. We usually get down to her by 8:30 or so, and she is very hungry for her milk by then. After giving her the bucket of milk, Jacinta promptly removes the empty bucket and goes on her way, out the door and over to the “living room” side of the shed. She grabs her tiny shovel, and tells me, with an inflection in her voice as if to invite me to join, “dig??” and sits down to her work saying, “yes, dig,” while she chops dirt on a piece of wood pretending to cook dinner. I wander away to pick grass (oh how silly it seems to be grazing for the calf and bringing her grass but it will end soon) while Jacinta yells out insistently, “Mommy? Mommy!” I answer her appeasingly over and over, “Yes?” and she repeats herself over and over, like a chant until I return with an armload of grass. We then enter the pen and feed the baby. She loves her grass, prefers it to the hay sitting there for her to eat all day and will eat it right out of our hands, even Jess’ hands. Jess says to the calf, “Hand?” thrilled by the closeness of the cow’s thin black tongue to her hand. When Jess has had enough of that, she says, “Done!” as she does with the chickens and walks out the door ready to move on. I have to pull her back up to the house. If she could choose, she’d much rather continue chopping dirt, with me sitting beside her giving her dinner ideas. Unfortunately I see too many things that need doing to sit there so I’ll yell from the potato garden, “Are you making chili?” “No!” “Are you making pizza?” “Yes!” Then she chops up green tomatoes from the teepee garden.
Otto, first Jess’ best buddy from Ferndale, now is also the biggest chick we’ve got. Well, he’s become a full blown obnoxious rooster. Bummer. Ben/Kai is also a rooster but he’s calmer, perhaps because he has a bigger brother. It has been known that if more than one of the chicks turned out to be a rooster that we’d have to get rid of them because roosters fight each other and also harass the “girls.” So each day we hoped that Otto and Ben were really girls, but they are not. Otto has finally learned to crow, he squawked along for a while, learning how to do it, instinctively, and now he’s finally got it. He still sounds like a baby, but he’s already begun bossing all of the other chicks around and fighting his brother. So I’ve been told that I need to give Otto, or Otto and Ben away, boo hoo. I love listening to him learn to crow, and his name is Otto, how could he be obnoxious? Little Ben/Kai has not yet tried to crow, but I’m sure he will soon. It is amazing to see the difference in growth in the 4 chicks who all came out the same day, though they were laid on different days.
On Monday I neglected to put the baby chook pen back together after cleaning it out. That evening I went to lock them up and there were only two! The two girls were roosting on an upturned box. Where was mum? She had ditched them and gone back to the big chook palace. Where were the baby roosters? NOWHERE! I looked everywhere with my flashlight. I had killed them with neglect. Just following the good news of my nephew’s arrival, I had killed Otto and Ben/Kai. I couldn’t sleep that night, my poor babies had been devoured by a snake. I’ve since learned that chickens are creatures of habit and will refuse to inhabit their pen if it is not what they are used to. The two roosters learned that night to sleep in the trees, it’s just instinct. Chickens are rainforest birds and know how to survive in the trees. We just lock them up because we want to keep them, and don’t want to allow nature to truly take its course because it means risking the life of a chicken we use and want to keep. Now we have to go and guide them to their pen each night before they fly up and roost in the trees, silly “roosters.”
Garden work this week was minimal. Michelle and I fenced in the potato garden from turkeys and chickens who dig mulch over all of the plants. I actually had to water this week because the heat returned and took the place of the rain, so the new dam pump came in handy. We moved the big mulcher into a new bay and built it a pedestal to keep it out of the mud. Matt and Keith used the chainsaws and hacked down a lot of big branches which had been overshading the yard and preventing the ground from drying up. Keith and I started a new compost heap which involved a bit of digging in the chook pen, gathering poo from chickens and the cow and wheelbarrowing it all up and down the hill. We love having the calf as a supercomposter, she makes our compost a true luxury. I did no planting this week, but a bit of fruit tree care.
I got out a lot this week, even with all of the extra laundry, lice, and a cold. Jess and I visited Michelle’s new place on the Nambucca River, and enjoyed a night out watching the moon shimmer on the water. Choir was again a spirited joy-filled singing experience. We took Jedda to the vet because her wound reopened. Tonight we had dinner at the Murphy’s and even saw a kangaroo on the road, yes, still hopping. Jess talked about it “hopping” and Neri Murphy’s mouse “hopping” all the way home. Through all of this driving and about 10 times here at home, Jess and I listened to the best cd, African Rhymes and Lullabies from most of French speaking Africa. I ordered this book on the French Amazon.com website last week, and it arrived! I have been devouring the text and translations from African languages to French and just loving the melodies, beautiful soulful voices and the drumming. Jess laughs and sings along to certain parts. I listen to a lot of African music with her, dancing or drumming along and I can tell that her sense of rhythm is developing more than mine ever did.
Jess will become a little tyrant if we let her. With her new ability to speak she tries to tell us what to do. Often it is helpful and cute, but sometimes she goes too far, unfortunately even then it is still cute. When the chickens come near the back porch, she yells at them authoritatively, “No! Go away!” At bedtime, after the usual lead up, she now points to her crib and says, “There?” She calls for her blanket, her pillow “piddo”, and her ducky. She gets in her crib, points at the rocking chair and tells me to “Sit….Knit.” I did this one night and she obviously enjoyed it so now it has become routine, but she tells me to do it. As they say, kids like routine, and take so much pride in knowing what’s next. She tells us when she has done a poo, comes to the bedroom and lays down in the spot on the floor where we usually change her. She asks for “powda” or “oil.” When you take a shirt off of her that she really wanted to wear, she cries, “Wear it” (whimper whimper). In the middle of the night she might wake up and request “mitch” (milk), needless to say, that request isn’t often fulfilled. She says, “Bless You” to herself when she sneezes!
I’ll close with a night time story. It was 7pm. Jess and I set out with the wagon down the hill. Goal: walk to the vacationing neighbor’s house, arrive by 7:30, meet Keith there with his truck, swim in their pool, and drive back by 8 for bedtime. Jess refused to board the wagon, “walk.” She walked, stopped for rocks, looked at the moon, walked, went backwards, played in puddles, and ran. I thought she’d get tired and get in the wagon, but never! As I stood far ahead telling her that it was time to go, she ran in her last puddle, slipped, face down into the only puddle that happened to have cow manure it. “Carry,” was her solution, that is how we would get the next half mile to the pool. No way! I’m not carrying you I told her, “You kept jumping and fell in poop when I told you to come, Wagon or walk.” “No” she cried, “Carry!” Eventually I convinced her to run with me, but then night fell. We came upon cows and I picked her up, thinking, “oh well, we have to get there to get our ride home and it will go faster.” By 8pm Keith came back with the truck and took us to the pool, wet nasty clothes, wagon and all. We swam under the moon and the stars in a fancy in-ground pool and all was washed away. Jacinta was in bed by 9 and it became a funny story, not just a long dark messy journey.
Next week at this time Matt will be on a plane to San Francisco coming home to do work that makes him very happy and see some of you who also make him very happy. How much can happen in a week, it’s amazing. Goodnight y’all.
An eventful week this was, a gross understatement. Lecia, my sister, had her first baby at 4am last Sunday morning. She and Ben named him Kai Roberts Johnson and he is beautiful! She and the and baby are well and now at home after a long stay in the hospital. Matt, Jess and I are now aunty, uncle and cousin to little Kai and are thrilled to bits, but sad to be too far away to cuddle him. On that note, Matt will be able to give him a cuddle in a few weeks during his visit to the States to teach at his University in San Francisco. This is another reason why the week has been so eventful. Matt got an email urgently requesting him to fly back to SF to fill in for Matt Fox, the founder of the school where Matt received his doctorate, who was supposed to teach a one week course at the end of March. So Matt has been spending most of his time after he gets home from the bank preparing 15 hours of teaching an Intro to Creation Spirituality class. He has one week left now, so you can imagine the work he has ahead of him. Less exciting but making for an interesting week, Jess and I got head lice, yikes! It was yet another opportunity to try out homemade herbal remedies and succeed. Now she has a cold, so here we go again. I had my first knitting group here at the house, on a Monday morning. I took Jacinta to yoga and had her watch and play quietly (it worked for about 20 minutes) followed by the beautiful swimming hole which was very different after our week of rain.
Here on the land we had a great time getting into the new rhythm of feeding the calf morning and night. After disagreements over what we should name her, we still call her, “Baby,” because Jess calls her Baby. We usually get down to her by 8:30 or so, and she is very hungry for her milk by then. After giving her the bucket of milk, Jacinta promptly removes the empty bucket and goes on her way, out the door and over to the “living room” side of the shed. She grabs her tiny shovel, and tells me, with an inflection in her voice as if to invite me to join, “dig??” and sits down to her work saying, “yes, dig,” while she chops dirt on a piece of wood pretending to cook dinner. I wander away to pick grass (oh how silly it seems to be grazing for the calf and bringing her grass but it will end soon) while Jacinta yells out insistently, “Mommy? Mommy!” I answer her appeasingly over and over, “Yes?” and she repeats herself over and over, like a chant until I return with an armload of grass. We then enter the pen and feed the baby. She loves her grass, prefers it to the hay sitting there for her to eat all day and will eat it right out of our hands, even Jess’ hands. Jess says to the calf, “Hand?” thrilled by the closeness of the cow’s thin black tongue to her hand. When Jess has had enough of that, she says, “Done!” as she does with the chickens and walks out the door ready to move on. I have to pull her back up to the house. If she could choose, she’d much rather continue chopping dirt, with me sitting beside her giving her dinner ideas. Unfortunately I see too many things that need doing to sit there so I’ll yell from the potato garden, “Are you making chili?” “No!” “Are you making pizza?” “Yes!” Then she chops up green tomatoes from the teepee garden.
Otto, first Jess’ best buddy from Ferndale, now is also the biggest chick we’ve got. Well, he’s become a full blown obnoxious rooster. Bummer. Ben/Kai is also a rooster but he’s calmer, perhaps because he has a bigger brother. It has been known that if more than one of the chicks turned out to be a rooster that we’d have to get rid of them because roosters fight each other and also harass the “girls.” So each day we hoped that Otto and Ben were really girls, but they are not. Otto has finally learned to crow, he squawked along for a while, learning how to do it, instinctively, and now he’s finally got it. He still sounds like a baby, but he’s already begun bossing all of the other chicks around and fighting his brother. So I’ve been told that I need to give Otto, or Otto and Ben away, boo hoo. I love listening to him learn to crow, and his name is Otto, how could he be obnoxious? Little Ben/Kai has not yet tried to crow, but I’m sure he will soon. It is amazing to see the difference in growth in the 4 chicks who all came out the same day, though they were laid on different days.
On Monday I neglected to put the baby chook pen back together after cleaning it out. That evening I went to lock them up and there were only two! The two girls were roosting on an upturned box. Where was mum? She had ditched them and gone back to the big chook palace. Where were the baby roosters? NOWHERE! I looked everywhere with my flashlight. I had killed them with neglect. Just following the good news of my nephew’s arrival, I had killed Otto and Ben/Kai. I couldn’t sleep that night, my poor babies had been devoured by a snake. I’ve since learned that chickens are creatures of habit and will refuse to inhabit their pen if it is not what they are used to. The two roosters learned that night to sleep in the trees, it’s just instinct. Chickens are rainforest birds and know how to survive in the trees. We just lock them up because we want to keep them, and don’t want to allow nature to truly take its course because it means risking the life of a chicken we use and want to keep. Now we have to go and guide them to their pen each night before they fly up and roost in the trees, silly “roosters.”
Garden work this week was minimal. Michelle and I fenced in the potato garden from turkeys and chickens who dig mulch over all of the plants. I actually had to water this week because the heat returned and took the place of the rain, so the new dam pump came in handy. We moved the big mulcher into a new bay and built it a pedestal to keep it out of the mud. Matt and Keith used the chainsaws and hacked down a lot of big branches which had been overshading the yard and preventing the ground from drying up. Keith and I started a new compost heap which involved a bit of digging in the chook pen, gathering poo from chickens and the cow and wheelbarrowing it all up and down the hill. We love having the calf as a supercomposter, she makes our compost a true luxury. I did no planting this week, but a bit of fruit tree care.
I got out a lot this week, even with all of the extra laundry, lice, and a cold. Jess and I visited Michelle’s new place on the Nambucca River, and enjoyed a night out watching the moon shimmer on the water. Choir was again a spirited joy-filled singing experience. We took Jedda to the vet because her wound reopened. Tonight we had dinner at the Murphy’s and even saw a kangaroo on the road, yes, still hopping. Jess talked about it “hopping” and Neri Murphy’s mouse “hopping” all the way home. Through all of this driving and about 10 times here at home, Jess and I listened to the best cd, African Rhymes and Lullabies from most of French speaking Africa. I ordered this book on the French Amazon.com website last week, and it arrived! I have been devouring the text and translations from African languages to French and just loving the melodies, beautiful soulful voices and the drumming. Jess laughs and sings along to certain parts. I listen to a lot of African music with her, dancing or drumming along and I can tell that her sense of rhythm is developing more than mine ever did.
Jess will become a little tyrant if we let her. With her new ability to speak she tries to tell us what to do. Often it is helpful and cute, but sometimes she goes too far, unfortunately even then it is still cute. When the chickens come near the back porch, she yells at them authoritatively, “No! Go away!” At bedtime, after the usual lead up, she now points to her crib and says, “There?” She calls for her blanket, her pillow “piddo”, and her ducky. She gets in her crib, points at the rocking chair and tells me to “Sit….Knit.” I did this one night and she obviously enjoyed it so now it has become routine, but she tells me to do it. As they say, kids like routine, and take so much pride in knowing what’s next. She tells us when she has done a poo, comes to the bedroom and lays down in the spot on the floor where we usually change her. She asks for “powda” or “oil.” When you take a shirt off of her that she really wanted to wear, she cries, “Wear it” (whimper whimper). In the middle of the night she might wake up and request “mitch” (milk), needless to say, that request isn’t often fulfilled. She says, “Bless You” to herself when she sneezes!
I’ll close with a night time story. It was 7pm. Jess and I set out with the wagon down the hill. Goal: walk to the vacationing neighbor’s house, arrive by 7:30, meet Keith there with his truck, swim in their pool, and drive back by 8 for bedtime. Jess refused to board the wagon, “walk.” She walked, stopped for rocks, looked at the moon, walked, went backwards, played in puddles, and ran. I thought she’d get tired and get in the wagon, but never! As I stood far ahead telling her that it was time to go, she ran in her last puddle, slipped, face down into the only puddle that happened to have cow manure it. “Carry,” was her solution, that is how we would get the next half mile to the pool. No way! I’m not carrying you I told her, “You kept jumping and fell in poop when I told you to come, Wagon or walk.” “No” she cried, “Carry!” Eventually I convinced her to run with me, but then night fell. We came upon cows and I picked her up, thinking, “oh well, we have to get there to get our ride home and it will go faster.” By 8pm Keith came back with the truck and took us to the pool, wet nasty clothes, wagon and all. We swam under the moon and the stars in a fancy in-ground pool and all was washed away. Jacinta was in bed by 9 and it became a funny story, not just a long dark messy journey.
Next week at this time Matt will be on a plane to San Francisco coming home to do work that makes him very happy and see some of you who also make him very happy. How much can happen in a week, it’s amazing. Goodnight y’all.
posted by Matt & Shana & Jacinta & Genevieve Henry at
12:24 AM
1 Comments:
I have a pet llama, named Matt.
Leo
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