Chickens and Unschooling

A few minutes ago, C came into the kitchen very excited that S helped him learn how to sing, "Do re me fa so la ti."

Then S told me she wrote a song she wanted to sing for me.

"High in the sky the birds do fly."

"Down on the ground the Earth is round."

She intentionally created it with the rhymes.

My son has a fairly unusual name. It wasn't even in the top 700 on the Social Security Baby Names list the year he was born. It hadn't dropped below 500 in over 40 years.

Even with all of that there is a little boy in C's karate class with the same name.

That's two out of six kids.

The Sensei had to resort to calling them by their first name followed by the first letter of their middle names (I'm not sure why he didn't do first plus the initial of their last names).

The other boy's middle name starts with A.

When the Sensei asked for our C's middle name he told him he has two. The Sensei asked him to pick his favorite. Good thing he chose the one that starts with an S, his other middle name starts with an A and the Sensei would have been right back where he started.

...daughter the elder is using YouTube to look up drawing techniques. She's finding things she wants to draw then pausing the video to take the time to draw. Then viewing/pausing and drawing some more.

All on her own. No help/suggestions from me.

I hate days like Mother's Day. On the one hand I know it's a contrived excuse to spend money - buy cards/flowers/whatever. On the other hand are all the messages of how much one needs to do for ones Mom if one wants to show her how important she is. So, if I get a bunch of stuff I'm a beloved Mom? But I don't want a bunch of stuff, so if I don't get a bunch of stuff, my family is treating me as I want, but all the messages on the airwaves imply that makes me a less beloved Mom.

Arg.

I want/don't want a fuss. Mostly don't. Stupid little voice in the back of my head. Ads get out of here.

Then I'm plagued all day by all the damn "Happy Mother's Day" messages (not the ones specifically given to me by family, I mean the general messages from advertisers and everyone's Facebook wishes to their Wives/Moms). Everyone else seems to think it's a swell idea.

Then there's me. I expect no-one wants a rant on Facebook about how damn stupid this whole thing is. So I rant here instead. Semi-anonymous.

I wouldn't mind a hot fudge sundae, though. Too bad there are no DQs nearby.

To the day, we got Ezra. Of course, we didn't know his name was Ezra yet.

He looks a lot better now than he did then. Being fed regularly will do that for a horse.

Today was C's first karate class. We took him to the same place H went, so he could have the same Sensei.

He loved it. Though he needs to work on shutting up for longer than 30 seconds at a time. When it was over C told me he wanted the class to still be going. I told him he could go next time (Monday) and he told me he wanted to go "next day" instead. Not possible, but hey, at least he enjoyed himself.

The girls and I watched. It was hilarious as always. I love that Sensei.

Yesterday we went to our Natural History Museum.

We went to the area where you can pan for gold (fools gold really - iron pyrite as H reminded me while we were there), since we hadn't been to that part of the museum in a long while. Before we did that, though, we had to go to the most important place to go to in the museum.

The gift shop.

C bought a cute little red stuffed dinosaur. I got the kids some snacks. H bought a little glass container and a discounted bead bracelet.

At first H planned to use the container in games involving collecting evidence for investigations.

Then we panned for gold.

It turned out that itty bitty fragile glass container made the perfect holder for the bits of iron pyrite she collected. This inevitably led us back to...

...the gift shop. Where S and C had to buy their very own itty bitty fragile glass containers. You can see where this is going, right?

The containers did make it all the way home. The iron pyrite in water looked really neat in them, too. Right up to the point where S and C accidentally dropped their containers.

Sigh.

The kids did have a lot of fun at the museum, though. They loved panning for Gold. We also read a lot about the Hohokam Indians, and C played with a kid about his age while the girls and I looked around.

H has been riding Junior whenever it is nice enough to do so. It's getting hotter these days so Junior may get a big break over the summer. I did try ponying H on him last night, since it was nice and cool after dark. Junior was mostly too distracted trying to cram as much grass into his face as possible, since we hadn't allowed him out to free graze earlier that day. He was a bit twitchy, and H overbalanced at one point and slid off.

Junior didn't get to free graze because of a new problem with him that we discovered the day before. I caught him scratching his rear end on one of our young fruit trees. He had it bent over at a 45 degree angle as he backed onto it. I tried to scare him off, and it worked. Unfortunately, it worked so well, that he tore off the top of the tree as he tried so quickly to get away.

*Sigh*

This new behavior explains the damage we'd found recently on other young trees. Since I wasn't around to scare him off of those, we'd only lost fruit and found a handful of broken branches on each. I don't know if we can let him loose in the main yard anymore. Certainly not till our fruit matures, so he doesn't knock them all off. I have him grazing in the front yard today.

It's because he is so short. Ezra rubs his rear end on the mature orange trees, because he is too tall to use the young trees.

*Sigh*

At least the next time I'm likely to add to the herd, the trees will be much taller. Eating trees I might have expected, scratching posts - not so much.

I may have to change my chicken userpic. Then again I may never want to change it ever again. It features Lantana, my now deceased Rhode Island Red.

She was energetic and quick enough to sneak out the gate when I let the ducks out this morning. She was her normal calm self when I picked her up to tuck her back into the chicken yard before the flood waters progressed too far into the yard.

She was stone cold dead with ants crawling on her face when I went out to feed the Geese about 10 minutes ago.

She was my oldest chicken - 6 years old this Fall. The only hen that had been mine since a chick. In the winter, when everyone else mostly stopped laying, I would still find the occasional extra large brown egg and I knew it was from Lantana. She was the only chicken calm enough to pet, and she would even let C pick her up and carry her around a bit.

I'm sad to have lost such a good hen. I'm worried that there was no apparent cause and maybe the other hens are at risk. M thinks maybe the goose got her, and I wouldn't put it past the female to attack a chicken. Lantana wasn't very fast at getting out of her way, but they've coexisted for two years, so it's probably not Speedy's doing.


Lantana, the Rhode Island Red. RIP.
(photo courtesy of H.)

Time to break out the shovel.

*Sigh*

ETA: I just realized a little while ago that of all the animals we currently have, we'd had Lantana the longest, besides Hazel. She predated my livejournal. No other current animal, besides Hazel, predates my livejournal.

We ended up burying her under the oak tree.

This is the first day this year that the only thing I can notice when outside is how bloody hot it is. I've watered all the animals. Twice. I had to move the duck pool into the shade so the ducks would use it. Before I did they were just clustered in the shade; as soon as I moved it they were clustered in the shade in the pool.

Weeee!