the critter news (and why I'm blogging about it)

There's a lot happening in the world. Obviously. Bombings there, shootings here, children being sold into slavery. There's a lot happening in our little world. Middle-aged friends dying of cancer. Young people dying in farming accidents. People being charged with crimes.

A blog is such a strange thing. Do you sit down and write whatever comes to mind, stream-of-consciousness style? Do you document the highlights or the lowlights of your own life? Do you make it a collection of stories and youtube videos you run across? Do you consider your audience, your family members who know you well but live far off and yet the next door neighbors who see you every day (and thus already know about you having the flu) but who might be surprised or alarmed at your thoughts on some controversial issue? How honest should you be? I know there aren't universal answers to these questions. I simply say all of that as an introduction to this post about animals.

Posts about animals might seem silly. But they're what's going on in a world that is as real to me as anything else and as enduring as the seemingly brainless and saddening activity of humans. I don't watch the news, because there isn't a darn thing I can do about 99.9% of it, and it just stresses me out. Which is the point, from what I gather at those times I do catch it incidentally. We watched the weather channel upstairs last night because of a huge storm system that's supposedly on its way here, and we couldn't believe the hype and nonsense. We decided they must practice at Weather School by setting a potato on the table and trying to talk about it in super hyper, dangerous-sounding language for ten minutes.

So there. That's my rambling justification for talking about animals while reporters in other countries are being imprisoned for trying to track down the truth about injustices.

Thank you.

The animals are taking over - the wild ones, the land, and the domestic ones, our time. You know about the grasshoppers, the bain of our existence. Mom just read an article in the paper today about this being a huge year for hoppers because of the spring weather. In a bizarre example of the John Muir sentiment that by tugging at any one thing you find it attached to the rest of the universe, baby birds are reportedly gorging themselves on the hoppers to the point of being unable to fly.

grasshoppers in the yard

A black and red snake has been hanging out in the rock pile beside the house all summer. Maybe she ate the toad, because I haven't seen him around anymore. For family groups, there's a set of three skunks that alert us to their presence by spraying nearby every couple days, several does with fawns, including a set of spotted twins, and several gaggles of wild turkeys with various sized babies. A mama black bear and three cubs (!) passed through and spent a couple of days visiting the pond. There are bears all around us in the hills, but it's unusual for down here in the valley. Here's a very far off photo of the bears. You can see the mama at the back, and three tiny black dots ahead of her.

My Pops has been deep-cleaning the barn and is finding tools, drill bits, and other shiny things stuffed into the darndest corners. The squirrels and rats do this. The other day he pulled a blanket from a top shelf, and down came a wad of apple-flavored horse treats, stuffed away for winter by rodents. He just had something like eight tons of hay delivered, getting set for winter.

It's been a round of bad luck with the horses and injuries over the last few weeks. Four have gotten leg gouges in a pasture we've been summering them in. There must be a pile of twisted metal or barbed wire somewhere on that property, but the guys haven't been able to find it. Harley, one of the horses Jason broke last summer, came down with an intestinal ailment a couple weeks ago, and it appeared for a couple days that he might not recover. He has though.

The chickens are well.

The dogs are well.

The tree by the garden is abuzz with bees.

checking Harley's heart rate and intestinal gurglings

wrapping Marley's leg injury, the worst one of all

frogs

my 8 month old Z girl

Eight months. Two thirds of a year. One less month than I was pregnant.

Zoralee is definitely living up to her nickname of Pickle. Like Jason says, sometimes she's a sweet pickle, and sometimes she's a sour one. She is busy. And curious. And sometimes sociable to the point of ridiculousness. She cops an attitude, which she can be distracted from with a little ingenuity, but every day you've got to change up your game. She grunts and hollers and slaps the table for food tidbits. She shakes absolutely everything she picks up to see what it does.

My absolute favorite thing these days is the Quick Chin Down move. When she's really happy about something, she quickly puts her head down EXACTLY like a Chinese nod. I say she has some Wong in her. Wong was a Chinese man who married my great-great-grandmother later in life, so he would be Zoralee's step-great-great-great-grandfather. Somehow that nod, it made it through the deep and wide pool of genes.

She knows which things are off limits, and so far, a strong "No" suffices, especially if she gets moved to another spot in the room. If she really wants to play with something questionable, she'll go toward it, then turn to see if we're looking at her. For the most part, we try to keep those things out of her reach. But you just can't do that with everything. If there are 3 billion and 37 okay things to touch in a room and one tiny poisonous speck frittered away in a corner, she'll find the speck.

Mostly though, Zoralee's eyes roam the earth, searching for something to climb. She learned the knee-up technique a couple of days ago. Jason and I had put our mattress on the floor to form more of a family bed with her mat. We got into her bed and played with toys so that she'd feel happy about the new arrangement. Evidently it worked, because she kept climbing in and out of her bed up onto ours, using the hereto unknown knee-up skill, squealing, and then dive-bombing off of our mattress toward the floor. She had all the confidence in the world but not all the sense. She also stood up with her hands at her side for a solid second or second and a half, twice. Both times, she freaked out with glee, probably because we were. Today she climbed up onto the bottom step of the staircase. YIKES. I am feverishly sewing the cloth part of a boundary thingy that Jason fashioned from PVC pipe. As it is, we are all the time laying chairs across doorways or open spaces, and that's getting old.

I hear the sentiment from fellow new moms that there is a definite pattern in babydom of routines and preferences lasting two or three weeks. Then they're suddenly onto something new. I totally concur. Right now, I've been getting a huge kick out of Zoralee's interest in tasks. If I open one of her dresser drawers, she'll stand there and take every last garment out. She may even crawl away for a bit but then return to finish the job.

It reminds me of some things I learned when I subbed at the Montessori school in Anchorage last year. I'd put all that on the brain's back burner, but when I saw Z at the dresser drawer, I got really excited to find a book or two on Montessori principles and incorporate them into her play. One thing I remember is that it was a big deal to not interrupt babies and children working on little tasks, especially with unrelated things like, "Hey, you want a Cheerio?" but also even to say "good job," or "Oooh! What are you drawing? It's so pretty!" because it disrupts their flow and trains them to look for external praises rather than working within their own motivation. If they show us voluntarily what they're up to, it's cool. Really interesting.

Well, that'll be enough for now. One tired mama is signing out. Maybe Z will start a new habit tomorrow of sleeping in until 9 or 10 a.m. Ohhhh gosh. I crack myself up.