Which Came First.......

Somehow I had a feather brained idea to get chickens. This was four years ago now. Looked up Murray McMurray website and ordered some chickens to be delivered in the spring. Didn't have a place for them to live, had no idea what to do with a chicken really at all, but how hard can it be? Right? When I get set on an idea, I am somewhat hard to dissuade.....I think 'bull headed' is generally how I am described by most of my close friends and relatives. It does get the ball rolling though, and sometimes that is really all that needs to happen to make it go. 6 am on a Saturday in April, phone rings and I can barely hear what the person on the other end is saying over the "peep! peep! peep!" in the back ground, "Your chicks are here in the post office for you to pick up." Normally, we like to sleep in, but Keith scrambled out of bed and headed into town to bring back the 24 chicks (plus 1 free rare one) that were now the newest residents of the farm. He came back about 30 minutes later carrying a rather small 1 foot x 1 foot square box with a rather noisy bunch of one day old chicks in it. I had scrambled around the house to improvise a confinement system that would hold them in until a more permanent dwelling location could be devised. Had to keep them out of the house because the house cats might eat them, had to keep them warm because that was what all the books said. I had managed to pick up a small waterer and feeder ahead of time. A quick knife to a few cardboard boxes and voila instant chick brooder. We set them up on our "stinky porch" - so named by our children due to the fact that the garbage resides out there and it does, in fact, sometimes stink......but that is another post altogether. There is maybe no other baby creature as cute and fluffy as a one day old baby chick. Watching them scramble around their enclosure was absolutely mesmerizing. The kids would sit out there for hours captivated by the random, chicken brained ramblings of the little ones. The "free rare chick" was quickly dubbed Brownie as he was the only one that looked a little different and could therefore be picked out of the crowd. McMurray had actually sent us 26 chickens because there were a few in the box whose health was rather questionable right from the start. I inspected them and tried to tube feed them as any good vet would, but they just didn't have it in them. Try explaining that to five kids who are suddenly and completely in love with the sickest of the lot. There were tears all around when the two sickest chicks passed away and a small funeral ceremony held in their honor....and then life went on and the kids walked away from the episode understanding a little better the fragility of life. One thing about chickens....they grow fast! It took no time at all before they were jumping up onto the sides of the brooder and inspecting the great beyond, just outside of their known world. Thankfully, Keith had been hard at work on a permanent chicken residence. Not only that, but the idea of the chickens now residing in one of our previously unused sheds prompted the fixing of the roof of the entire building. Suddenly, what had been a dilapidated building was now a snug little shed in which to house the chickens, and potentially any other farm animals that came our way. Turning them over to the wilds of the world, however, proved heart wrenching.....not that they weren't fine, but as Keith said one night when he finally came in from the chicken house. "Geez, it is like sending your kids off to college - I feel like I should put up a cot out here!" You get attached to the little things. I have heard that raising chickens becomes an addiction. I know that whoever said those words knew what they were talking about. Our plan was to have them be "free range" chickens, which is all well and good, but it takes a certain leap of faith to allow these young feather brains out the door and only hope that they somehow come back. There were several tentative trials of letting them out for a few minutes only to shepherd them back inside almost immediately. One of the biggest worries were the many farm cats that we keep. They are kept so that the rodent population doesn't get too out of hand. That, and the fact that, as a veterinarian, you tend to acquire many of life's "castoffs" that don't have anywhere else to be. One such cat was Sparky. He came to the farm because his claws got him into trouble and the people that had him needed to get rid of him.....hence, my house. He had grown into quite a nice cat and a very good hunter.....especially of chickens. One morning, I had just finished the chores and was about to head off to work when suddenly I heard a "PEEP!" coming from very near the closest shed to the house. I knew that there was no way that the chickens, housed in the building furthest from the house, could be that well heard from where I stood on the porch. I looked out toward the shed and low and behold, here comes Sparky with a half grown chick in his jaws peeping away. Torn between panic and knowing that if I rushed the cat, he would likely run out of range entirely with his catch. I called to him in my most cajoling voice, "here kitty, kitty" and he stopped and raised his tail in recognition as though to say, "Hey! Look what I caught for you!" Somehow, I managed to sneak a hand in and get him around the scruff of the neck at which point he dropped the bird. The chick took off running and stopped in a shaded area the swing set, but now I noticed another cat headed toward the unsuspecting chick. I grabbed this cat by the scruff and now had both hands full of mighty hunters. I knew I had to contain the cats because even if I just took them away and set them down, they would beat me back to the chick's hiding spot - cats are brilliant like that. So, I settled on trapping them in my husband's shop for a few minutes - although hard to turn the handle on a door when both hands are full of squirming, hungry cat. Tucked one of the cats under my elbow in a snug football hold, turned the door handle and tossed them in and shut the door as fast as possible. The chick was still in the same place, thank God and I was able to corner it and pick it up without too much trouble. Still too shocky from being in the jaws of a carnivore. I looked it over and found that all that had happened was that there was a puncture hole that went through the neck and into the crop where food was spilling out. I took the stressed out little tyke into the house and rinsed off the skin to fully analyze the damage. What to do? Too little to kill and eat, potentially healthy enough to be fixed, but usually the stress of medical care will sometimes alone kill them. I reached for the junk drawer. When in doubt, the answer may just lie in the junk drawer. Super glue has so many wonderful uses, but one of the greatest is fixing cuts. It is very similar to "tissue glue" which is the surgeon's answer to what to use. With glue and chick in hand I walked up stairs. Keith was still soundly sleeping and again, with things in each hand I didn't have a good way of getting his attention without being too loud. "Keith! Keith! Get up! I have to glue a chicken!" I said as I kicked the edge of the bed. He sat up blinking and said, "What?" I quickly explained the situation as we went downstairs where the light was better and over the sink I glued the chicken's neck closed. With a few simple prayers thrown toward whatever God might watch over mauled chicks, I took him back outside to be with his buddies. Within minutes of being back out with the other chickens, I could no longer figure out which chicken it was. To this day, I don't know if it was one of the roosters that we eventually butchered, or if it is still one of the hens that lives out in the shed. It healed up without incident thanks to Super Glue.

Straight Run

When I ordered the chickens, I ordered a straight run, which means that you will get both males and females in the mix. We were excited about all the wonderful eggs that the hens would give us, but we opted not to dwell on what would happen with the males. Eventually, on October 20th the first little egg appeared as though by magic one morning. Small, but perfect, this little egg has become immortalized on our shelf for all time (or at least until some kid knocks it down) - I blew out the inside and shellacked it to remind us how good we have it to get free, home grown eggs.....and to remember how long we have been eating those eggs.

The boys were getting ever bigger, although it was still a little hard to tell just which one the "boys" were because they hadn't started crowing yet. Within a few weeks of the first egg hatching, however, there suddenly was some very unusual noises coming from the chicken house. It sounded like a choir of pubescent boys - voices cracking all over the place as they made multiple attempts at what might one day be called a "crow" Many would start fine, but then get choked off mid crow in what sounded like a deep throat clearing. With the crowing came the testosterone and the realization that we now had almost a dozen chickens to "do" something with.

The local butcher doesn't do fowl because of the feather mess - this is completely understandable having now seen the feathered mess for myself. As an undergraduate Animal Science major, I did take a "meats" course in which we saw how many meat animals were processed and then cooked. I highly recommend this course to anyone if you have any questions at all where your meat comes from. Better yet, try this....try going to a meat packing plant and asking for a tour. Just so you know.....it will never happen. You know why? Because they worry not that you will be grossed out by the animals being butchered, but you WILL be grossed out by the conditions and how the meat is handled. It may very well lead you to never eat meat again and then were would their company be?

I have been to the packing plants as they are in process. I went as a student doing research. We had to go and get tissue samples for what we were working on. It wasn't pretty - any of it. It was loud, and disgusting, and even I could see the gross cross contamination happening. Best yet was when an entire side of beef fell off the conveyor belt. It is supposed to be then "condemned". They hung it to the side for a while and then, when they thought we were too engrossed in our work to notice, they slid it back onto the line. The USDA inspectors that are there, I am ashamed to say, are veterinarians. It saddens me to think of how low their lives have sunk to be a USDA inspector....most, to me, appear to be former shells of a veterinarian. No longer actually caring about the animals they were sworn to protect, now a mere pawn of the government and getting paid high dollars to do it too.

Anyway, back to the boys. The time had come. Reviewed how to humanely kill a chicken and "process" it, which entails removing the feathers and internal organs all without contaminating the meat in the process. Our chosen method of humane euthanasia was La Guillotine also known as "the axe". We devised a cone that held the chicken securely and quietly and then if you hang them upside down for a few seconds they become almost hypnotized. We made it as quick and painless as possible. The statement "ran around like a chicken with its head cut off" has some basis in actual events, but "flopped" is probably more like it.

After decapitation, the body is immersed in almost boiling water to loosen the feathers and then the feather picking begins. This is a skill that is developed with practice. The first chickens we did took most of the day to get processed, now with our two years of practice behind us, I can tell you that just two of us can process ten chickens in just under 2 hours. But the feathers are the messiest part. They come off the chicken and stick like glue to you - to every part of you, hands, face, chest, hair. And they aren't just feathers, they are wet feathers,....hot, wet feathers, so the smell is one that you will always remember.

I typically get the post of evisceration, being that I am schooled in what needs to stay in and what needs to come out. The feet come off first and then the rest of the neck. A sharp knife is your best friend in this department, that and a pair of latex gloves (or several pair) After that, the scent gland and the anal opening are dissected out and tied shut to avoid any contamination. A small slit is made up the belly of the chicken and then, with small hands a benefit, you squeeze one inside and get a grip on everything from the crop and gizzard on backwards and you gently start pulling. Typically, it all comes out with a "shlop" kind of sound and then you have to assess weather you managed to get all that you needed. Typically, the lungs have to be removed separately because they are part of the upper chest wall and attached rather firmly to the ribs. They come out easily however compared to the kidneys. The kidneys are actually within the bone of the pelvis and behind several tough nerves and connective tissue, so this requires some digging in many cases to get them completely out. The testicles of a chicken are internal and quite large - they startle many at first (including myself) in trying to figure out the anatomy. It had been a while since I had had an avian anatomy course, but after a few minutes of private review I gave a short course to the herd of kids that came around.

I have had numerous people ask me why I would let my kids see it. Why not? I think it only right that they should have some idea of where their food comes from. They understand that it was a living, breathing animal with many of the same parts as we have. They understand that we killed it in the most humane way possible after it had been allowed to have a reasonably happy chicken life of roaming around free on the farm. They understand and are grateful to the chickens for providing us with food to live on. I had seven kids running around me that day while I processed the first chickens and not a one of them was all that grossed out and were really quite fascinated by the anatomy lesson.

After the insides are out, the chicken is scrubbed (inside and out) with fresh water from the hydrant and then bagged in a 2 gallon Ziplock bag and tossed in the freezer. Does it bother us to eat these chickens that we have raised from tiny one day old chicks? In a way. But I am, as I said before happy that they lived a good life - they weren't in cages, they weren't kept shut up inside, they were protected from predators and fed organic food. I think about it, I think about them and I am grateful to them....yes, grateful to a chicken because they provide some of the very best soup and dinners of the entire year.

4-H

The chickens have brought a new aspect as well, other than just food. The kids show them.

Simon's first year in 4-H was fairly uneventful because he just took projects that were judged and then sat around for the rest of the fair, but the second year....we took Brownie.

It is important with a flock of chickens to have a rooster.....ONE roster. We discovered early that two just wouldn't work because they started competing for the girls and the girls were paying the price, if you know what I mean. Bob, our other rooster had to go. We had a special butchering session a few weeks after the first and had "Bob noodle soup" that week for dinner. My daughter Ella, did have a little issue with a dinner with a name and will often times now remark, "Who are we eating this time?"

But Brownie was the chosen one. He had been our "free rare chick" that we had received and after much research, I figured out that he was an Ameraucana chicken. Ameraucana are one of the breeds of chickens that lay different colored eggs - greens, blues, and sometimes lavenders. I was excited for Simon because there was so much he could talk to a chicken judge about this breed. He did his 4-H work book and learned some of the feather patterns and different types of fowl. He practiced giving Brownie a bath before the fair. We carted Brownie into town in a cat carrier for the pre-fair blood testing that had to be done, and then the big week came.

We got Brownie all set up at the fair and waited around for most of the day for the judging to happen. Five minutes with the judge and done. Kind of anticlimactic in the end, but then we were only in one class. Brownie stayed the week at the fair and you could here him crowing from anywhere you were....our purple ribbon bird.

Genetics have to come into play however at some point. And where you have one rooster and some hens, eventually, one of the hens takes it into her brain to set on eggs. I had it all planned out, according to the almanac, when would be the best time to get one of the hens to set on eggs. But hens don't read the almanac and they were having nothing doing with the bucket of eggs that I had left for them to set on. It did , however, get their little chicken brains working. Within three weeks of leaving a bunch of eggs for them to ponder over daily, two hens finally took it upon themselves to try to hatch them out.

When a hen becomes "broody" you can tell because all the do is "sit" all day. You can move them around and where every you set them, they sit and stay. They will get up once daily to walk around, eat, drink, and poop, but then it is right back to setting on eggs. These are dedicated mamas! Needless to say, the eggs that I had left for them were goners, so we slowly traded them out for new eggs daily until they each had about 10 eggs to set on. It takes 21 days to grow a chicken from an egg and it is quite possibly one of the coolest things to witness. As the time grew short to when the eggs were to hatch, we put the hens in a separate area away from the other chickens - a little "A" frame brooder house where they would be safe from all the other aunts and uncles pecking on them. I got the call at work on the day that I was a "chicken grandma" and I hope that when I truly am a grandma, that I am half as proud as I was that day. All together we, or rather the hens, hatched out a total of ten baby chicks and raised them quite nicely in the little brooder. When the hens got tired of all their offspring, we moved them back into the regular flock again and then waited a while to move the babies over to the regular pen. There was a lot of chicken moving for a while. Eventually, with much monitoring and stress, the young ones integrated into the flock and took off on their own. Roughly seven months later there was another round of first eggs and butchering - one entire generation born and raised on the farm.

There is a definite learning curve involved in raising chickens, and ours has been (so far) about three years. We have had a few more hens hatch out a few more chicks with some limited success and some failure - mainly due to our intervention. We humans think we know it all when it comes to raising young - even when they aren't our own. But this fall, just as it was starting to turn cold, our best hen....Big Brown Hen as she is affectionately known, decided that she wanted to set on another round of eggs. I didn't think this was the best timing in the world, but chickens don't really care all that much about human opinions, so I decided to make her a "test case" and leave all the eggs laid in one day under her and NOT move her to a brooder. I figured it was too cold for many of the chicks to survive anyway, their chances of hatching were slim to none in my mind because it was 30 degrees at times and if she got off the nest....well, they just weren't made to survive that sort of temperature change.

We left her alone with 10 eggs to mind, paid little heed to what day it was and three weeks later, were stunned to find 6 baby chicks under her! 60% hatch rate....better than we had done so far when we had interveined, but they will never survive once they jump out of the nest because the other chickens will kill them. Survival of the fittest, we decided.

Mama hen was a force to behold. No chicken came within two feet of those babies without her beating them senseless. She chased off anything (including our small grey cat) that even so much as thought about bothering her chicks. She kept a wary eye out for any marauding animals and would call the chicks to her any time there was an exceptionally good spot of bugs or seeds that she had found. At night, when the temperatures dipped down into the twenties, you could find her and her chicks all safely nestled together -all of them protected under her wings staying warm. As they got older, I would go out there at night and find her sitting on the floor with 6 little heads poking out of her wings and feathers....she looked like a 7 headed chicken.

All of our best efforts to provide and protect and Brown hen did better than we ever could with all our fancy heaters and brooding boxes. Mother Nature knows best. Which came first?.....the mama hen.

Brownie's Reign of Terror

Brownie was our main man in the chicken house for the first two years. Purple ribbon winner at the fair and lord of the chicken house. There were offspring that bore his coloring and laid green eggs, but he had a certain way of ruling the roost that was a little frightening. He would eye you up as you came into the yard and sidle up to you, looking like the regal rooster that he was and then.......whoa! The attack was fast and furious and it consisted of him spiking you with his spurs in rabid suscession. He left many a person with wicked bruises - not only from the attack, but from the attempts to get away from him. I started always carrying a broom with me everywhere I went in the chicken yard. He would stalk you and follow you, waiting for the best time to attack.....when you were furthest from an escape. It was at the height of his reign that we ordered another round of chicks - new blood and more interesting breeds for the kids to take to the fair. In this order was another "free rare chick" only this one started out black and after more research, determined that this was a Dominique chicken. He became the choice chicken for my daughter to take to the fair for her first year. From there, he became the Champion Non-Standard Commercial Individual chicken. He not only came home with a purple ribbon, he came home with a trophy! He was also much meeker than Brownie, so the decision was quickly made to usurp Brownie. It was a difficult decision, but it was made much easier right after he attacked me one last time. We butchered at total of 15 chickens this last summer and Brownie was in there somewhere. I am sure that he will make some excellent Brownie Noodle Soup

This Old House

I have undertaken a project. I don't do this too often in this house because I am definitely no expert.....Keith is. He handles the house projects and I handle any of the medical emergencies that arise with the pets. Seems like a fair trade. I have a tendency to be a little impatient with getting things done so I don't take the proper time or care, not to mention the fact that I rarely use the correct tool for actually doing something. I have found that flat screwdrivers can be used for just about everything from opening a paint can top to fishing out toast from a toaster (provided it is unplugged and the toast is no longer on fire)

That said, I took on this job. It started by painting the room while Keith was away. I did it as a surprise for him while he was gone working at my brother's house for a week. I did it while he was away (and called it a surprise) because he would have hovered and fretted over whether or not I cleaned the brushes out well enough after I was finished with them. This sort of "hovering and fretting" drives me absolutely nuts and is part of what prevents me from taking on other jobs. So, I did it while he was out of town.

Problem was, the paint job looked too good when I was done.....it made the floor look terrible. I mean, before when the wall was bad at least the floor looked the part, but now there was such a difference that it just would have killed me to move the stuff in there with the floor looking that bad. So, after Keith came home and had a chance to inspect the room and declare the paint job "good" and also verify that his brushes were in fact clean enough, he agreed that the floor needed something.

I have always favored the idea of refinishing the floors. This is an old house - 101 years to be exact, but the floors upstairs are pine.....wide plank, pine floors and Keith was generally in favor of just painting them again and calling it good. I volunteered to do the work - "I'll sand and stain them" I offered - that was only fair right? And so it began and Keith was nice enough to get me a new sander and set me up with the proper tools which is a very good thing or I would still be at it with a single piece of 20 grit and a flat screwdriver.

At first it was just a job, one of countless projects to be done on this house before it is technically habitable. I figure we will get it completed about the time that the kids all grow up and move away, much like my own parents did. Slowly, the layers of paint came off and the wood emerged and slowly it dawned on me how old this house really is. The smell of old wood is not something that can be easily explained. I realized what it was when I walked into the room to work one day and was suddenly transported back to my grandparent's attic in their South Dakota farm house which was also made of old wood. One hundred and one years ago.....1909 - before my grandparents were born, this house was finished by Meyer's construction, as evidenced by the name of the builders and the date that was found on one of the beams in the attic....that is a long time to imagine. No motorized vehicles, no television, no e-mail, no electricity....old.

I wonder who the people were that built the house. They were probably in their twenties or thirties. Did they have families? Where are those families now? As I was cleaning out cracks in the floor that have now dried and split enough to allow entrance to necklace beads and crayons and other small child paraphernalia, I would come across the head of a nail that had been hammered in generations ago.

Where will I be in 100 years? Will I have left anything of any lasting importance behind when I go, like these men did? Will there someday be someone who is refinishing this same floor and wondering who the last person was to sand and stain it? It is a humbling thought to think that I may not leave anything of any real importance in this world. But then again, I am leaving my children to it and, with any luck, my grandchildren.

As with any tedious job, this one moves slowly, but I feel as though I know each board individually. Which led me to another realization. I was moving some of the trim boards around one day and I managed to get a wicked splinter in the outside edge of my foot.

Have you ever attempted to take a splinter out of the outside edge of your foot? It requires some amount of Cirque du Soleli maneuvers. But as I was fishing the splinter out, it dawned on me that this wood was probably two hundred years old! The wood that would have made up that room had to have grown for quite a while prior to being harvested, dried and cut for flooring. Two hundred years! 1809! Shortly after we gained independence from England, before the war of 1812. The forests that made this floor was likely standing during the time of my great, great grandparents and before all the Native Americans had even left the area.

Now, I realize it isn't Pompei. It hasn't been around for thousands of years, but even something as old as this floor, in the Midwest is encouraging - maybe things we build really can stand the test of time, weather the storms, and still be useful. I know there are many that like "new", but unfortunately, in today's age that also tends to equate with "fast" and I have yet to see a new fast house stand up to any serious time. I am also a big fan of natural materials....wood and stone. The "new" vinyl siding that the previous owner slapped up fast sometime in the 80s is now completely ruined, but the wood that we uncovered under part of it was just fine.....needed some paint, but otherwise fine. It had been there for almost 80 years with the same rain and sun that the vinyl had been exposed to and failed to stand up to.

I understand the new and improved mentality, but have yet to actually find anything "improved" upon in most cases. I see most people living in subdivisions where all the houses essentially look the same - all have the big garage out front and some variation of "greige" color, ....where is the originality? Where is the individualism? Where is the craftsmanship? I understand that most of the houses built in the early 1900s were also very similar, but they took their time, used excellent materials, and, I will let you in on a little secret that I have learned while living with an architect that has also done construction work, the older houses are cheaper AND better built! Yep, most people don't want to live in the "old" section of town, but would rather have the "new" house in the new subdivision. It is entirely possible that in 60 years, chances are very good that the "new" house will have been razed to the ground and rebuilt due to some design or construction flaw at least once, while the old house will still be standing.

So, I applaud the men that built this house (and the man that continues to build this house), their time, their skill, and their patience. I think of them often and can only hope that the next few owners of the house walk into this particular room and marvel, if only briefly, at the floor and all the work that it must have taken to make it look so nice.

Celiac Disease Sealed Our Fate

We used to be simple, happy folks living on a farm in Iowa. No real worries, no great consciousness of the world outside of our own. And then our daughter got sick. When she was about 18 months old we started to notice that nine diapers out of ten had diarrhea in them. This had happened periodically off and on for a while, but now it was becoming consistent. My son had had the same problem as a kid for a while and we had been to the doctor with him. Finally determined that it was maybe a milk allergy or giardia or something to that effect. Anyway, I had taken him off milk for a while and tried to disguise the horrid taste of the Metronidazole that they had me give him in maple syrup and, low and behold, he got better and grew up relatively normally. But not Mara. She continued to have diarrhea, and loose weight. I remember many nights walking into her room and she would be standing, crying in her crib with horrible diarrhea all over her P.J.s and then she started vomiting as well. She was a quiet kid. She really didn't do much more than sit and quietly look at books, which was nice for me because I was 8 months pregnant with her younger sister and in the pregnancy fog didn't notice how serious Mara's condition was until sometime after the birth of this fifth child. One day I was changing her shirt and pulled it up as she was facing away from me. Her spine and shoulder blades stuck out alarmingly and her belly protruded out front. She looked like an Ethiopian baby that was starving to death. I thought she wasn't eating enough so we started counting calories and feeding her Pediasure. I made an appointment with our family doctor who noted that she was "failing to thrive" which basically means she had stopped growing like she should have. She did blood work and found that she was anemic with iron deficiency anemia. We started a month long course of giving her iron daily, which was an incredible struggle because it tasted so bad. After a month of that, more blood work. This poor child didn't even cry when she was stuck with needles - she was too weak....I cried, but she didn't. Still anemic. You can imagine my horror, night after night watching my baby getting sicker and sicker. I would lie in her bed with her at night to read her a book and simply cry. All the medical knowledge that I had could do nothing for her except to keep after the medical profession to figure it out. I envisioned lymphoma or leukemia, I envisioned all sorts of horrors that my mind would race over at night long after I should have been sleeping. Thankfully, our family doctor had the foresight to order a screening test for celiac disease and it came back alarmingly high. Celiac disease. Wheat intolerance......who knew? Right? Now, technically, she hasn't been officially diagnosed with celiac because to do that you need to have small intestinal biopsies. I wasn't going to wait around for the month that it was going to be before she could get into the specialist, I took her off wheat immediately which isn't easy in a house of crackers and pasta. I went to the local grocery store knowing essentially nothing about what I was looking for, only that I had to avoid all things that contain wheat, rye, and barley. No graham crackers (her favorite), no bread, no saltines, no oatmeal (because that is typically milled in the same facility as wheat and is therefore contaminated), no noodles, no mac'n cheese, no...... I stood in the isles of the grocery store and I started crying. I couldn't envision a world in which my pasta noodle loving, graham cracker eating kid would have to now live. I slobbered and sniffed my way through the aisles at a complete loss of what to get for her to eat. I needed more information and was borderline on a complete panic attack until I happened upon the popcorn....she loves popcorn! For the first few days she subsisted on a few gluten free cereals that I could find, some popcorn, Pediasure (because, as it turns out, that is gluten free), rice, milk and cheese. She never looked back. Within two weeks she wasn't having any more diarrhea and she started to have more energy. Her color changed from a pasty white to a more rosy glow and I think I may have finally gotten a full night of sleep. Celiac disease, it turns out, is very common and very much under diagnosed. They estimate that 1 out of 10 people has celiac disease and probably doesn't know it. On average, it takes about 11 years for the average adult to get diagnosed with celiac because it can have such a broad range of problems that it can cause. Mara's case was severe, but many cases show very mild signs and can look like a whole host of other problems - joint pain, muscle pain, weight loss, weight gain, intermittent gastrointestinal signs, gas, heartburn, even such things as poly cystic ovary disease and allergies have been possibly linked with celiac disease. Many people carry the genes for celiac disease, but that gene needs to be turned on before you actually develop clinical signs. It is a whole complicated genetic nightmare to try to figure out, but thankfully, the cure is easy.....don't eat wheat or any of its cousins. Mara's diagnosis led us to actually reading the labels of all the food we ate and, you know what, it is really scary to actually read labels! There are things that you cannot pronounce, much less know where or what they come from originally. Most of the un-pronounceables actually come from corn, but there are some that contain wheat, so we had to become very good at additives. The thing is, it is so much easier (and healthier) to eat things that don't contain additives...period. Fresh fruits and vegetables are always okay for Mara to eat, as are cheeses and dairy products, nuts and eggs. She became our living, growing, healthy model for what to eat! Initially, there were not many foods in the grocery store that were "gluten free", but the number and the amount of varieties continues to grow by leaps and bounds due to the number of people becoming diagnosed with this problem. There are now crackers and pasta noodles made with rice flour, or tapioca flour that are just as good tasting (if not better) than some of the regular crackers. There are now cake mixes that are gluten free and taste really great! The hardest part for us was that we cook for a family of 7 and now we had to cook for a family of 6 plus 1. All her meals have to be prepared first and with separate utensils so there is no cross contamination with wheat of any kind. Eventhough she was diagnosed when she was only slightly over 2, it was hard to always be the odd person out at every meal, especially when something really good was made like spaghetti and she would have to put up with eating a fried egg instead. So, I decided that I would try her gluten free diet as well. It required us to make her a "meal" rather than just left overs because I had to eat it too. I have been eating gluten free food for the last year and the oddest things have happened. Several of my chronic health issues have gone away - allergies improved, asthma improved, blood sugar stabilized. Not only that, but I simply can't eat a lot of the goodies that used to tempt me so easily - crackers....out, pastries.....out, donuts.....out. I have lost some serious pounds around the middle. All in all, a good change for me and watching Mara run around the house being as wild and crazy as all the rest of her siblings has made me a believer in what changing a diet can do for a person. So, now, when we decide what we are going to eat, we read the label and if there are ingredients there that require a chemistry lab to produce we tend to NOT eat those products. The less processing a food goes through and the more natural it is, the better it is for you - your body just knows what to do with it. Take margarine for example......have you looked at that label? partially hydrogenated vegetable oil...... you KNOW that took someone in a chemistry lab somewhere going "Maybe if I just put a few more hydrogens on this molecule, it will taste more like butter".....and it does, but at what cost? Now look at the ingredients of butter.....cream and salt.....that's it! You and I can identify cream and salt. Both occurring in nature and therefore something that our own metabolism is set up to deal with. Another one that gets me is high fructose corn syrup - it is in literally everthing these days - ketchup, soft drinks, salad dressings, cereals. Pancake syrup is quite simply nothing but high fructose syrup with maple flavoring! Here's the confusing part - it is the same molecule as table sugar....at least on the outside, but it was created differently (yes, in a lab) and it contains a double bond that, when it is broken down by our body, requires our body to deal with the substance differently than it would with regular sugar. There is too much of it and our bodies utilize it differently - two strikes, in my book, for why it should not be in the food system. But it won't go anywhere soon. Do you know why? ......because it is CHEAP! By God, the very thing that it comes from grows right outside my door in huge quantities.....not only that, but it is subsidized by the government That's right, the government, in all of it's infinite wisdom, pays our farmers to grow something that is chemically changed into something that will sweeten roughly 96% of everything we eat and then wonders why we have an obesity problem, which they will also have to figure out a way to pay for. There is a way to change it, however, and this was brought to light by Michael Pollan in In Defense of Food ....we need to vote with our forks three times daily. If we stop consuming it, there is no money in producing it. This book, and this whole philosophy, is essentially why we have started eating almost nothing except organic food with minimal processing....."if we buy it, they will come" Field of Dreams philosophy, I know, but it will work if enough people get on board. I look at Mara now and I think, "kid, you may have helped us all" because it was due to her that we finally started evaluating what we were eating and what that might be doing to us. I heard recently that eating really good quality food is like taking a bite of health insurance every time you do. I, for one, think they were absolutely right.

How Much Wood .....?

When we moved into this farm house, there were two furnaces. A traditional propane burning furnace, and a wood stove. At first, I was not sold on the whole wood burning idea - too much pollution, too much deforestation, too much work to get the wood. I felt that the propane furnace was the better way to go and actually visualized the basement without the monster of a wood burning stove in the way - "wow! think of all the space!" Not that I really had any idea what to do with that space in a 100 year old basement in a farm house. Just in case you have never been in an old farmhouse basement, let me tell you, they are scary, dark, musty, damp places that not even mice like to frequent. And this one was no different. Imagine a scene from Misery and you will have some idea of what the basement was like. But I digress. So, the first year in the house I don't think that we used the stove once. The chimney wasn't lined with anything which basically meant that all the smoke and heat was just behind the bricks and plaster in the house. A chimney fire would have been the end of us. The propane heater kept us from freezing to death, but it was a cold winter. That, combined with the fact that each room only had two 60 watt light bulbs in wall sconces led to some serious seasonal affective disorder. The second year, we had a few fires in the wood stove, mainly as an experiment to see if the chimney would hold. It did and the house took on a very warm cosy feel. We were sold! Not to mention that the prices of fuel oil and propane were heading ever upward. By year three, we were ready to line the chimney and see what it would really do for us. Keith risked life and limb climbing up on the three storey house to place a liner in the chimney and then purchased the brushes and needed equipment to clean it out yearly. But so much time and money was put into that work, that there was very little dry wood accumulated to actually burn that first year. Keith did put a cap on the chimney, however, to keep the birds out. This seemed like a great idea until I was lighting a fire the weekend he was away and a mostly burned up piece of cardboard floated up and blocked the grate. The house filled with smoke and we nearly froze to death as I had to open up all the windows so that we could breathe. I, of course, thought it was due to the wet wood I was trying to burn, but no amount of hot kindling stick fires could entice the fire to stop smoking up the house. I resorted back to the propane to save our lungs and only after Keith came home and braved the roof in sub zero temperatures did we figure out what had happened. There is no longer a grate at the top of the chimney and now there are a number of ill fated birds that remove themselves from the gene pool each year. Darwin's theories are alive and well. Year five on the farm led Keith on a mission for dry wood. Ice storms that took down huge numbers of trees were his best friend and he soon found that there was always plenty of neighbors with trees that needed splitting and hauling away. Little by little, the piles of wood grew, but the problem still remained that the wood needed to be dry. The first year was the hardest because he essentially had to cut and haul two year's worth of wood so that one could dry for a year. And then there is the problem of where to put it. Piles of wood emerged and seem to get rearranged every so often, but then I am not the one doing all the moving, so I try to stay quiet and avoid confrontation where the wood is concerned. My kids, however, seem to have found their purpose (at least as far as Keith is concerned) There is always wood to be hauled, or split, or cut, or moved. This job can keep him (and the kids) busy for hours and it is the perfect deterrent to misbehavior on a windy day in January, "Settle down right now or I will send you out to get a load of wood!" ....I usually don't see or hear from the kids for the rest of the day. Simon seems to have taken to the wood thing, however. He happily joins Keith on the tree finding missions and they will send hours cutting up logs to haul home. On a recent adventure in a neighbor's pasture, Keith had to dodge a charging bull while Simon leaped over the fence to avoid being gored with a horn. Nobody ever said harvesting wood was without it's risks. There have been any number of close calls. The sutures placed in a hand that inadvertently was in the way of the axe, the shins and toes that have been crushed. I know for a fact that if you loose a toe-nail it takes exactly 1 year to grow a new one. I know this because at Christmas one year, in the middle of the night while fueling the fire, I dropped a huge log on my big toe and proceeded to, through the next several weeks, watch the nail change from red to black and then fall off completely. By Christmas the next year, the new toe nail was finally long enough to have to trim. After finally getting enough wood to last through a winter, the next consideration was how to split it all. Keith had a few wedges that were procured in the chopping down of a huge maple tree, these he used for the first season of wood splitting. This was an agonizing process to watch. Keith is a tall, strong, wiry guy, but this was still agonizing to watch. The splitting maul was used to split smaller pieces and then wedges were used to split the larger ones. This was all well and good as long as Keith was home to do the splitting. I remember one very cold February when he was gone for a week - I don't remember now why he was gone, but it was probably to get away from his wife who was whining about being perpetually cold all the time. I was left to fuel the fire on my own and did manage to split a fair number of logs, but I don't think I could raise my arms by the end of the week. They say that splitting wood warms you twice - once when you split it and once again when you burn it - I find that to be very true. I have a feeling that if everyone in the country were to have to split wood to stay warm, there would be far less obesity problems in the world. But enough with the wedges. I just couldn't watch it anymore. So, for Christmas on the second year of burning wood, I gave Keith a hydraulic splitter - one that you have to work the handles to pump the hydraulic pump toward the wedge and thereby split the wood. I liked it - still required some work, but wasn't as back breaking as the other method. I could actually help with the splitting chores now and it got us through the winter. Keith, wasn't as sold - too wimpy for him. He has a love of tools - big tools - and his eye was on a motorized splitter which somehow seemed to materialize somehow - spirited to the farm as so many other tools have been before it. Again, I try to avoid getting between the man and his tools if possible. So now, we have the ultimate splitter. Keith claims to have an unhealthy relationship with this particular tool and I have to agree with him. He loaned it out to some friends of ours last winter and then it got snowed on. I caught him staring out the window with a distinctly bereft look on his face, worried that his splitter was alone and uncovered in the storm. But it does the trick. Many a night I will hear him and Simon outside splitting wood late into the evening and they come back into the house in good spirits and with a sense of camaraderie produced from tackling the job of felling, splitting and stacking a winter's worth of wood. The biggest drawback, is the hauling of the wood from the pile to the house. After a foot or more of snow, this gets to be an odious chore. The wheelbarrow works in the fall and spring, but the majority of the wood needs to be brought up when the weather is always at its worst. A nightly chore for the kids to go get a load in the sled and then bring it up and unload it, I feel, is a good one, but the guilt I feel watching them outside on the porch dropping the logs one by one down through the porch to the specially build window opening into the basement, is incredible so there are many loads that I haul and unload either by myself or with them and there are many loads that Keith hauls and unloads by himself. My favorite is a kid that is looking to earn either more time on the computer or some money to buy something that they want - two loads of wood hauled and unloaded will earn a kid 20 more minutes of computer time or $2 extra of allowance (personally, the allowance is the better way to go, but then I am not a kids anxious to play Runescape online.) All in all, I love the fire. I have mastered starting a roaring fire with one match (or less if you have good embers). I collect all the small twigs in the spring and we save those in empty feed bags in the shed so they are dry and hot for starting fires in the winter. The entire house becomes warm with wood heat - the floors, the walls, the attic where the girls now have their rooms. Most nights it is too hot to go to bed with covers and by morning you are comfortably snug in a cool house. The smell of the wood burning outside is a very comforting smell - very similar to the feeling you get sitting around a campfire, there is something about fire that is very primordial and part of what sets us apart as a species. The burning of wood for fuel does have its drawbacks - it does pollute, but then again, so does oil as evidenced by the recent spill in the Gulf. The thing that draws me in the most is that it is renewable....and it really does grow on trees! We do our best at maintaining a balance - most of the wood that we take is dead fall or dying trees and we plant several trees each year to replace the ones that we have used. I see trees that get up rooted to make ways for houses or roads - huge stacks of it on the side of the road and I think, "What a waste!" knowing how many homes could be heated with that fuel. I think that our dependence on fossil fuels needs to come to an end - and will eventually, whether we want it to or not, but it is ridiculous knowing that there are other ways to produce electricity and heat that are not employed simply because they are too time consuming or strenuous to do. What do we need all this extra time to do? Watch T.V.? Not talk to one another? Catch up on Facebook with people we really don't ever see anyway? The modern life has given us the greatest gifts of ease and time.....the modern life has also given us the greatest curse as well - ease and time....time to sit and do nothing, ease to become complacent and greedy. There is something to the idea that splitting wood warms you twice, but it warms another way as well - I feel as though my kids, grumbling and complaining as they sometimes do will know where the warmth comes from - it comes from something that we grow and nurture and then cut and harvest, split, haul and burn and then lovingly plant again for another generation that we may never see. The winter at our house can be measured by the loads of wood, as the piles of split logs slowly shrink in size you know you must be getting closer to Spring and winter will eventually loose its death grip on the world. Just about the time that we despair of ever being free from the wood hauling chores, the tulips pop up, the windows come open and the thoughts of hauling wood disappear for an entire season.....unless you are my husband in which case you gaze longingly upon your splitter and you shine it up for another tree splitting season.

And So It Begins.....

Well, not really. We've actually been here for almost seven years. We have lived in this place, grown vegetables, harvested fruit, remodeled parts of the house, grown the family by two more people, lost jobs, gained jobs, met neighbors, lost neighbors.....so, in other words, we are somewhat entrenched into this ground. We've been here long enough to figure out what we want for ourselves and for our children. We came from the city. We lived in town in a relatively new house. We had two well paying jobs. We abandoned that ship for this......20 acres of Iowa farmland with a 100 year old house and a few out buildings. Of all the decisions I have made in my life, I will always think of this decision as one of the best. Where do we go from here? Where are we heading? These are always the eternal questions of every person regardless of their job or location. What's next? What's next for us is this: We are raising five children to be giving, gracious and hard working. We live on zero excess in a world of exuberant excess and we work to teach our kids to understand this for what it is.....too much "want" rather than "need", too much "privilege" rather than "right". We strive to raise our own food amidst a country with a huge obesity problem and a huge problem with how our food is raised and grown. There are no sudden changes to be made, but many small changes that can make a world of differences - we work to make those changes known. So, the point to this adventure is to keep track of the learning, the growing, the experimenting with finding the best way into an unknown future on 20 acres in Iowa.