Another broken leg.

Mad Cow Strikes Again.

She stepped on this guinea and broke it's leg.

I watched her limp around for a while, and when I got closer for a better look I saw a pool of blood where she was standing. I caught her very easily, which tells you how bad she was hurting! Her leg was very obviously broken, so I brought her in and bandaged it then splinted it. Erinn was a big help - she held her while I worked on her, even though she was bleeding all over everything. I kept her in a crate in the kitchen overnight (the guinea, not Erinn), then put her in the horse trailer with food and water this morning. It didn't take her 4 buddies long to figure out where she was though, and they made a bunch of racket until they convinced her to fly out.

Homemade Laundry Soap

Homemade Laundry Soap

(Click on the link above for detailed directions.)

1/3 bar Fels Naptha or other type of soap, as listed above

½ cup washing soda

½ cup borax powder

~You will also need a small bucket, about 2 gallon size~

Grate the soap and put it in a sauce pan. Add 6 cups water and heat it until the soap melts. Add the washing soda and the borax and stir until it is dissolved. Remove from heat. Pour 4 cups hot water into the bucket. Now add your soap mixture and stir. Now add 1 gallon plus 6 cups of water and stir. Let the soap sit for about 24 hours and it will gel. You use ½ cup per load.

Frequently, I just grate a bar of homemade soap into some hot water and boil it for a few minutes until it is all dissolved. Then I add cold water to it, and pour it into a plastic jug. That's ALL I usually use on the laundry and it works fine. However, sometimes I do make the recipe above using homemade soap in place of fels naptha.

A Bear Likes Skates

by Alex Billings
January 2000

A bear likes skates,
to find it's mates,
then you will see the bride,
all fat and wide,
and the groom,
as skinny as a broom.

I found this lovely poem in an old notebook, and there was a drawing of two grizzly bears wearing ice skates below it. (Alex, don't be mad, there's an even better one below!) :o)

Little Boy, Little Toy
by Alex

There was a little boy who had a little toy.
He loved his little toy because he was a little boy.

This one had a drawing of a little boy with a tiny toy truck, and a little boy standing in front of a HUGE truck. I wish I could scan it. Aren't you glad I can't?

Cinnamon Chocolate Swirl Soap! YUMMY.

Mooky cutting the gluten free/sugar free apple pie we made today.

You probably can't tell in this picture but he is getting so tall. It's amazing how he can be so sick so often, but still be growing so incredibly fast.

Jars and jars of stuff...

Today I made cinnamon chocolate swirl soap, chicken broth with chicken pieces in it, chicken noodle soup for Mooky's lunch, yogurt, kefir, and laundry soap. Not to mention a lot of dirty dishes. I got nearly a gallon of milk from Mad Cow, and nearly a quart from Dana Lou. I separated her from her kids for a few hours so I could get just a bit of milk. I need to start separating them all night every night so I can milk Dana every morning. The kids are more than old enough to handle that. I'm not sure why Mad Cow stayed away from Aileas but I sure appreciated the milk.

Here's Mooky's soup made with GF Rice Penne pasta and homegrown chicken. He said it tasted great, "Just like chicken noodle soup."

Cow Milk vs. Goat Milk

Our latest experiment; the results of which won't be available for 3 weeks when the soap is finally cured.

Goat on the left. Cow on the right.
And yes, I know it was really strange to make cow milk soap and pour it into a mold with goats on it! Mooky ever so kindly pointed that out to me. :o)

We made a small batch of goat milk soap and a small batch of cow milk soap. The cow milk curdled when I mixed the lye into the milk, but when I mixed it into the oils with the stick blender it smoothed back out. Also, the cow milk batch has a thin filmy white coat of powdery stuff which appeared before I even took the soap out of the mold.

The batch with the goat milk turned out perfectly of course, because after all, goat milk is perfect in every way. :o)



In this close up you can see the white film better, as well as the unfortunate spot where a little bit of green soap landed when we were pouring. The kids got a good laugh out of that. They thought I did it on purpose. AS IF!

Kris is HOME!

Check out this great article that Kiwi sent me about God's Provision. (<--Click there.)

Kris came home from the cabin today. We missed him so much! He called from Harper and asked if I wanted to meet him at the house of some elderly friends who had asked us to help them out with some odd jobs. So Erinn and I jumped into the truck and headed down 479 towards their house. On the way I saw a deer who had tried to jump the fence and gotten her leg twisted in the wire. I told Erinn that although she looked dead, I was going to stop on the way back to be sure.

On the way back home I pulled over beside her and she lifted her head and looked at me so sadly! Oh, it was awful! She looked so much like Pokey...(well, of course, she was a whitetail after all!) By coming so close to her I scared her into getting back up on 3 legs rather than just hanging there. Kris pulled up and decided to get a closer look to see if the leg was broken, hoping maybe we could just free her rather than shoot her. (Which we could have gotten into a LOT of trouble for doing on the side of the road - no matter that we would have been putting a badly suffering animal out of her misery!)

He walked up to her, and it scared her so bad that she somehow managed to yank her leg out and collapse into the grass. He quickly backed away and we waited to see what she would do. In about 10 seconds she jumped up and took off running away from us. Her back legs didn't look good - the one was hanging uselessly and the other was weak and exhausted so not holding her up very well. We had to leave - couldn't have done anything else for her. I'm getting really teary in my old age - that whole situation just made me so upset due to losing Pokey so recently.

We spent the rest of the afternoon processing the meat from the buck Kris got on Friday. Nothing was wasted. All the meat went into the freezer. All the fat, tendons, sinew, etc, got ground up into chicken food. And the bare bones went to Hannah and Bacon.

We just found out that Mooky can't really handle the beet sugar much better than regular sugar, and he said "Well, I guess I won't be eating anything sweet at Thanksgiving. Because if I do I will be too sick to play with Dalton." Hey - he chose Dalton over sugar. I'm impressed!! LOL Maybe I can make a pie with honey instead of sugar.