Eat It

Funny Jaron story. I have some pickled teeny brussel sprouts from our garden last year that I want to get out of my fridge, so I've been making a push to eat them. 

I offered some to Jaron for lunch today. 

He put one in his mouth, chewed it for a second, and then spit it out and said "no." 😂 

I said, "you're not going to eat that?" I ate one of the brussel sprouts on his tray. 

He said, "eat it," and held it out to me. (Sometimes he feeds me the things he doesn't want to eat). 

I opened my mouth so he could drop it in... And then he put it in his mouth. I guess it was worth a second try if Mom eats it.

But a moment or two later, he grimaced and spit it out, offering it to me again. 😂

I signed him up for a spring session of ECFE, a messy art session. We've gone twice so far, and both times he's eaten the art supplies. One of the stations was making cloud sand with baby oil and flour. Jaron kept putting fistfuls of the mix into his mouth. The helpers thought it was hilarious; they expected him to take one taste and spit it out. 

I guess that's what you get when you feed your kid weird food. They can't tell the difference between craft supplies and food. 😂 

Paint was this week's taste. I stopped him before he could eat too much. Thankfully there's been a water play table each week and Jaron happily spends most of his time there. He's needed a new outfit both times, but that's a small price to pay for not having to clean up the mess. 😊

Speaking of messes... He really enjoyed his blueberry sauce on pancakes the other day...

Note the blueberry on his eyelid, forehead, and arm. 😆

Eggshell Feeder

I caught Mina in the dog house the other day. 😂

I also caught our garlic coming up! 

Since Jaron and I were outside, I decided to do a little shed maintenance. Those pesky mineral feeders kept getting knocked down by the goats as they turn around to eat out of the end of the feeder. 🙄 One even cracked along the back where it hangs on the wall. I swapped the cracked one for the cat feeder. The cats won't mind a cracked feeder. 

I moved the mineral feeders to the back area away from the food. We have two varieties of mineral, mostly to test which the goats like more. The feeder on the right is the winner! DuMOR is the favorite. 

Next shed update was to make an egg shell feeder for the chickens. They need oyster shell or egg shells to give them calcium to keep their shells thick and hard. Whenever we put shells in the compost, the chickens eat them up right away, so they're definitely craving more calcium. I've been saving shells for a while, so I crunched them into smaller pieces and filled a juice bottle with them. 

The Internet provided the idea for a gravity fed feeder. Two boards, a tuna can, and a couple of screws are all you need. 

And a bottle and a couple zip ties too I suppose. 

They were easy enough to throw together, I made two more. One for kelp (provides iodine) and one for grit. They get enough grit free range from pecking at our driveway, but in the winter it'd be nice to supplement. 

Here they are hanging in the shed! 

I wonder how quickly the chickens will discover them.

Library Books, Lost and Found

I know how notorious library books are at getting lost. I worked in a library for almost two decades, so I've experienced plenty of people who 

A) admitted to losing books and paid for a replacement right away

B) found the book right after they paid for a replacement 

B) claimed library books had been returned and demanded that we look for them on the shelves because we forgot to beep them in. Occasionally they were found on the shelf. Most of the time not, and the book or movie would show up a few days later in the outside dropbox. 

All the years I taught, I checked out hundreds of books for my classroom and never lost any. So I'm pretty good at keeping track of library books. 

Jaron has a stack from the library I keep in the living room on a particular shelf. So far I've been able to keep track of them pretty easily, but somehow in mid-February I lost three. Yes. Three. 

I distinctly remember putting my finished library book in the library bag along with two of Jaron's selections I was tired of reading. I also remember rushing to get out the door for a speaking engagement, remembering I needed books to entertain Jaron during class, and swapping the library books for books we owned. 

That's the last time I remember seeing them. 

I thought I had returned them, but I got a renewal notice. Wait, not returned?? I could see a librarian making a mistake and not checking one book back in, but three? Not likely. And thus my search began. 

At first it was looking in the most obvious places. Nothing. Then the unlikely places. Nada. This continued for about a month here and there until I finally got an overdue notice. Time for a serious search. 

I decided to search the entire house from wall to wall, top to bottom. I made a list of all the rooms in our house, the cars, even the garage, checking them off as I went. 

Jaron searched too. 

Oh wait, that was busy work while I searched. 😆

Every cupboard and shelf, inside closets, under beds and dressers. No library books. 

I kept coming back to the thought I'd returned them, but there being three missing made me question. 

I only had a few rooms left to search, and none of them seemed likely. I had to contemplate paying for the books. G recommended going to the library to look for them myself, but I wanted to finish the search at home first. 

This week I got a renewal notice for some other Jaron books. I noticed one of the missing books wasn't listed. After logging into my library account, I realized that one of the missing books was not on my account anymore! Could that mean I did return them?!

G actually searched the library shelves for me on Monday while I had a chiropractor appointment. And guess what. He found both! They were on the shelf where they belonged. 

Somehow all three missed getting beeped. 🤦‍♀️ All that searching and wracking my brain for nothing! But at least the lost have been found. 

Beer Bread Muffins

I found a very good cheesy beer bread recipe longer ago that has since become my go to when I need to use up old beer. 

This time, instead of making a loaf, I tried muffins. 

The butter bubbled up and I worried it would overflow, so I put the tin on a cookie sheet to save my oven. 

They turned out pretty good! 

The next pan didn't get filled quite so high. 😅 

I didn't have any issues with butter overflowing this batch. 

I also sprinkled the herbs on top instead of mixing them into the butter. Then I brushed the tops with butter at the end. That worked just fine too. 

Most went in the freezer for future use. I've found they freeze and reheat quite well! 

Bigger

The ducklings are quickly growing. We had them in a box in the laundry room, but they've graduated to a bigger box in the garage. Only three didn't hatch, so we ended up with seven out of 12 (one got cracked partway through incubation and we got rid of it). My guess is those three must've been the ones not in the turner. 

The broody hen up in the haymow is still broody. There's a second one up there often, so maybe we'll have two mamas. How far into the 21 day incubation are we? Not sure, but the weather forecast looks pretty nice coming up, so maybe the chicks will make it.

I caught these two sharing a nesting box. 😂

Someone else is getting bigger too. Must be going through a growth spurt...

After I took this picture, he topped his meal with about 2/3rds of a cheese stick. 😱 Where does he put it all???

Pie Fail

Our Japanese students have never had pumpkin pie before so I whipped one up for them to try. 

It baked beauuuutifully. And then we took a bite. 

A very harsh, bitter flavor similar to anise was all you could taste. 😩 I thought I had accidentally doubled the spices. 

The crust was too good to throw away and the custard innards seemed easy to scoop out...

So I mixed up the filling adding more pumpkin, some cream, more sugar, some vanilla extract, and some almond extract. 

It lessened the spiciness, but the aftertaste was still bad. Too late in the day to bake. Maybe an overnight in the fridge would help. 

This morning I pulled out the tweaked filling. The bad aftertaste remained. I decided to remake the filling altogether. 

When I added the lemon extract to the new mix, I noticed it had a harsh smell nothing like lemon. A quick Google search revealed that lemon extract doesn't go bad necessarily, but it can break down into bitter compounds. Ahhh, that explains it. 

I dumped the new filling with the bad extract; thankfully I'd only mixed the liquids, not the whole thing. I remade the filling again. Baked it again. Covered the crust with tin foil so it wouldn't burn in the rebake. 

This version tasted much better! The girls enjoyed their piece. I was disappointed with the thickness of the crust (which I had wondered about in version 1.0), but otherwise it passed muster. The place where I puzzle pieced the crust together even turned out okay. The filling didn't get underneath the majority of the pie and it was easy to cut and serve.

Now what to do with the original doctored up filling?? Dump? Or add cream cheese to salvage it?

Prosthesis Upgrade

At our last NICU follow-up clinic we also had a meeting with our prosthetic team. I call it a team because there were about five people meeting with us - the dr, his fellow, a resident, the owner of Limb Lab, and another Limb Lab consultant. Everyone wants to be part of Jaron's journey! 

They saw immediately the issues with the prosthesis. It came too high up on Jaron's armpit so he couldn't even have the arm relaxed against his body. It was too long compared to his other arm and his shoulder was pushed up if he tried to weight bear on his left side. And no bend. 

The owner of Limb Lab had ideas. So did everyone else. It was a giant swirl of conversation where people built off each other's thoughts to come up with something better. 

Turns out what we have is prototype #1. 

They took it to Limb Lab to make immediate adjustments that day. We stuck around to have Jaron try it on before they glued things in place, but he fell asleep before they could, so they eyeballed it and sent it home with us. 

Prototype #2:

Much easier to take on and off. They recrafted the seat for his residual limb so that there's not suction pulling his flipper when he's wearing it.

Reaching for the cow pictures. 😅

I can actually put it on him and walk away without worrying about him getting stuck. He doesn't seem to mind having it on. 

He will put weight on it but hasn't mastered crawling on all fours yet. It's definitely building muscles he hasn't used before! 

It was a little short after they cut the arm and made a bend. They made it easy to take the foam pad off and put the hand back on, so I did. Now the height is practically perfect. 

I put it on him in the high chair for snacks one afternoon and had him work for his food. He figured out that he needed to hold his arm down so the cup wouldn't move as he dug raisins out. 

He had so much fun, that when I took the top off so he could easily grab them out, he put the top back on. Then after he was full, he took the raisins out and put them back in again. 😂

One thing I don't love about this model is that it sometimes works its way off his flipper. As in it comes off without me taking it off. I wonder if it's too short now. I need to take a picture of it in the act and send it to the professionals. This is prototype #2- they plan to make more tweaks before making the final model and billing insurance.