Ten favorite moments of 2011

1. When Anita walked in and announced, “Honeysuckle had ten babies last night!”

2. Learning that people who hate cilantro lack an enzyme which makes it  taste like soap. Too bad.

3. On a day when Ransom’s coffers are dry; a large-ish check arrives to help out with bills.

4. Ava Lou, our two-year-old granddaughter, empties all the salt and pepper from the shakers, then eats most of it.

5. When Denis learned he’d brushed his teeth after I’d dropped the toothpaste container in the toilet.

6. The William Baffin Climbing Rose is climbing and blooming 4 weeks after being planted.

7. Harvesting, shucking, processing three wheel barrel-loads of our own sweet corn at Heartbeet Farm’s.

8. Pulling a volunteer marijuana plant nearly as tall as me from the sidewalk flowerbed and using it to garnish a mojito for Sandy O.

9. Watching the The Princess Bride with seven-year-old grandson, who thought it sounded like “a movie for girls!”

10. That Jesus loved me even as I envied someone with a perfect life and hair.

                               Honeysuckle's naked bunny babies

                                      Ava tries on her mom's mascara

                                                    Denis shucks corn

                                                   Mint mojito

                                          Toad Hall painted

                      

Honeysuckle's babies eat kale

Four weeks old, thriving and surviving the cold nights. Well, not that cold for November. One of the black ones is the biggest of the ten. We called him Lardo until Anita renamed him Clover. The tiniest one is Iris. She has struggled to thrive and has received special attention, often being carried about in Anita’s bunny bag. She is content to snuggle and sleep in a dark warm place and then comes out to explore. She prefers the Mac and is already good at word processing. 

They love kale and carrots and eat their kibble like there is no tomorrow.

The video here is kinda long, but it’s free antidepressant. It's meditation. Zen. Try it. You’ll feel better if you  don’t have a heart attack from too much cuteness.  http://youtu.be/M-cjep1GU9Q

Bunny dreams

One week old! They're getting fuzz and their ears are unfolding.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1oAIAes_uc&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

Note one little monkey face, his teeth showing, dreaming of carrots and cartoons.

                                       Father Heathcliff.

 

Get Off!

Honeysuckle - hungry mother eats a cracker

Honeysuckle took awhile to accept motherhood, but now she is doing great. However, just like any mother of multiples, she needs frequent breaks in the chill of the back porch and indulgences like apple slices, carrot tops, AND occasionally one of my special crackers for which she is so greedy she becomes a galloping white nightmare, chasing you around the kitchen.

Watch her eat her snack here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnmHtOrb6-w

I thought you might also like to see her nest with the babies in it. It is all soft and fluffy and lined with her own wool.  As all mother rabbits will do, she pretends they don't exist and rarely feeds them in front of us. Yet we can tell she's been nursing because the babies have transparent round bellies that roll to the side when we pick them up, like they've swallowed a little white bouncy-ball.

 

                      Watch them here: They squeak!

 

 

Honeysuckle doesn't tell

 

      We’re there again. Not knowing. Feeling her belly. Are they babies or feces? Three weeks ago she spent a happy weekend with Heathcliff. But whether she’s actually pregnant or not, we don’t know. Maybe she doesn’t know either, she’s so demure. But she’s ready. She refuses to use her littler box having turned it (all on her own) into a nest once again:

      She worked so hard trying to pull the curtains down that Anita took pity and gave her some rags and wads of sheep’s wool. She seemed so grateful and spent a long time, as mothers will, arranging and rearranging the environment. For added affect she placed a piece of the wool rug in the corner.

     Her wool has grown so long, she can barely clean herself. She’s overdue for a shearing, but we hesitate just in case. She will need some of it to line the nest on delivery day. Today we gave her a little trim and cut a basketful off her belly and ruff. There’s still plenty left for her to pull, but she is looking at it like “How dare you!”

      If (big if) this is going to happen it will be sometime this weekend. If it doesn’t we may require emergency therapy for dashed hopes. Like large quantities of chocolate, mashed potatoes and many episodes of Project Runway. 

P.S. She has two litter boxes. The 2nd one is on the floor of porch, she uses it in a randomly scattered rabbity fashion.

Honeysuckle tricked us

I know you people. You only check back here to see if I've posted something about Honeysuckle. Do you want to hear about good literature or gardening or how you should pray without ceasing? No. You want to hear about a bunny. So okay. You should know she isn't so great and we are currently deeply disappointed in her. We thought perhaps, maybe, after all, despite rejecting five handsome bucks, she was going to throw a litter. Perhaps, we thought, there was a secret love affair no one witnessed. Back home she was amazingly weird, possibly even matronly - refusing to use her litter box, dragging ribbons (one we'd accidentally left on the porch) into it,  stuffing it with rags. When she was in the kitchen for her little visits she grabbed dish towels, cloths, a throw rug about three times her size and dragged them into the little half-bath, pushed them behind the toilet trying to make a nest. She seemed desperate. She was going to have babies and needed to be ready. We gently kneaded her belly, certain we could even feel them wiggling around. Her ten little breasties perked up. WE WERE SO CERTAIN, we changed our life and cancelled invitations just to be around at exactly 31 days and a few days beyond. (Rabbit gestation takes a month. Females rabbits are reflexive ovulators, which means ovulating only begins after mating. About ten to be exact. They can have anywhere from 4 to 12 babies. Now you understand the "they breed like rabbits" saying. Exactly.)

We waited days beyond any possibility. Hoping. But, no. What a disappointment.
[Oh, that urh, urh, urh sound is the sink drain gurgling, not someone chuckling.]

Image of God

I’ve seen this (perhaps you have, too): Two young children, perhaps siblings sitting side by side, engrossed, in their own space and tiny world, coloring, braiding a doll’s hair, rolling a train engine on a track, imitating an adult activity. One of them reaches for something in the other’s space. The sibling who’s space has been invaded moves the thing away – “that is mine.”  The invader is angered because she’s didn’t get what she wanted and clocks or bites her sibling hard, who cries and does a little (not even a big) pay-back, perhaps a neck squeeze or a push. The initial transgressor is completely undone by this and has a complete melt-down – I’ve been wronged. If you go herehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vupEpNjCuY you can watch these two babies at the beginning of this movie trailer. Isn’t this, in a way, a powerful and charming affirmation of our common humanity across cultures – the universal challenge of getting along in community? These two babies are less than a year old. And look at what they’re playing at! Pounding maize on a metate?! Modeling their mothers! Why am I so delighted? This has made my day and I can’t wait for the film to be released in April.

Note Sufjan Stevens on the sound track. "The Perpetual Self"

Thanks to Shaun LaRose for alerting me to this.

Held tight

Sunday afternoon. A fir tree is in the stand relaxing its branches and filling the living room with so much fresh pine resin I’m almost comatose. We ran out to a tree lot after church and I chose the second one we banged on the ground. Walked around it and I said, that’s it. I usually take so long looking at so many and I get so tense and confused by this silly little decision that I give up and grab the next one and don’t even notice it is worm-eaten on one side, with a broken tip and crooked trunk. But this one is perfect. The Vikings are kicking Chicago. And so, ya, I complained loudly last August when He signed. Being a capricious, adulterous fan, I now consider Favre my own. I can’t even remember, did he play for the Packers? Anita and I have put candles in all the windows. Denis is unusually chatty. A good day.

In all, a good weekend. We drove those eight hours north to the Canadian border and spent Thanksgiving with our son and daughter-in-law. Love them and their little house bursting with color, canned goods, and the sounds of children. (True, the sounds could be a collapse of desperate howling as easily as laughing. Not unique, hey?) They have a new little one – Ava Lou. She’s only two months old but already knows the most important maxim of life – it is much nicer to be held close in someone’s arms for hours on end than to lie cold and unprotected in a crib. Much nicer.

On Wednesday night we arrived in time to watch Anson at hockey practice, which is serious business up there. Although he can’t manage an upright side-scrape stop, (falling down and hitting the boards works for now) he skates with such fierce enthusiasm

it’s scary.

We didn’t eat the turkey on the big day. The only turkeys were the decorated cupcakes Micah made for the kids. It was pig and fish for us. Jerem deep-fried fresh walleye – nothing like it - and grilled a porketta roast. It’s an odd thing that the few Italians who settled up there long ago and are almost extinct now left behind a tradition of deboning and rolling a pork roast in so much garlic and spice you could smell my breath from the far end of the Metrodome. Micah made the rest of the meal – all good, but her bread. Give her flour and yeast and she will turn it to gold. I guess I did do the apple cranberry pie. Oh. And Denis did the olive cheese plate. All good.

Got home last night and we plan to stay put forever. Not leaving home again. Ever.