brooding
Chicklet season at Wannabe
First 11 chicklets of the season have hatched. Few more clutches coming.
There’s a blue chicklet!
This one was smart and set up in The Brooder
Two mums and their babies (yes they are co-parenting). There’s also a black naked neck chicklet under the foreground hen.
Photos. Lots of them.
[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]
Not quite intelligent enough for a coherent post, so have lots of captioned photos instead.
Homeschooling art and English: storyboarding with Mummy (who was working on AR storyboards)
4yo gets 3 birthday celebrations for her half-decade; one with us, one with JJ’s side, one on Christmas Island when we get there
Photos from the garden
[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]
A friend introduced the kids to the My Little Pony remake some time ago and with the starting of this blog post this song stuck in my brain (had no help whatsoever from the kids watching it a few times ;).
So I’m a bit late for “tomorrow spring is here”, we’re about halfway through the first month of spring as humans like to count it. I think spring came a bit earlier than September. As far as I’m concerned it’s spring when the weather and the flowers say it’s spring.
Work, Wannabe and other projects and a dash of unschooling
[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]
Firstly, what in the hell is with the life category?!
I’ve been (very slowly!) importing livejournal entries so I can replace missing photos. Very minor regret that I didn’t bother skimming through my shadowshifter livejournal before I deleted it as I probably had a few progress reports for my various projects kicking around on it, but oh well.
Organisational skills? What organisational skills?
[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]
What’s been happening at Wannabe Farmstead? Feels like a lot. I was out with the dogs at the oval when it occurred to me:
- I can sort out and adjust training “schedules” in my head fast from observing the dogs while working with them
- I can work out learning styles and interests of the kids from observation and interaction and work out where to go and things to do that they might find interesting
- I can work around family stuff with minimal dramas
- I can do things for clients on time (provided they get me what I need when I say I need it by)
- I cannot organise my own way out of a paper bag
I should probably do something about that last point.
Damn those stick fast fleas to hell
[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]
The conclusion to the sorry chicken saga.
Where to begin. Can’t begin at the beginning, that’s already been done. See above. So, let’s find a point in the middle to start. Firstly, after Tempest’s last two chicks (the yellow one she’d hatched and the small Australorp she adopted) died, we worked out it was those bloody fleas. The adults weren’t so badly affected by all appearances, though the eggs were fewer and further between, so maybe they were affected. We seem to have bathed the heads of the other chicks in olive oil in time to prevent an outbreak of chick killing proportions. JJ also put some concrete slabs under the roost, as apparently this helps break their life cycle or something. We like to go with naturalish preventative measures and remedies as much as possible for everything, saving The Big Chemical Guns for when there is a situation that warrants it. This was one of those situations.
The sorry chicken saga
[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]
There was much excitement and trepidation at Wannabe when Chess, our bossy little evil Pekin bantam went broody, and amusement when the more demure Tempest decided that she, too, would also like to hatch some eggs.
We were pretty thrilled to have broodies, as one of our long term plans was to increase our flock naturally, including letting the broodies raise their chicklets, and bring in new blood every so often to prevent too much inbreeding. This idea has since expanded to JJ planning on developing his own chicken breed.
Christmas time, mistletoe and wine, and slightly different this year
[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]
The lovely Ursula (also known as SulaMoon) over at deviantART gave me and another friend of hers pearwood a dragon for Christmas.
I think it’s agonisingly cute. Ursula is an amazing artist.
Just on the subject of Christmas critters, I did a whole blog post on my Christmas present but that was wiped when my host got itself taken out.