Beau Jackson

It’s been a week since Julianna was born. A week and a few hours, but who’s counting, eh?

Julianna has been a pretty easy baby so far. Or maybe we’re just getting better at this parenting thing. You’d think we’d have the hang of it by now, but we still learn new things, and the kids - even little Julianna - still find ways to get the best of Dad and Mom.

A couple of days ago we had to go grocery shopping. It was the first major expedition as a family of seven. It was stressful to say the least. Julianna needed her diaper changed. She had pooped. Again. I think she’s the poopingest kid we’ve got. We probably change her diaper 15 times a day. I can count on one hand the number of times she has not been poopie. Anyhow, we do the diaper change in the car - this is an old and familiar routine, and tends to be more comfortable for everyone involved than the changing table in the supermarket bathroom. So, no sooner than the diaper is pulled out from under her to swap in the new one, she starts pooping. Again. And like a good husband, I stick my hand under and catch it so that my wife does not get poop all over her clothes. That’s right, I said it. My days old daughter pooped in my hand. Julianna: 1; Dad: 0. Sigh. Hands are easier to wash in parking lots than shirts I guess.

On a far less gross note, Julianna was baptized yesterday (the 24th). Our priest used the traditional baptism rite which was really nice. Tuesday evening was kind of an odd time, but it’s what worked best for us and our priest. We invited several families and had a little reception with cake and punch afterwards. Then we went out to dinner. Very nice all around.

Even though we’ve ventured out of the house a few times with the whole clan, it’s still a pretty big ordeal. We just haven’t got the hang of it yet. It seems like it takes about 20 minutes just to get everyone into the car. Everyone has to find their shoes (and in the case of the the younger kids, I do mean find as the concept of leaving both shoes in the same place is lost on them). Once found, all the shoes have to get on all the feet, and if we start with William, odds are he’ll have at least one shoe off again before we finish with the others. Then we have to get Julianna into her seat. Then we start heading for the car in waves - first Dominic will take the girls and get them strapped in. Then I usually come out with William.  Then I go in and come back out with Julianna. Then Allena comes out with the luggage - er, diaper bags (plural). Then something will have been forgotten. Then somebody will have to use the bathroom. Then we might get to start the car and leave! By the time we get where we’re going, William will definitely have his shoes off again. Odds are pretty good that Elizabeth and Teresa will too. I’ve reflected that it’s really a shame that people have feet instead of hooves. If we had hooves, we could nail the children’s shoes on.

We decided that we’d make do with our mini-van for now. It seats seven (barely) and is reasonably easy to get everyone in and out. The whole “seats seven” thing would work a lot better if four of the seven were not in infant car seats or boosters. I work with a guy that has an older suburban that he’s willing to part with for a reasonable price. I still can’t afford it, but I think about it a lot. It seats nine. The fact that it’s a large enough vehicle to pull a trailer has not escaped me either. Now if I could just get the money together :)

All in all a good week.

So, as you all know, yesterday (Mar 23) was Easter.  It also happened to be my birthday - I will now pause briefly while you sing, and wish me a belated birthday.   All done?  Ok.  For those who may be curious, I turned 37 yesterday.  According to my (very brief) research, the next time Easter will fall on my birthday will be in the year 2228.  Chances are I won’t be around for that ;) so I feel safe in calling this a “once in a lifetime” event for me.

As a general rule, I don’t get sick.  At least not very often, and when I do get sick it tends to be mild and short lived.  This is in contrast to my wife and kids who get sick at fairly normal intervals and at what you might call normal severities.

One popular theory for my good health is that the Army gave me some super-immunization.  I suppose it’s possible.  When I was in the Army, they gave us immunizations for EVERYTHING.  They just put us all in a line with our sleeves rolled up an walked down the line with a pneumatic injector.  I don’t even know most of what they were immunizing us against (although I do remember yellow fever being mentioned at one point).  So who knows, maybe they did give me some whiz-bang super injection.  It would make sense - a sick soldier is not an effective soldier.

So what’s the point of saying all of that?  If they did give me a super-shot, I guess it finally wore off, because I’ve been running a fever for five days now and have one heck of a deep chest cough.

The irony is that the last time I had a case of the flu this severe was when I was in the Army and they made us take flu shots.  That was back when they still were using live virus in the flu shots and I did NOT react well to that.  I haven’t had a flu shot in 15 years, but I’m thinking maybe it’s time to start taking them again.

Ugh.  I hate being sick.

We rented Meet the Robinsons this week, and (as with all animated movies that enter my house) it has been watched many, many times in the last few days.  It’s a pretty good movie, even if you don’t have kids.  At the risk of posting a plot spoiler, there’s a scene with a bunch of frogs doing this jazzy/big band number called Where Is Your Heart At?

I’ve had this song stuck in my head for a couple of days now.  It’s not the kind of music I generally like, but I really like this song, so I thought I’d share.

Well, it was a busy Saturday anyhow. We always try to take it easy on Sunday and not do too much. But Saturday…

5:30am - get up, get dressed, eat cereal, drink coffee, go hunting. Now, hunting is not that vigorous of an activity, at least for me. Hunting means walking out the door about 15 minutes before it starts to get light out and walking out to the edge of our pasture where the woods start, picking out a likely spot and waiting. Ironically, it’s the sitting and waiting that’s the hardest part - not because it’s boring, but because it’s COLD. It was about 36 degrees out on Saturday morning, and while that’s not that cold when you’re moving around, it’s dang cold when you have to be very still.

8:00am - call it a day on hunting, and come on back in the house. A big convoy of pickups, several with stock trailers just rattled by on the dirt road near our place. The dear are going to be hunkered down for a while.

8:30am - back outside to change the thermostat in my truck. I replaced the thermostat a couple of years ago, but I foolishly put in a lower temperature thermostat (160 degrees), and consequently my truck never gets very warm in the winter time. I replaced it last week, but the one they gave me didn’t fit quite right, and I guess it was being held open all the time because the temperature gauge never budged off of “C”, which means I had no heat at all in my truck for the last week or so.

9:30am - after finishing other morning chores (feeding animals, kids, etc) it’s back outside to fix up the camper shell for my truck. Why do I have to fix my camper shell? Because rams are stupid. I have an old camper shell, and about the only time I put it on the truck is when I have to transport an animal. Last time I took it off, I left it sitting out in the yard (we have a big yard, it wasn’t like it was in the way or anything, ok?) . Our ram saw his reflection in the windows of the camper shell, and apparently he didn’t like the attitude he was giving himself, so he rammed out a couple of the windows. So, to make the camper shell workable for animal transportation again, I cut some window-sized pieces of wire mesh, drilled a bunch of holes in the camper shell, and pretty much put a big wire screen where the window was. This is actually not such a bad thing. The camper shell is probably 10 years old. It was cheap to begin with - just aluminum, not painted to match or anything, and it’s pretty banged up, windows not withstanding. Now that it only has the front glass and the rear glass, it’s quite a bit lighter and it’s easier to get it on and off the truck by myself.

11:00am - back in the house, get kids dressed and fed so we can go to town.

12:00 noon - (I can never remember if noon is 12:00am or 12:00pm!). Pack kids and wife in car to go to the stock auction, ’cause we’re bringing home the bacon today. On the hoof. We got to the stock auction just in time - got our bidder number, found a place to sit, and about 10 minutes later they were pushing the hogs into the pen. We ended up with two - one that’s all black, and one that’s white with black spots. They must be some kind of mixed breed. At least, we couldn’t find anything online that looked like these pigs. Still, they look healthy and with pigs, it’s not so much how they look, you know?

3:00pm - back home with the pigs. I park the truck in the shade and rig up a pig pen. I learned about pig pens last year. Pig pens have to be tough. Last year we used field fence (wire mesh) and strung an electric wire around the bottom thinking that would contain the pigs. And it did. Until the pigs decided they didn’t want to be contained any more. Last year’s pig pen had to be rebuilt with cattle panels, and we just started out with those this year. We’re also doing a little experiment this year. We butchered last year’s pigs in April or so of this year, and the ground where we had their pen STILL has not had the grass grow back on it. Those pigs cleaned out everything - seeds, roots, all of it. All spring and all summer it was just a bare patch of ground. So we built the pig pen on the garden. We also built the pig pen much smaller, and we plan on moving it regularly so that the pigs will basically clean out the garden area. Hopefully we won’t have so much grass growing in the garden next year. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

3:30pm - start building pig shelter. The drawback to putting the pig pen in the garden area is that there aren’t any trees around the garden, and it’s still warm enough in the afternoon that they’ll need some shade. Also, they need someplace to be to get out of the rain and such. So we built a little pig hut for them. I’ll have to get some pictures taken as they’re kind of hard to describe, but it’s basically a wooden frame with cattle panel sides and top, and then tarp stretched over the cattle panel to keep the weather off. It’s pretty heavy duty, so that the pigs don’t tear it up.

8:00pm - pig shelter finally finished. We took a break for dinner, but it still took about 3 to 3 1/2 hours to finish it.

Sheesh. I’m tired just writing about it again!