Yuletide Recap

Empty advent calendars, leftover turkey in the fridge and garbage bags of wrapping paper in the garage - all signs pointing to another Merry Christmas come and gone.

Our festive celebrations opened with Christmas Eve mass at our country church followed by a scrumptious prime rib and salmon feast at Mom and Dad's house.

In the past, Christmas Day here at Gael Glen Farm has been a quiet affair for Ian, the pups and I but the times they are a changing.  This year we hosted several family members (Grandma, Cora, Mom, Dad and Aunt Jane) on Christmas Day for some gift opening, yuletide celebrating and more eating - this time a Christmas ham with scalloped potatoes.  Aunt Jane and Cora's dog, Bella, quickly became BFFs and were inseparable all day - especially after Aunt Jane slyly fed Bella a small piece of diabetic chocolate (Bella's favourite forbidden treat)!  Cora, the pups and I finished the day with a calorie burning snowshoe excursion into the field behind the farm  to stretch our legs and work off some of the pie and butter tarts we'd eaten.

On Boxing Day, we had the clan over again for more celebrating, our annual Christmas stocking and gift exchange and our turkey and stuffing dinner followed by homemade pumpkin and lemon meringue pies.  We all made out like bandits in the gift department this year!  Some of the top gifts included: IPads, a neon orange Kubota mailbox for the cottage (it matches Dad's tractor), a bottle of Glenfiddich 15 scotch, a new angle grinder, loose leave tea accessories, Tabasco infused wood chips for the BBQ, scarves, a set of seed starters for the garden, coasters, bath towels, new maternity clothes, books, spending money and rain jackets.  Even the munchkin in my belly got gifts - a baby book from Cora and a beautiful baby blanket from Grandpa and Monique in Montreal.  We are all so spoiled!

As it turns out, this was the Christmas that kept on giving.  Ian started coughing and sneezing just before turkey dinner on Boxing Day and before we knew it almost everybody had come down with a virulent strain of the flu - clearly not one covered by this year's flu shot since we had all got it.  The headaches, chills, night sweats, body aches, itchy and sore throats, stuffy noses and repeated rounds of vomiting (for the pregnant lady only) finally abated after about three days and now we are mostly on the mend.

Ian's temperature at its worst.

Many thanks to everyone who celebrated this Christmas with us in person and the many others who were with us in spirit (from Kingston, Toronto, Wasaga Beach, Thunder Bay, Western Canada, New Zealand and even as far away as Heaven).  We hope you all had an equally festive holiday (minus the flu, of course) and have exciting plans for a safe and happy New Years!  Achoo!

A Snowy Winter Solstice

Welcome to the shortest day of the year and coincidentally also the snowiest so far.  Here at Gael Glen Farm we are currently getting pounded by Mother Nature's overzealous attempt to guarantee us a white Christmas.  It snowed a ton overnight and it is still coming down like crazy.  Luckily neither Ian nor I have anywhere special to be today since our country road is really only suitable for snowmobiles at this point (of which there are a bunch whizzing up and down the road at breakneck speeds!)  Our plan is to stay warm and dry in the main house and appreciate the snow only on occasional jaunts to plow the driveway, shovel the porch or visit the chickens and the bees.

Ian has yet to venture out (he claims there is no point snowplowing until the snow slows down a bit) but the puppies and I were more adventurous and took a morning trek out to shovel around the chicken coop and clear the snow out of the ventilation holes in the bee hive.  The snow is deep and as heavy as bricks.  It comes up past Charlotte's belly (and well past Emily's) causing the pups to hop across the yard like bunnies.  They are hilarious.

The bees are all hibernating soundly so not much to report on that front.

I opened the back door to the chicken coop that leads out into their run but the only souls brave enough to venture out were the ducks.

The koi pond is completely covered with snow - a vast difference from yesterday.  You can't even see the pond heaters anymore.

Koi Pond Yesterday.

Koi Pond Today.

Over all, everything seems under control on the farm so we will just sit tight and wait out the storm with some hot chocolate, egg nog and a good book.  Enjoy the fleeting daylight today and the snow if you can.  Drive slowly and safely if you are out and about.

Bath Time on a Winter Morning

On warm, sunny winter mornings like this, I put a water dish out in the chicken run in addition to the water bowl inside the coop.  While everyone drinks out of the outdoor dish, the ducks also use it as a bath tub.  Poultry aren't as fussy as people about their drinking water; they are perfectly happy drinking used bath water.  Go figure.

In the summer, the ducks have a plastic kiddie pool for swimming but in the winter it isn't feasible to fill it up since the garden hose freezes so they have to make do with the water dish.  The ducks just fit into the dish, one at a time, and the bath water is cold so it can't be the most comfortable bath but that never seems to deter them.

Leah always gets the first bath while Kate waits patiently for her turn.  Sometimes Kate gets a bit too close to the tub for Leah's liking and he tells her in no uncertain terms that he is not finished and she needs to back up!

Leah telling Kate to back the heck up!

The chickens do not take their baths in the water dish.  Instead they prefer to take dust baths.  They reserve the spot under their shelter as their bathing place in the winter since it stays free from snow for the longest time.

No one is dust bathing yet this morning, the chickens are too busy scarfing down the scratch (aka chicken treats) that I threw out for them in the yard.

A Fowl Meal

Well, disciplining the duck didn't work...

No, no....I am totally kidding.  First of all, the beast above is at least five times bigger than Leah would ever be on his heaviest day and secondly, I'm pretty sure I would never eat Leah, especially after only one day of corrective disciplinary action.  The only poultry that ever ended up in the pot on this farm (so far) was our rooster, Cornelius, and that is a story for another day.

Rest assured, Leah is alive and well in the chicken coop with the rest of the poultry though he seems increasing perturbed at being put into submissive every time he tries to bite me.  I think my duck behaviour corrective action might be working!

The fowl we did cook up was a turkey that Ian bought from the store last week.  As you know, Ian can't resist a bargain and so when turkeys went on sale at Sobeys he bought two!  We don't have enough freezer space for two huge turkeys with the rest of the food we are preparing for the holidays so Ian decided to cook one up in advance.  Usually we name our turkey before the cooking process begins but I didn't get the chance this time; the turkey was in the roasting pot and in the oven so fast that before I knew what was happening he was half done!

Turkey in the oven.

He turned out perfectly, though I missed the unveiling since I was already in bed by the time he was done and when I came down for breakfast the next morning he was already chopped up and part of him made into turkey pot pie.  Now Ian is all practiced up for the Boxing Day turkey when the whole family is over.  He is turning into quite the chef and there are absolutely no complaints about this from me!

24 Hungry Hens and an Aggressive Duck

Our chickens eat a lot; they go through a 50 lbs bag of feed in two weeks!  I used to get my exercise by slinging the feed bag over my shoulder and marching it from the metal storage bin in the garage to the plastic storage bin in the chicken coop on a biweekly basis.  However, since we found out that baby is on the way, this type of heavy lifting has been delegated to Ian (or anyone else I can coerce into doing it - but usually Ian).  So, when I notice that our coop feed stores are running low, Ian comes galloping down like the white (in this case camo) knight of chicken food to save the day and feed the masses.

The chickens are very appreciative - cooing and chirping as they watch their green bin and metal feeder get filled to the brim with delicious grains.

One fowl that remains particularly foul despite the arrival of delicious, fresh food is our male indian runner duck, Leah. (Side note: We named him Leah when we first got him thinking he was a she and the name stuck.)  I have this recurring problem of Leah switching from nice and friendly to nasty and aggressive.  He was in a bitey stage in June before we left on our trip, upon our return he was back to friendly and now over the past few days, he is back to bitey.  He nips at the legs of my pants when I enter the coop and yesterday he bit me hard right on the hand when I went to retrieve an egg that had been laid on the ground.  It hurt and it is really not fun to visit the chicken coop knowing that I will be chased around by an unappreciative and downright nasty duck!

I looked it up online and this seems to be a common issue with male runner ducks.  Other duck owners suggest the problem is that Leah is trying to be the alpha duck and to teach me to be a submissive part of the flock that he rules.  Yeah, like that is going to happen.  The proposed solution is to show Leah that I am the boss by either picking him up each time he tries to bite me and carrying him around on his back or by holding him down on the ground on his back in a submissive position.  Either way, I am only supposed to have to do this a few times before he gets the message that biting is not appropriate duck (or dog or human or Christmas tree) behaviour.

I will give it a try since I have nothing to lose and it may avoid duck l'orange being a feature dish on next week's menu.  Who would have thought I'd ever be reading up on how to discipline an unruly duck?  I'll keep you posted on whether it works.

Our Christmas Tree Bites!

The Christmas tree 2012 saga continues...

Once we got our tree home from the forest, some trimming was necessary to fit it into the living room.  My dream house would have one of those open foyers where you could fit a 20 foot tree but alas we only have 8 foot ceilings so an 8 foot tree it is.  Last year, Ian and I hotly debated how tall 8 feet was as we whittled down our 15 foot tree, with me cringing at each layer of beautiful evergreen branches he sawed off the bottom to make the tree shorter.  This year we agreed to keep the negotiating at a minimum by using a trusty measuring tape.  Instead of sacrificing bottom branches to achieve the required height, this year I opted to cut off the 3 foot lead branch at the very top of the tree.  Our star still doesn't quite fit but we have decided it looks better a bit crooked - gives it character.

After some manipulation, the tree was finally at the right height and screwed securely into the yuppie plastic tree stand that Ian made us buy the first year we were married.  I think the plastic bucket with bricks and wood splints that we used to use to keep the tree upright worked just fine but Ian wasn't having it.

Next it was time to put on the lights and trim the tree.  Every year we pull out the hand-me-down 1980's Christmas tree lights we inherited from my parents, plug them in and only half (at best) light up.  And every year, Ian swears that the next year we will invest in new LED Christmas tree lights and then proceeds to spend at least an hour replacing all the burnt out bulbs in the old lights so that they all work again.  This has been going on for 4 years and counting.

This year, when I went to strategically place the lights on the tree - alternating white and coloured light strands, of course - I quickly realized that this was no ordinary Christmas tree.  I think that the tree was seriously pissed off about being cut down to be brought inside as a festive decoration and had decided to demonstrate its wrath by stabbing us every time we went close to it.  You have no idea how much it hurt!  I have decorated a lot of hunted trees in my time but this was something else entirely. The only way to go anywhere near the tree was to wear gardening gloves, which we did throughout the entire decorating process, and I still ended up with a rash all the way up to my elbows from all of the pin pricks.

Finally (and not a moment too soon - we were both tired of getting bitten by our vicious Christmas tree), the tree was trimmed.  It looks beautiful; though, be warned - it is best appreciated from a distance!

Let There Be Light!

I learned recently in my prenatal yoga class that the word "guru" in yoga means to move from darkness to light.  The implied use of the word in class was that our new baby will be a guru for us since children are such a joy that they can take you from being sad or depressed to a state of blissful happiness.  I'm not sure that I buy this particular application for the word but I can certainly see a baby being a guru in the sense that he/she will take you from the darkness of a good night's sleep to the light required to see when you get up every two hours during the night to breastfeed.

Reflecting back on the week, we have had a few other guru moments where we moved from darkness to light.  The first was when Avery the Chameleon's incandescent heat lamp burnt out.  All reptiles regulate their body temperature externally.  Some reptiles do this by absorbing heat from rocks, whereas chameleons prefer to bask under a heat lamp.  They need the heat to digest their food and absorb nutrients, keep their skin and eyes healthy and be overall happy creatures.  Avery was extremely unhappy when her light burnt out.  She turned her skin completely black and refused to move until I had gone to the pet store, purchased a new heat lamp and installed it above her terrarium.  Once the lights were back on, Avery came out, turned herself a nice greeny tan and was once again a happy creature.

Black coloured, sad Avery hiding in the dark because her old heat lamp burnt out.

Green coloured, happy Avery basking in the light of new heat lamp.

Our second guru moment was when Ian decided that the front of our main house needed sprucing up for the holiday season.  Both our neighbours, Alan and George, have great Christmas lights.  Their houses are lit up like the Griswold's in a National Lampoon's Christmas.   This year, Ian decided he was tired of our house looking like the poor cousin on the street and so added a whole bunch more lights to the whole bunch that were still up from last year.  It doesn't seem to matter how many Christmas lights we put up on our house though, it never looks like enough. We have hundreds of lights up now but I think we have so much distance to cover that we actually need thousands or even millions of lights if we are ever going to get the "Wow Factor".  Unfortunately, Christmas lights are expensive and we have maxed out our light budget for this year.  The house does look more festive than previous years, but lucky for us we still have the next 40 years to add a few more strands of lights each year.  Ian's mission is that one day our house will rival the Griswold's - though I have a feeling that at this rate it may well take us until the day we die. :)

Gift from a Secret Santa

This holiday season, in honour of both Grandma and Cora coming to visit over Christmas and the Dickson family coming to celebrate New Years, Ian and I decided it was appropriate to go all out decorating the outside of the main house.  This involved putting up heaps more Christmas lights and the even more time consuming task of creating a homemade evergreen garland for our front porch.  As you can imagine, we had a substantial amount of greenery left over after trimming our Christmas tree to size and so we decided to use it to decorate the porch railing.  It looks pretty good for a DIY project!

As we moved along the front gardens zip-tying the branches to the railing we stumbled across a surprise gift thoughtfully left for us by a Secret Santa.

As you can see - the gift was a dead rodent.  While I do appreciate the occasional fuzzy rodent (I have grown quite attached to Gus), I am not a huge fan of finding them frozen solid outside my front door.

Seeing that winter is the detective's best helper, it wasn't difficult to ascertain who our friendly gift giving neighbour was.  Judging by the feline tracks leading directly from the mouse, down our driveway, up George and Isabelle's driveway and into their garage; I'd say the odds are pretty good that the mouse giving Santa Claus is George's cat.

Not exactly what I was looking to receive for Christmas this year, but it's a start...  let's just hope that the real Santa Claus leaves gifts under the tree that are closer to the mark.

Munchkin Viewing

We had our first munchkin viewing (aka ultrasound) on November 9th at 8 weeks of pregnancy.  Even though the baby was still very, very small (1.6 cm) and looked a bit like a baseball park peanut, we learned a lot of interesting stuff about him/her.  We found out that we are having only one baby (not multiples, thank goodness!) and we could (vaguely) see the baby's head, bottom, limb buds, umbilical cord, the yolk sac and the beginnings of the placenta.  We could also see the baby's heart beat at a whopping 166 beats per minute!

At our first midwife appointment on November 28th we got to hear the baby's heart beat for the first time.  It was amazing to hear the rapid "gush, gush" of the little munchkin's heart.  Hearing the heart beat seemed somehow more real than seeing it beat on the ultrasound screen.

Today, we had our second munchkin viewing.  We are at 13 weeks of pregnancy and have finally entered the second trimester.  Hopefully my morning sickness will continue to abate and I can stop taking the nausea medication soon.

Ian and I initially (and we realize now, naively)  thought the purpose of going for this ultrasound was to get to see our baby again and remark on how cute he/she looks now that his/her eyes have migrated from the sides to the front of his/her head and his/her fingers and toes are no longer webbed like a frog.  However, we quickly learned that the Government of Ontario doesn't pay for this ultrasound because they see a benefit in having parents meet their forthcoming offspring in utero.  The real purpose of this ultrasound is to do the Integrated Prenatal Screening where they check whether we have a higher or lower chance than usual of having a baby with a either Down syndrome, trisomy 18 or an open neural tube defect.  While it is incredibly scary to think of our baby having one of these serious genetic diseases, after much thoughtful consideration and discussion, we have decided that in order for us to feel like we are being the most responsible parents we need to know what our baby will be up against so we can plan as best we can to give our child the best chance to succeed in life.

Even though we decided that going forward with the genetic screening was the right thing for us to do, it is still scary and nerve wrecking when we think too hard about it.  At the ultrasound, I am happy to say we didn't think about the genetic screening part at all because we were totally engrossed in watching our munchkin.

Our baby was much bigger and consequently much more visible during this second ultrasound compared to the first.  The figure on the screen actually looked like a baby.  He/she is 7 cm long now and has a strong, regular heart beat of 144 beats per minute.

Our munchkin has two arms and two legs (phew!), a brain and a very large head.  And holy smokes was the baby a wiggly worm!  He/she moved his/her arms up and down repeatedly during the ultrasound and at one point planted both feet on the bottom of the uterus and pushed off (like you would do at the edge of a swimming pool when doing laps) causing him/her to go shooting up to the top of the uterus.  Our baby moved and grooved during the entire scan providing much amusement to both us and the technician.  To top it all off, the baby's nuchal translucency (the thickness of the skin at the back of the neck) is absolutely normal - which is a great sign.  Double phew!

On the whole, the munchkin viewing was a very positive and enjoyable experience and we have a photo to share with you all.  I know ultrasound photos never look like much unless they are of your baby but this munchkin is ours and I think he/she is so beautiful!

Annual Christmas Tree Hunt

For close to two decades now, my family has gone on a "hunting" expedition for our Christmas tree.  We do not hunt in any of the usual places like the Ikea or Home Depot parking lots or the cut your own Christmas tree farm; we hunt in the forest for a tree au naturel (and as an added bonus - free).

The quest to find the biggest and best tree out there that (more or less) fits into our living room is a family affair.  Some years we have had only two hunters and other years we've had many more.  This year we had our best turn out yet - seven human hunters and two dogs - a family record!

In the early years, Dad and I would head out with our trusty hand saw and keen eyes as our only tree cutting resources, but as the years have passed, our tree cutting tools have increased in power...and yes, also admittedly in redneckness.  This year, we cut down our selected specimen with a chain-saw.  No kidding; though when you see the size of the tree we picked, you might understand.

Icy Paradise

We had some freezing rain overnight which has turned our yard into a skating rink.  The dogs looked like they really enjoyed slipping and sliding all over the place during their morning backyard exploration.  I could really only appreciate the beauty of everything after I had broken the chickens out of their ice covered coop; all the door latches were frozen in place under a half inch of ice.  The fence gates were all frozen solid and required a good deal of manhandling to open and close.  Finally, in order to get water for anyone, I had to de-ice the water hydrant which had also turned into an icy heap.  Once everyone was free and the morning chores were complete, I was able to stop and take a look at how pretty everything looks under a layer of ice.  Here's what I saw...