Ashley Burkhart Walker
Special to the Hiawatha World
I would describe our homeschool schedule as…erratic. I tried for a more consistent schedule at the first of this year, but it’s truly hard balancing everything we like to do and school must-dos. Friday, I took time to refill some feed tubs before coming back in after chores. My youngest had gone in ahead of me and I was pleased to see she did get started on her math while I was out, sometimes I never know what she’ll do without my instruction. She was piddling around as I finished washing up milking equipment, so that prompted me to ask how math was going. She brought me her papers and said she needed help, I could plainly see that she wrote “help” on several areas of her paper, along with drawing what appeared to be an angry bunny. After telling her to please come tell me when she needs help, I told her I needed a little bit more time before I could sit and help her, so she could help me by skimming some cream off of a couple jars of milk while she waited on me. I wasn’t gone from the kitchen but for maybe two minutes, when I came back in, the jars still sat untouched with their cream tops and my youngest was gone. I hollered for her, nothing. Hollered again, but louder, still no reply. My son wandered in, and I asked if he knew where she went, nope. Even though neither of us heard her go out, she must’ve been outside. I went to the back door and instantly saw the reason she wasn’t in the kitchen where she should be. She was just leaving the barn with Pistachio the baby goat in her arms and was grinning wide as she approached the house. She came in, set the goat on the kitchen floor and began skimming and giggling while watching Pistachio mosey around the room. Needless to say, we didn’t get math started right after the skimming was done, but we got in some goat play time, and that is definitely worth putting math off for.
As I said, our homeschool schedule is erratic, it’s just always something. Last week, we knew we had a chick hatch day coming up. We removed the eggs from their turning cradles, increased humidity, and put the incubator on lock down while the incubator next to it was still turning all the eggs as they weren’t due for a bit, so I thought. The morning of the egg’s hatch date, there was lots of sweet little peeping and the sound of chicks scrambling around. I peeked at the hatching activity and went on. My youngest came excitedly to me a little later and asked if I knew both incubators had chicks in them. Um, no, and uh-oh. I told her to come help me right away. Evidently, I had the overflow of that days hatching eggs in the second incubator. We lifted the lids and transferred all the hatched chicks and hatching eggs. Thankfully, no one was stuck or injured in any way. I am so glad my chick loving girl discovered my oops. We had more fun the next morning trying to catch and count all 30 of them!
I mentioned before that I was working on switching Georgi the Brown Swiss to once-a-day milking, well, she said no, not happening. I was decreasing her protein, protein equals production, and was seeing a slight drop in production, but definitely not enough to just cold turkey her on the evening milking, that most likely would have been a mastitis disaster. My next step would be to move her milking time steadily up in hours over the length of a week or two, making the length of time till morning milkings greater, thus decreasing her production a bit. That was the plan, until she got started on the green spring grass and decided to just up her production by a good gallon a day. It is truly amazing how efficient cows are on green grass, and it is amazing how steady the Brown Swiss are at producing milk, not a huge peak in production then tapering off like Jerseys. So, Georgi said I better keep washing those half gallon jars, because she’s going to keep them all full. It would have been easy to be frazzled about not getting to quit the evening milking, but it’s also easy to feel blessed about having such an amazing cow, a cow that wants to see us twice a day, even when I wanted to see her only once a day in the barn. Thank goodness I love being a milkmaid over vacationing, can’t say the same for the husband, but he accepted the second milking not budging pretty well, silently actually, was that silence defeat or acceptance? Thank goodness, he likes that big lug of a cow too, she grew on him pretty quickly.
My youngest toted the playdough container out the other day and was pretty disappointed in the lack of soft playdough we had. I told her we’d get some the next time we went to town. It later dawned on me that we could just make our own! In no time at all she was mixing up her custom colors of super soft playdough.
Homemade Playdough
Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour
¾ cup salt
4 teaspoons cream of tartar
2 cups lukewarm water
2 Tablespoons vegetable oil (coconut oil works too)
Optional: food coloring (I use Wilton for brighter colors)
Instructions
Stir together the flour, salt and cream of tartar in a large pot. Next add the water and oil. If you’re only making one color, stir in the color now.
Cook over medium-heat, stirring constantly. Continue stirring until the dough has thickened and begins to form into a ball. Remove from heat and then place inside a bowl. Allow to cool slightly and then knead until smooth.
If you’re adding multiple colors, divide the dough into balls (for how many colors you want) and then add the dough into separate quart sized bags. Start with about 5 drops of color and add more to brighten it. Knead the dough, while inside the bag so it doesn’t stain your hands.
Once it’s all mixed together, you’re ready to play. Store the play dough inside bags or containers to keep soft. If stored properly it will keep soft for up to three months.
