Glads...

Back in the Fall when we first moved in, an older boy from around the corner became friends with VJ. His passion? Gladioluses.

He shared with VJ what he had learned about them and gave him some of the bulbs he'd just dug from his own flower bed, and together they looked for a spot in our large front lawn to plant them in.

VJ was in charge of mowing the 2 acres, and it had needed several trimmings in the Fall before the cold weather set in. This was 2 acres with the kind of lawn mower that a boy, walking behind, pushes.

He got to know the lawn well, so when the time came, he and Tom were able to pick out a choice spot for the glads. 

Tom knew all about varieties and both boys were eager for Spring and then Summer to come so they could see what colors had resulted from Tom's experimentation the season before.

Back in the Fall they had dug a small garden, maybe 4 x 9 feet, toward the front of the property, out by the road. It was exclusively for glads. We watched them from the house as they dug hour after hour.

Whatever magic they put into the preparation, by mid Spring they were able to show us dozens of gladiolus spikes poking from the soil. 

But we still had to wait for the flowers. The 10 year old and the 12 year old kept an eye on them...

Fritz shows a goat...

When we went to our first goat show, the children decided to show some of the older kids.

Each kid got a collar for easier handling - read: catching and restraining.

And in the show, each kid is led by a leash hooked to the collar.

Some people who know what they are doing train their young kids to walk calmly at their sides. It is against the nature of kids as well as their human cousins to walk calmly, or even to walk, but with enough hours on the leash with a mature handler, they do get the message.

Our children practiced with their goats at a small 4-H meeting, and discovered their chosen Grand Champions would not be led.

They were instructed to go home and practice practice practice.

They went home and put away the leashes and waited with some small excitement for the show. 

It was small show of 4-Hers from the Greater Boston area. Given that the Greater Boston area is essentially urban, there were not many 4-Hers to draw from. 

The show was held in someone's big backyard. The show ring was defined by bales of straw. A real judge had been hired, and the usual strict show rules were adhered to. So it was a good setting in which to learn how to show. 

Some of the 4-Hers had kids, but most had full-grown goats. Good choice!

When we first got to the show, we had to leave the goats in the car. They hollered when we got out and didn't take them with us. 

Our children were in two classes each. They got to watch a while before it was their turn. The kids were still hollering in the station wagon, which was backed toward the show ring, so they went and got them, put them on their leashes, and tried to hold onto them.

I suggested they walk them back and forth. While they were just standing in one place, the kids had wanted nothing so much as to leap about and run, but now that the children were trying to lead them, they wanted to stand still. It did not look good.

Other children walked by us confidently with their goats aligned perfectly at their sides, calmly walking.

It was time to go into the ring for the first time. 

VJ led the way, then Margo, then Fritz. With a lot of tugging, the kids adopted a position that on average was next to the children. On average. A lot behind, a lot above, a lot ahead - that's an average position next to the children. 

It was chaos plus popcorn. Four goats walked calmly by their owners, three goats did not. 

One child got frustrated and tried to control his goat. One child let go of the leash. And Fritz walked steadily around the circle seemingly oblivious of both the judge and the kid. 

Around and around went he, steady and serene. Above and below went she, and right and left but mostly above.

The judge suggested that they should have practiced.

Fritz plodded on. Then when the time came to stand with the goats and show their best attributes, Fritz stood. Four children stood looking at the judge, 4 goats stood beside them. One child chased after the goat that was loose as it leapt over the bales of straw and headed back to the car. Two goats did back flips and cartwheels, and one child stood stolidly looking straight at the judge. The other shot daggers from his eyes into his acrobatic charge, but the kid didn't notice. 

The ribbons were awarded. A blue to one of the children whose goat stood still. A red to another of the same. A yellow to the third. And a white Honorable Mention to Fritz, who really showed himself very well.

Fritz loses a shoe

The children went to school, of course. It was a new school, and one with parents who knew their kids were the smartest ever. I knew that about mine too, and that meant there was no need to tell their teachers: I looked forward to their teachers telling me how great they were.

They were the new kids, and I was the new mom, and I had no time to hang out in the school parking lot and make friends. I had met the teachers about once apiece...

It was a year of budget strains at home, and when we got the news in November of that first winter that our taxes were to double, we stopped spending any money we didn't absolutely need to spend. It wasn't a tough decision, there just wasn't any to spend beyond the mortage, taxes, utilities - the basics.

Clothing was not a necessity, even for school. The children's bodies were covered decently, they had coats, and though each of them was beginning to look a bit ragged by Spring, soon they would be in a whole change of wardrobe of warm-weather clothes that had been stored away in the Fall. 

So even while we had challenges in many areas, school was going along smoothly and was a place where we as a family could count on success.

I did get one call from a teacher who wanted to discuss Fritz's reading with me. I was surprised, but expected the best. During the conference, though, she told me he was in the lowest reading group and hadn't really begun to get the idea of reading.

Given that he had been read to from birth, that was surprising, but this was only a half or so of the way through first grade when she had me come in, and I thought there'd be time...

Then I thought, well, he has just spent a half year of kindergarten doing what he pleased in a hotel in Switzerland, so he's probably behind on his pre-reading skills.

We discussed his lack of interest in sounding out and she suggested that he might be one of those children who is a better sight learner, and he could just learn words and soon he would be a reader. 

It seemed to me that the underlying idea was that he really wasn't mentally capable of learning to read.

I thought she was wrong, of course. I knew my boy. He was smart. Even though a good while before that, a person who did IQ testing professionally asked if she could experiment on him. I got the impression at the time that she thought he was a bit dim, but that was well after I agreed to do it. He sat on my lap and answered questions and answered and answered, and we never heard more from her. I was confident he would prevail again.

I agreed to let the teacher do what she thought best, and over the next many weeks asked him how school was and how reading was and got the usual answer, 'fine'. 

So when the teacher called me back in, I was again surprised.

Already doubting his intelligence, she was now a bit upset. She was ... controlled. She told me she had a little problem with Fritz and wondered if I had any idea what to do. 

Naturally I asked what happened. She told me Fritz had put his torn up old sneaker, one that had been in at least mud, on her desk. She wondered what I thought she ought to do.

That didn't sound like Fritz to me! He might have been oblivious of his schoolwork, but he wasn't the least bit interested in creating problems.

I apologized and went home eager to see if I could find out what had happened. 

Fritz explained. When he got to his class in the morning, he did what he always did, kick his shoes off. One got kicked too high and landed on the teacher's desk. He didn't know what to do. The teacher didn't see it fly up there. The class was laughing. She turned around and saw the disreputable remnant of canvas on her desk and asked the class who's it was and how it got there. No one said anything. But every student turned and looked at Fritz...

We went and bought new sneakers the next afternoon. I don't think it changed her mind about his intelligence, of course....

A scary call...

Right there while we were struggling in the Spring of our freshman year as homesteaders, we got a call from my mother. My father hadn't been doing well since January, she said. 

That was news, the very first news that he might be in a decline.

She said he was having treatments - unspecified - every few weeks and they weren't working as well as they had been. 

She'd keep us posted.

And how were the grandchildren?

Footsteps in the night...

If you live in a suburb and it's daytime and you hear soft and small and rapid footfalls, you know the children are playing happily outside, and right in the yard where you want them to be.  As long as there are no shreiks, in which case it could be the neighbor dog chasing them. You get up from your reading and peek out the window in case you are needed. The chance it's not a bear is great.

If you live in the city and it's nighttime and you hear hard and heavy and rapid footfalls, you hide in your closet. It's definitely not a bear, but there are worse things than bears.

If you live in the country and it's daytime and you hear heavy and lopsided footfalls, it's the cat. Cats can make themselves sound ten times as heavy as they are. You smile and go back to your reading. She only thinks she's a bear.

If you live in the country and it's nighttime and you hear any kind of footfall at all that is coming from outside, the animals are out and running around the house and in and out of the garden. Herd animals do not do this alone. You get everyone up right away and grab the flashlights and go capture the wild beasts and put them away and fix the hole in the fence or close the unlatched door, and do it now before they get into the neighbor's peas in the garden or hay in the barn. This is worse than being chased by a bear, and if one happens to emerge from the woods tomorrow, you will feed the entire herd to him.

These are important applications of universal rules and every homesteader should learn them.

So why not sell some goats!??!!!

As the feed bills piled up, and as I got to know my fellow goat people, I realized that a big part of the goat game was selling goats.

That is different from having goats for milk only, but it is a real necessity if you don't want to end up with 10,000 goats. They have to be 'freshened' every year, and that always entailed babies.

Sure, it was possible to sell the doelings as well as the bucklings for meat, but it was also the difference of about $75 in the income from them if they were sold as lovely little milkers-to-be. 

But with everyone having an abundance of kids in the spring, how would I be able to get them to choose mine?

This question had already been answered many times over: have the best doelings.

And since there was nothing much but pure cuteness to see in a baby, that meant going by the breeding. Like mother - like daughter. Or like sister - like sister. If the mother produced a lot of milk, or if she had characteristics associated with producing a lot of milk, her kids would have an advantage in the marketplace. And likewise if the father had produced a lot of great kids who went on to be good dairy animals, his other daughters would have a leg up. So to speak. 

And how would anyone know these things? Through milk testing and shows.

So that's what we faced that busy busy Spring of 1977: goat testing and showing.

Goat testing consists of a once-a-month visit from someone in your test group, made up a other people in the area who signed up for cooperative testing. She came one evening and the next morning, and watched you milk, weighed the milk, and took a sample of it for fat content. Then you did the same for someone else, on a rotation basis within your group.

The sample was then sent to a Department of Agriculture lab for analysis.

A good dairy animal consistently produced a large volume of milk with a high fat content. So good results on the tests meant a good reputation when it came to selling kids. Like mother - like daughter.

I jumped right in to testing. Our group consisted of about 7 or 8 family farms around the southwestern part of the outskirts of suburban Boston. The closest farm was about 7 miles away, the farthest more like 15 or 18. We'd drive down in the evening, be there while they milked all their goats, drive home, and drive down again the next morning and watch again. In the winding, twisting roads of rural Massachusetts, the drive could take 45 minutes each way for the longer distances.

I always took one or more children with me in the evening, but couldn't in the morning because of school. 

Some people milked at 6 pm, which was still light, but then at 6 am it was not that great. Still, it was fun to visit with the goat people. Others milked later, maybe 8 pm, which meant getting home close to 10 after driving on VERY dark rural roads!

Then a day or so later someone would come watch me milk and measure and sample.

We were the only family with young children on the milk-testing circuit, and I soon could see why: it ate up a lot of family time. And often we would still have our chores to do when we got home.

Testing is a good thing. It keeps us all honest with regard to the overall output of our operations: if the milk was not flowing in abundance, something needed to be changed. Or if the butterfat were low, same thing. And when someone came shopping for a goat, it looked impressive that we were on test.

On the other hand, if the test results were not good, testing wasn't going to sell any goats except to inexperienced shoppers.

So testing was potentially useful, once we got a track record - if the results were good. We thought our goats were great! But we didn't really know...

Stacking up the challenges

In April 1977 we were done with the birth of new babies, and had the chore of feeding them all. It was fun. But it had to be done 3 times a day. (It did taper off to 2 in May...)

The food wasn't up and edible yet, and wouldn't be for a couple more months. That meant we were eating from the store. And that meant the finances were getting scary.

And looking at the total number of does we suddenly had, with all the babies, we realized we had more mouths to feed than before, and the feed bill was already high.

It is expensive to raise a doeling from newborn till she starts producing a year or so later. She eats and grows and eats and grows, then gets bred, then eats and grows...

And we had 6.

So the bills were accumulating for feed and hay, and aside from the milk we could drink and sell, and the bucklings we had sold, nothing was coming in.

And it was stressful.

The interesting thing is that at no time did we decide to call it quits. The long-term outlook was good...

That was our thinking: sell milk and goats, eat from the garden, later have chickens and maybe ducks and geese and turkeys....

And we knew that this was a wholesome way to raise a family, and learning self-sufficiency seemed very important. With double-digit inflation and high gas prices, the national economy didn't seem as thought it could be trusted.

So in our minds our little project was full speed ahead.

But in our guts we experienced a fair amount of stress.

There was no question we were living a dream, but it verged on a nightmare every so often.

And I was having stress headaches, or possibly migraines, every 3 days, and that definitely took some of the fun out. Sick headaches that meant that lights and sounds were intolerable...

Still, I was happily pregnant with the baby due in November, and I felt really competent being able to carry 100 pound sacks of grain and do other heavy labor when I didn't have the headaches.

I was able to earn a little teaching TM residence courses, and every penny helped.

John was away at scientific conferences fairly often, and I found it stressful to have the three children, the six kids, and the five mother goats all to myself to care for. 

That's not actually fair to the children: they milked every morning and night, and did a fair share of chores. I was just feeling a lot of ultimate responsibility on my shoulders, and they didn't seem as much up to that task as they were to carrying the feed sacks.

But the days were warming up, bringing cheery thoughts with them as well as green shoots in the garden. We were ever optimistic. We never once questioned...