Dawn's kits, and still waiting.

Dawn gave birth Tueseday night, and when I got home I reached in and felt around. I felt a couple moving kits, and Dawn was unhappy with what I was doing so I left her alone, and checked again in the morning. When I checked then I found one cold and dead normal kit, one dead kit with the back of it's head missing and the brain showing, and two normal healthy kits. The rabbit with the part of the skull has anencephaly which means a large part of the brain or skull missing. The Lady of the House promptly did some research, and found that there may be some correlation between tomato blight, and the kinds of birth problems we've been seeing. There is some correlation between feeding alkaline plants and the kind of problems that we've been having so we want to do more research into that.

A lost litter, and a distracted life as we wait

Right now I'm not going to beat around the bush, our focus is preparing for Critter's arrival. Trying to organize the house, get a solid inventory of what we have and what we need still in terms of small person care. By the by, if you've never had a small person come into your life before, it's a lot. Especially if you want to minimize the environmental impact you're going to cause with a small person, and try to feed the small person well.

We return, slightly modified.

So, last time I posted here was a little while ago. It was snowy, cold, snowy, and, well, February. We were planning for spring. Since then spring has sprung, and Summer even has shambled in recently. What's been going on since then? Well, lots of things.

Seed starting, planting too many seeds inside, expanding our indoor growing area, doing so again. The seedling swap for the Hilltown Seed Saving Network, bringing more seedlings home than we had space for, digging more space, planting too early, losing some to frost, having enough to recover from the frost, our first litter for the season.

Oh, and the Lady of the House and I finally got married. It was perfect with friends, family, and fun.

And she's pregnant.

We're actually not %100 sure we're ready for this. Scratch that, we know we're not, but we feel very lucky to have a kid on the way. We recently found out the potential salamander is in fact a male human which seems much more what we want than a salamander. We are actually thrilled that we're where we are for having a kid. Not only is there significant support for families in the hills, we can much more keep the kiddo outside, running around, and connected to the land. We've been thinking a lot about what having a kid means, and what we want the kid to learn. Obviously just due to the fact that our life is going to be changing, as this blog continues it is going to include a lot about the kid.

Right now the things that are just getting started on the homestead is, we just started the second round of breeding for the year with Sunshine breeding with our new buck Herbie, and Twilight breeding with Starry Night. Tomorrow will be another pair of does, and the same with Saturday. I promise, next post will be more about the homestead and with pictures, I just really needed to motivate myself to get going again. So, out into the garden we go.