petrified plans

In my last post I wrote about finding a good sized cache of petrified wood by the front porch, and having the happy dilemma of what to do with it... and with the rest of the petrified wood we've found here over the years.

I wanted to somehow display the petrified wood, but not necessarily in the house.... but not on the ground either (around a flower bed for example), because then it would just end up being covered with leaves and dirt and eventually buried again.

I was thinking about how Mr G displays his petrified wood along a stone ledge in his backyard... and I liked that idea but don't have the right kind of ledge.


 

It was about that time, as I was thinking about what natural "ledge" I might be able to use to display the petrified wood outside, that I noticed our cattle panel "collection" leaning up against the pasture fence. I'd pulled all my odd sized bits of cattle panel out from behind the barn because we had been planning on incorporating them into the pumpkin patch fence... but then we changed the fence design and no longer needed them. So they were just sitting out, in the way, waiting for me to put them away again.

One long piece caught my eye and got me thinking that I could make a "ledge", or shelving, from it and some fence pickets and display the petrified wood that way.



I started by trimming the sharp points, and cutting each short side of the panel to create "stakes" to anchor the cattle panel into the ground. (We always have to factor in for wind here... the wind is fierce and if something is outside it has to be well anchored or it's likely to end up in the neighbor's pasture!) Then Joe helped me bend the cattle panel into a "U" shape by using a fence post to hold the center and bending each end towards the middle.

It didn't turn out perfectly... but close enough to hold shelves.

Then I painted the cattle panel black (because it still looked like a cattle panel to me, and I was hoping to fancy it up a little...) and pushed it's "stakes" into the ground out back, in a mulched area up by the house. (The only piece of cattle panel I had, long enough for this project, had one small bent section, you can see it on the left... which I just worked around. Cattle panel is extremely rigid... which is why I can use it to hold rock, but it also makes it very hard to bend it back straight once it's been bent like that...)



I also bought a few cedar pickets at Home Depot.... they would be my shelves.

I bought some wider pickets (5 1/2") and one narrower one (3 1/2") to fit the spacing of the cattle panel openings, and cut just the dogeared top off two of the wide pickets and the narrow one... those became my bottom shelf.



I cut two of the wide pickets about 8" shorter for my middle shelf...

... and the last wide picket I cut 8" shorter than that for the top shelf, so when it was done it would be kind of an "A" shape. (This description sounds convoluted and confusing... the picture below should help.)

I thought it might be easier to see the petrified wood if the shelves were graduated... going from deeper on the bottom (3 pickets = 14 1/2") to just one 5 1/2" shelf on the top. Once the shelves were in place, I adjusted the cattle panel framework until they were level, and made sure they were evenly spaced from side to side. I didn't attach them to the cattle panel frame, but I might later if they start to shift...



Then I loaded it up with petrified wood.

Once I got all the wood on the shelves I realized I probably have too much petrified wood for graduated shelves so, as soon as I buy more pickets, I'm going to add a few pickets on the top and in the middle to make the shelves all 14 1/2" wide.

(In this photo it looks like the shelves stick on more on the left, but they are centered, it's just this photo angle that makes them look off...)




I do love how it turned out... The petrified wood is displayed where it can be seen and enjoyed... and is no longer sitting in little piles here and there around the house and yard. I can see us adding pieces to our little collection as we find them...







And it's lovely to have something pretty in the yard that doesn't need watering or weeding!

The total cost for my little project has been about $10. so far (the wider pickets were 1.88 the thinner one was 1.28), and I'll probably spend another $5. or so on pickets when I make the top shelves deeper. The cattle panel was already here, of course, and using it got it out of the "leftover fencing" pile and got some use out of it... which is always good!

one man's trash...

I worked out a nice trade the other day with our neighbor Mr G. I wrote a little about him, and his wonderful time capsule of a barn here...

It started when I bought him a rolling trash can, thinking it would help make it possible for him to get his trash down to the road on trash day and would keep the critters out of the trash.  I dropped the can off at his house, and he showed me where he wanted it... out in a shed by the barn.  I had to move an old galvanized trough to fit the trash can into the shed, and as I moved it Mr G talked about how it should be set out with the trash, it had holes in the bottom that couldn't be patched, so it would no longer hold water. I asked him to please not throw it away... that I would take it. The look on his face when I offered to take it made me smile, but he didn't question me too much, he just said (in his formal, very accented, old world way), "But it's no good for anything, it has holes."

When I drove down his driveway 10 minutes later the back of my Previa was stuffed with a large (holey) galvanized trough, and Mr G had learned a little about my gardening peculiarities and what a nice planter you can make from an old galvanized trough.

At first I wasn't sure where I was going to put my new planter... If you remember I already have two large troughs in the backyard garden area that hold strawberries.



And a small trough in the front yard for flowers (usually pansies...)



I finally decided this one would go on the west side of the house, next to the chimney. I have kind of a large, mulched area there and the ground is fairly level, I think it would be a great place for a planter full of flowers...




I still need to level it and fill it with stones in the bottom and soil on top, and then plant of course. (Which is the fun part!)



I'll post an after picture once it's finished...

Soldier and Nancy ~ a little "living history"... and a brief update

We've been helping take care of a neighbor's horses lately...

That's Soldier in the front stall... Nancy in the back stall.

This photo shows their personalities... Soldier is big, bold, confident and curious... Nancy is small, shy, a little skittish and not much into things that are unusual... like a camera!



They are the dearly loved horses of a friend of ours, Mr G... a elderly man who, until some bad health this past spring, took care of them entirely on his own. Soldier was his riding horse... Nancy's a rescue he got as a companion for Soldier. Since March though, another neighbor and I have taken turns caring for them... Mr G spent a month in the hospital, and has been home for awhile now but isn't strong or steady enough to take care of them.

I might feel differently come winter but, right now, I don't mind taking care of Soldier and Nancy. You know how much I love history... and going into Mr G's tack room and hay barn are like stepping back in time.

Mr G was born in the mid-1920's and grew up on a farm in central Europe. He came here after WWII and has no wife or children... just his horses. His place looks and feels a little like I imagine a small farm in 1930/1940's Europe might have looked and felt.





His tack/feed room is nicely organized and is decorated with pictures and calendars he liked so much that some of them have been hanging on the walls for decades.



He also has a little hay barn, with hay neatly stacked on one side and this old, carefully cared for, tractor on the other. (I might try to buy this tractor when he's ready to sell...) The chains on the tires are for the snow, of course... yes we do get so much snow that even a tractor needs chains!



An ancient, well used pair of hay tongs remain stuck in an old bale of straw next to his hay.



Anyway, I don't mind going up there to do his barn work... I go early in the morning, before anyone else gets up, and it only takes 20 minutes or so.

It's so peaceful up there.... and I love seeing the "from scratch" ways his barn is set up. There are no livestock panels, electric fencing, or pre-fab stalls here.

It's all made, by hand, by Mr G.

His tools of the trade...




.... mended, not replaced, when they break.



These scissors, stuck in the crack between the wood of the hay barn, have a slightly curved blade... for trimming the "feathering" on the back of a horse's legs and fetlocks. They also work well for cutting baling twine!



Decades worth of horse shoes... Soldier only recently began going barefoot.



An antique scythe hanging in a shed...



A long piece of lodge pole pine which can be used to limit Soldier and Nancy's pasture access...



I took a lot of other pictures as well, too many to post... wanting to somehow record a way of doing things that seems to be quickly being lost...

We are doing fine with S here, by the way... M and R are bending over backwards to make things work and I'm hoping everyone's patience holds out until they find her a place to be. Her attorney (all children in foster care are appointed one) was here yesterday and S enjoyed showing her around... She (the attorney) will probably be sending her assistant to the foster mom's house on Friday to help get S's things packed up and moved out. It will be good to get that done sooner rather than later...(When we packed up a few of S's things to take with us on Monday, the foster mom told S she'd better take everything because she wouldn't keep it for her... Needless to say, we couldn't pack up a whole room at that time, and S has been stressing about the foster mom throwing her things away...) The GAL is sending her assistant to make sure foster mom doesn't start in on S or me again verbally...

It must have been a slow day...

... at the sheriff's office yesterday.

I think every deputy and sheriff in the county spent the afternoon out behind our back pasture fence.

They walked around... discussing and gesturing... hung yellow crime scene tape, and took pictures of my neighbor's barn and the areas behind and to the side of it.

They stood around with clipboards, writing on papers that fluttered in the breeze.

They called the coroner, who showed up in a big black SUV with darkly tinted windows.

The neighbor's back pasture looked like an overflow lot for the county... filled with marked and unmarked county cars.

Once the coroner got there, they all stood around some more... writing on their clipboarded papers, leaning on the hoods of their cars, and sometimes wandering over to the fence to watch my neighbor's horse eat.

I could see my neighbor from time to time... which was a relief with the coroner's car sitting out there.

They never called an ambulance, and judging from the lack of urgency (and the coroner's car) I guessed that whatever was behind the neighbor's barn was already dead.

After several hours of doing whatever they were doing, they rolled up the yellow police tape, and one by one all the cars drove out of my neighbor's pasture and left to do whatever deputies and sheriffs do on sunny Saturday afternoons when they aren't in my neighbor's pasture.

After they left, I saw my neighbor outside and walked back to the back pasture fence to make sure she was ok, and find out what had happened.

Here's what she told me...

Her husband had been doing some fencing work and had been digging a post-hole by the barn, when he dug up a large bone. He thought it was probably a deer until he dug up what looked like a knuckle bone...

That's when they decided to play it safe and call the sheriff's office.

The county deputies came and dug a little more and found a rib cage... and it looked human.

That's when the deputies called the coroner...

...and my neighbor and her husband were asked to wait in the house.

Before long, someone came and started questioning them about how long they'd owned the house, who had owned the house before them, how could they contact those people, etc.  When it was time to feed her horse, my neighbor had to be escorted by a deputy as she got the hay from the barn and carried it out to feed.

As the afternoon passed, the neighbors continued to wait at the house while the deputies, sheriff, coroner, and everyone else who was out there (about 15 people by that time) leaned on their cars, wrote on their fluttering papers, and took turns digging ever so carefully to reveal more bones.

After hours of picture taking, digging, discussing, and leaning on cars, someone finally dug down far enough to find the skull...

... of a very large dog.

With that the crime scene tape was wrapped up, everyone wrote a little more on their fluttering papers, and they all left.

My neighbor was a very good sport about the whole thing, but her husband was a little cranky about the wasted afternoon.

The only thing he was happy about is that the deputies had finished digging the hole he'd started...

... and they'd taken all the bones they'd found with them. :)

What I've learned...

We have new next door neighbors. They moved in last week. Before they lived here they lived in the city (not far from where we used to live). I've been watching them exploring their new property... discovering the deer that live there, and the remains of coyote "dinners" in the gully, and wondering how tall a fence they'll need to keep their two little dogs from becoming the next coyote dinner.

They kind of remind me of Dh and I almost 5 years ago, when we first moved out of the city and onto our little piece of land.  As I've watched them I've realized that I've learned a lot over the years we've been here... (although the more I learn the more I realize how much I have to learn!).

I thought I would share some of what I've learned here...

1. A good pair of mudboots is your best friend. Really. (But do try to remember to change out of them before you go to town.)
2. A little manure never hurt anyone.
3. You can never plant too many flowers*
4. Don't waste your time trying to keep wild animals off your land (and out of your garden). This is a battle they will always win because they are craftier, more agile, and more persistent than you are. Cut down on stress and resign yourself to putting a decent fence around your garden (5-6' will keep out most of the deer) and planting extra for the rabbits.  If you have flowers plants that you really don't want eaten invest in some "Deer Stopper" and spray them every week or so.  Apparently deer don't like the taste of rosemary and mint oil mixed with something that smells like rotten eggs.
5. As long as we are talking about gardening... regardless of what it says in your favorite gardening book, do NOT use straw to mulch your vegetable garden unless you are planning on harvesting hay.
6. Respect the weather. Understand that driving in blizzards can be risky and possibly result in a wrecked car and children who, for years, are deathly afraid of driving in snow. (Don't ask me how I know this, just trust that it's true.)
7. If you put in long hours catching up on all the work around the place, and think you're done and can finally sit and relax for awhile... you've forgotten something (or probably several somethings) because the work is NEVER caught up!
8. Learn to say no when friends (unless they're Granny) offer you dogs they can no longer keep because you have so much land, time, etc. If you don't, you could easily end up like the people you read about in the paper who have 52 dogs, 87 cats and 4 goats sharing their bedroom.
9. Don't waste anything, you'd surprised how important "garbage" can be. We use composted alpaca manure to fertilize the garden (see #2), made a "harrow" for the pasture out of old lumber and scraps of chain link fencing, and have learned that even "scrap" wood can be used for something... which saves not only money but also a trip to town.
10. If you hear something yowling, after dark, and it sounds like a really big cat... don't go looking for it... mountain lions are real, and you don't want to stumble into one in the night.
11. Stock up on food and hay before winter, keep a decent wood pile on the porch where you can get to it, and make sure the flashlights have batteries. It's not a question of if a big snow storm will start dumping... it's a question of when!

*Ok, so this one really has nothing to do with living in the country... I thought it was important enough to try to sneak it in anyway.

Keeping busy

This past week has been a blur...

One of our next door neighbors was out of town for 10 days, and her husband, who had a severe stroke just over a year ago, spent part of almost every day that she was gone with us. He hasn't recovered fully from his stroke and still needs a little help during the day. I hadn't known him well before this past week or so, and it was so nice to really get to know him... His wife came home yesterday and while it's nice not to have the responsibility of making sure he's eating, taking his meds, getting out of the house, etc., I kind of missed not seeing him at the dinner table last night.

We also have S again. There was an emergency is her family so she came here. She's been here for several days now but will probably go home tomorrow. She's been a little different this time...I could tell she was stressed, especially the first couple of days. She was very clingy with me, but also irritable and impatient. Thankfully she settled down again though, and I think she's had a good time being here...

The past couple times she's been here, she's asked me to teach her to knit. I've put her off, knowing that it would be a time consuming project (like M and R,  S is cognitively delayed) but this afternoon I finally sat down with some extra needles and yarn and taught her.

She's doing pretty well with it... Some of her stitches are beautiful, but some are still kind of funky... extra loops and things here and there.

She was so proud of herself though, as she worked her way through each stitch... I could see the concentration it was taking, and when she got to the end of each row and counted her stitches (to make sure she didn't add or lose any!) she was so happy to have the right number!

M and R had their last Special Olympics bowling practice on Saturday... I'm sad to see it end, I really hate to lose the structure of those Saturday morning practices. Weekends can be hard for M... but the extra structure of Special Olympics helped a lot. Unfortunately, S.O. is over until after the first of the year.

I might have to take the kids bowling one or two Saturdays a month just to recreate a little of that structure.

They had a mini-tournament during this last practice and each of the kids got a nice medal (awarded by some of the local police, who donated their time)...

... and a framed picture of themselves at the bowling alley.

 

The loved the pictures so much they insisted on hanging them in their rooms... immediately! :)

We seem to be having an endless Indian summer here... It's been really warm for late October, and almost no snow still, just the lightest of dustings the other night, so I've been working outside a lot. I've got the kitchen garden cleaned out, and the past few days I've been hauling mulch. A tree cutting business in town is giving away free mulch, so I keep sending dh down to town to fill up our little pickup truck.

I've mulched under my little fruit trees, and under the back porch where the weeds grow through each summer. 

The past couple of days I've been mulching around a big bush that grows outside my kitchen window. It's not my favorite kind of bush, it's just ok looking... It's been surrounded by weeds since we moved in and I'm hoping it will look better when it's cleaned up and surrounded by wood mulch instead.

Does anybody know what kind of bush it is? It gets fluffy, pink, feathery, flowery things each summer, and although it's looking a little rough right now, most years the leaves are just beautiful in the fall.  

Well, M is up... I'd better go.

the neighbor from the *very hot, very bad place*

Anybody feel like giving me some free advice? I've got a neighbor problem that I'm not sure how to handle...

This is kind of a long story, so you might want to make a cup of tea, and hit the bathroom before you settle in for the drama.

We love where we live, but it's probably a very good thing the houses are far apart, because my across the road neighbor is a little unstable (and yes, I mean that in a clinical sense).

Until about a year ago we'd been acquaintances, and then became friends. Rose (not her real name, but I get tired of using initials, and she kind of reminds me of our goat Rose... prone to crankiness) and her husband have two kids, a little boy and a girl just a few years younger than R. R and the girl (maybe I'll call her Betty, after our good natured goat) used to visit sometimes when they were both up on the road getting the mail, and they got to be friends. Rose started asking me to watch for Betty's school bus and keep her here on the days that she wasn't able to get home in time to meet the bus. I didn't mind helping her out, and the girls enjoyed playing together.

Rose and her family went out of town last spring and she asked me to water her flowers while she was gone (their yard is like a park, absolutely perfect, with at least an acre of blue grass!), which I did...and they brought back some little gifts for the kids in return.

They invited us over for the 4th of July last year, buying hundred of dollars of (illegal) fireworks and setting them off (while I prayed that our animals weren't panicking too badly with all the noise and smoke, and that no stray sparks would end up in my pasture!).

I knitted her some dishcloths, and taught her how to sew. Last summer, when Rose decided to make poodle skirts for all 15 girls invited to Betty's birthday party, I pulled out my sewing machine and she came over after the kids went to bed and we sewed.

I thought we were friends...

She was always kind of a difficult person though, with an abrasive way of talking to people. She said she had worked with people with developmental disabilities before, and wanted to do respite for me. But I wasn't comfortable with the patronizing, slightly disrespectful, way she talked about, and to, people with DD, so I never asked her to do any respite. Fortunately, at the time she was asking to do the respite, our funding hadn't come through yet and I could honestly tell her I didn't have the funds to pay for respite yet... and by the time the funding came through, she was no longer speaking to me.

It all started with a little stray dog her husband brought home one day. Pie was a puppy, about 8 months old, and had been running loose for ages. Rose wouldn't put up a fence or dog run, (she told me it would make her yard look "trashy"... Ouch! We have lots of fencing... but I told myself not to take it personally) and she would just train the dog to stay on their land.

But the little dog wasn't easily trained... It would run down to our place each morning when I went to the barn, and jump on me. If I wasn't careful it would dart into the stalls and our little pasture, and bark and nip at Grant and the goats.

Rose got a shock collar for Pie and if Pie would run down to the road, she would "shock her into coming back".

It didn't work. Pie learned that my house was out of range of the shocking device.

Pie dug into my backyard and jumped on Quin, often leaving Quin (with his deformed hips and legs) in pain for days. She'd jump on the kids when they were outside, and run into my house when they tried to come in.

I called Rose several times asking her nicely to come get her dog... I tried to talk to her about dog training, keeping Pie on a leash until she understood where she lived, or putting up a temporary dog run. Rose told me she'd been around animals all her life and knew what she was doing.

Sometimes I'd feel sorry for Pie (she was getting nothing but screamed at by Rose) and let her hang out in my backyard.

Once when Pie was up on the road, some people stopped... thinking she was a stray... and put her in their car, going to take her to a shelter (or home... who knows), but I went out and explained that she was my neighbor's dog, and kept her in my house until Rose got home again. Rose wasn't happy with me, saying she didn't think she wanted the dog and I should have just let those people take her.

After several months of this dog, things were starting to get strained. I was seriously tired of working around this wild, ill-mannered dog, and Rose seemed to think I was somehow encouraging Pie to come down here.

Finally last fall, things came to a head. The farrier was here trimming Grant's hooves, and some neighbors had ridden their horses down for a visit. One of the neighbors, a little friend of R's, was on her new horse... a feisty Arabian mare. Pie kept barking and nipping at the mare's heels and the girl's mother was getting very upset, yelling up at Rose's house to "come get your dog". Rose sent her kids down, but they couldn't catch Pie, so finally the farrier stopped his work and caught the dog for them.

Winter came and we still saw Pie, but not nearly as often. During a bitter cold spell I found her on my backporch, shivering, and called Rose asking her to come get her. By that time Rose was obviously angry, and barely speaking to me.

Each time our cars passed each other on the road, I continued to smile or wave, but she just looked away. (Yeah, I'll admit it... after a while I waved and smiled just to bug her.)

As winter went on, we stopped seeing Pie as often, although I still found her out at the barn sometimes in the mornings, waiting to jump on me. Once when coming in from the barn, she tried to run in the house with me... I reached out to grab her collar to keep her out and she nipped my hand (well... she nipped my work glove), I had stopped calling Rose to come get her dog (since it seemed to just make her angrier) but I called that time and told her what happened. I thought it was ridiculous that their dog was trying to bite me on my own front porch!

In the spring I had to go around to survey all my neighbors about a paving project that was being proposed. I hated the thought of going to Rose's,  she'd been extremely rude to me at Christmas... barely speaking to me when I took a gift of Christmas cookies and treats to them, angrily telling me that she'd be down to talk to me soon because she had "things we needed to hash out" and, when I told her that we'd lost Grant the day before to colic, she coldly said that she'd seen he was sick and he looked so bad it was probably good he had died.

But I agreed to survey each neighbor, so I had to go...

I had to climb over the fence to get into their place (their acreage is gated) and I found Rose working in the backyard. She greeted me coldly, asking me what I wanted. I said I was representing the community board, and had this survey, and started to explain. She said she wouldn't talk about the survey until we'd "hashed things out".

Then... and this is the strange part... she collapsed, sobbing, into my arms. She cried that she just knew we were going to sue them because Pie had tried to bite me, and that she knew I was the one who called the sheriff because her dog was out (I wasn't, although I had considered it), she could tell I was leaving my porch light on at night to "lure" Pie down to our house to get them in more trouble. (what?!) She sobbed that they couldn't risk everything they had, risk losing it all to us in a lawsuit, over this dog.

By now, the theme song from "The Twilight Zone" was running through my head... I tried to reassure Rose that we'd never called the sheriff, weren't planning on suing them, and the porch light was left on some nights only because I'd forgotten to turn it off.

She said she'd taken Pie to the shelter earlier that week, but now she couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, couldn't stop crying, and was spending hours each day at the computer,  looking at Pie's picture in the "adoptable dogs" part of the shelter's website, trying to determine if she looked well fed and happy.

She was truly falling apart. I told her that if not having the dog was that upsetting to her, she should just go get it back. She said they wouldn't give it back to her. I offered to go adopt the dog myself and give it to her. (Yeah, I know... I'm such a chump!)

She cried on, and at, me for over an hour, and I started thinking that maybe she was finally starting to believe that I hadn't done any of the things she thought I'd done. It sounded like she might be headed down to the shelter the next day to try and get her dog back. As we left, M, six months early, invited her to his birthday party (Oh M, I wish you would have not said that!) and she said yes, "unless your mom is mad at me and doesn't want me to come". I said no, of course not, and let the matter drop.

Guess what happened next? During the time Rose was falling apart, crying to me in her backyard, someone adopted Pie. By the time she got back in the house to check the website, Pie was gone.

I check the website too, and knew what had happened, and I wasn't sure what that bad timing might do to our newly mended friendship...

It didn't take long for me to figure out that she had stopped speaking to me again. If I corner her at the mailbox, she'll be civil to me... but nothing more. Even during last month's heat wave, it was frosty between the two houses...

So... here's my dilemma (Are you still reading? If so thank you... you deserve an award!) Michael's birthday is coming up. We're having a square dance out in front of the house (the only spot big and flat enough), do I invite Rose and her family? I'm inviting our other close neighbors, and she'll see we're having a big party. If I don't invite her she will probably assume I'm angry at her (which I'm not). On the other hand, after inviting R and M to Betty's party last year (the year of the poodle skirts!), she did not invite the kids this year.

So....do I invite Rose and her family? She's made it very clear that she's upset with me. Is it stupid to invite her? Or would not inviting her just reinforce for her that I'm a terrible person. (Honestly though, her thinking was so confused the night she fell apart, that I'm not sure she's able to think rationally about me and the whole situation anyway.) She's unstable enough that, even if she were talking to me, I'd prefer to keep my distance from her...

Thoughts? Opinions?  Tell me what to do please!

Things still feel very up in the air over here... 

 The pdoc is still out of town, so there has been no resolution to any of the issues that we were planning on talking about; day treatment, treating the tardive dyskinesia, meeting with Dr G, etc. I hate it when things feel so uncertain....

 

 I've got some P.A. (physician assistant) students coming out today for a visit. It's part of a program through the U of C Med School and Children's Hospital... Parents of children with significant disabilities can volunteer to open their homes to P.A. students and/or med. students and residents to help "enhance" their training. The program gives these students a chance to visit in a relaxed setting with parents and kids with disabilities, and see just what goes into the day to day care of a disabled child. 

 Since we moved we've only had a few groups of students come out, but I keep my name on the volunteer list... it seems like a good program to be involved in. 

 I was thinking this morning about what information I'd like to pass on to these students... We'll talk about FASD of course, and mental illness in children. But after the frustration and emotional upheaval of the past year I feel like there is another message I'd like to make sure they get... I think it's important for them to understand that while caring for a severely disabled child can be very difficult, sometimes the most difficult part is (unintentionally) brought into the family by the medical community. A lack of communication and follow through by even very caring medical professionals adds so much to the burden of caregiving. I hope they come away with the message that compassionate health care providers can make a tremendous difference in the lives of children with disabilities and their families, but that thoughtless and inconsistent communication and lack of follow-through can add a great deal to the already challenging job of caregiver.

 

 We went to a neighborhood meeting last night. A handful of neighbors want to pave the roads in our little subdivision. It would cost us (lots!) and most of us seem to be in a agreement that we don't want the roads paved. In fairness though, we've decided to survey each person in our neighborhood about paving before making a final decision. 

I volunteered to survey the neighbors on my street... It seems like a good way to meet the neighbors we haven't met yet. The meeting got a little heated at one point, I think it will be very good to get this survey done and have this paving issue put to rest for a few years. (This is the third time it's come up in less than three years!) 

 Yesterday I woke up to a lovely, foggy morning and had to take some pictures.. Here's the last one (and my favorite).