Vermin

When I got guineas I knew that the biggest challenge to keeping them alive was the local wildlife. The resident red tailed hawk and great horned owl were very real concerns when the birds were little and I did lose one to a bird of prey in the beginning. Nothing attracts possums and raccoons like fowl, and they were always the real worry. When the guineas first moved out of the bathroom I put a strand of electric fence about four inches off the ground all around the coop. I plugged it in every night and didn't have any problems. Eventually the birds got big enough to roost, and once they started that nonsense there was no way to convince them that the coop was a safer place to sleep then high in the trees. They were more susceptible to predators in the trees though and it caused problems to no end.  Opossums and raccoons are pretty resourceful when it comes to getting something to eat. They can't catch the birds on roost but they sure can scare them off and then chase then around the yard all night trying to get a bite to eat. The strategy isn't terribly effective but by morning I've got birds all over the yard and the neighbor's yard and out in the road and my morning starts off with a guinea roundup.
The birds got chased out of the tree exactly one time before I headed off to the store for a live trap. One thing you can be sure of, if a opossum has a choice between trying to hunt a live bird and eating a piece of leftover salmon, they'll always go for the salmon. I was pretty sure I could catch whatever what causing the problems, but what to do with them? We live in a pretty suburban area and I didn't just want to trap something in my yard and drop it off five miles away in someone else's yard. That's not very nice. I could have just killed them, which would have made sense. But no, I decided that I could use this as an opportunity to teach my children about killing/not killing things. They know that I hunt and kill things to eat. They know where the chicken and beef that they eat comes from. They had very recently eaten the chickens that we had raised with the guineas. I thought that since I had been driving home the fact that in order to eat meat something has to die, I could also drive home the fact that we shouldn't kill things just because it's the easiest solution to the problem. Instead we could release them in the Sam Houston National Forest where they could get on with their wild lives without trying to eat my birds. This was an outstanding plan. In theory.
The first night I put out my trap I caught a small opossum. I loaded the kids up and drove him the 25 miles to his new home in the National Forest. They were all able to see an opossum up close for the first time, and watch it play dead, and finally watch it's very odd gait as it ran into the forest. We talked about how creepy opossums looked and how they were marsupials like kangaroos and how our opossum was now going to go on living his opossum life. When we got back home I set the trap again just to make sure. I caught another one. Again I drove it to the National Forest and dropped it off. Three days later I caught a third opossum and sent it to live with it's friends. All was quiet for a while until I started catching raccoons. This time the kids learned that raccoons aren't cute curious loving little animals. They are in fact hulking, snarling merchants of death that want to bite your face off, and they can run really fast when you release them. My kids are now afraid of raccoons. When the numbers are tallied, I've caught seven opossums and four raccoons in the last year and a half. I've driven more than 550 miles transporting these animals and I've still managed to lose 3 or 4 guineas to them. Mostly I've learned that, as a parent, once you've assigned a morally righteous position an action, you must continue with that action. Choose wisely.

Welcome

I want to say hello and welcome to all of the new readers that have shown up this week. With the increase in readers I'm feeling a little pressure to write about subjects that are actually interesting to people instead of things that randomly pop into my head. This post is simply a call to you readers for post suggestions. What do you want to hear about? More diaper stories? Breastfeeding as a dad? What sounds good? I'm planning to write about bread, yogurt, opossums, sports field maintenance, and my complaints with tampon companies in the next week, but I'm open for anything. One of my most endearing and annoying qualities is that if you have a subject, I probably have something to say about it. So head to the comments and let me know what you want to hear about, and thanks for reading.

High Security

Nobody gives you a baby gate at a baby shower. You get clothes and towels and and blankets and all of those things. We received a baby bathtub and a breast pump and some other really useful stuff. Relatives even sent us a rocking chair. But no baby gate. People even mentioned that we needed a changing table and outlet covers and some other stuff that we really didn't need. Nobody mentioned a baby gate. Perhaps they thought that we just knew? We knew about diapers and clothes and people still bought us those, so that can't be it. Perhaps people really don't like to talk about containment procedures for small children. They feel weird having conversations about how to turn your living room into a toddler jail. Well, not me. Baby containment was a vital part of my parenting strategy.

Hey Dad! What are you working on?

Sometimes in life you get lucky. When we bought our house, we got lucky for a variety of reasons, most of which weren't obvious at the time. One of those reasons was the single, normal width, doorway connecting our living room to the rest of the house. Not that there was much else to the house. It was the kitchen, a single bathroom, a single bedroom, and the living room which was half the square footage of the whole building. You could say that the house plan didn't flow very well, but when we bought it you could stand in one spot and reach your arm into each of the 4 rooms. Flow wasn't really necessary. The point is, that unless you wanted to go outside, there was only one way in and one way out of the living room, and you could stand in the kitchen or the bathroom and see in. This is an ideal arrangement for containing small children.
You can lock them out. You can prepare food without worrying about them trying to grab hot things or put their head in the oven. You can change the laundry around without anyone trying to climb in the dryer. You can pee without having a small child try to look into the bowl while you try to aim around them. That last one is particularity problematic. When we remodeled the house to add two more bedrooms we had to add another door to the living room. The very first thing we did was add a gate to keep small hands off of the power tools.
Not that gates are all good. Aside from the fact that people who visit think you're running a small scale prison, there are other issues. At 5' 10" I could stretch and just step over the gate, my wife had a harder time. I could step over empty handed but I was always just a little worried about slipping while holding a baby and it's hard to open the gate when you're holding an infant and a bottle and trying not to drop either one of them. The kids were not always happy to be on the other side and some epic screaming fits occurred. Nobody could open the gates the first time they visited. This resulted in my mother in law needing to ask me to open the gate so she could go pee. Awkward. Less awkward but still problematic was the fact that the gate separated the bathroom from potty training. Eventually the gate was moved to allow access to the bathroom so I didn't have to open and shut it every 45 seconds because everyone had to pee when I was stirring something on the stove or was up to my elbows in bread dough.
Overall though, the baby gate was one of the best pieces of parenting equipment ever. It simplified safe parenting and allowed me to get things done just out of the arms reach of tiny arms. I was still there, my kids could see me and I could see them due to the design of our house, nobody felt abandoned. I don't give away baby gates at baby showers even though I kind of want to. Not everyone thinks they want to confine their children (though they will, oh they will) or has a house that makes is convenient or even possible to do so. I do always mention to the parents to be, "You know, with a gate there and a gate there, you'd have this room sealed off". I often get weird looks, but if I visit their house when they have a two year old, I feel vindicated, because the gates are always there.

Dad Image

Look Mommy, a hobo!

Mirrors are funny things. They show you yourself as the world sees you, which is not always how you see yourself. I age faster than the self image of myself. For a very long time my self image was me when I was about 13. This lasted into my early 20's when I was briefly able to see myself as approximately who I was, a long haired hippie looking rock climber. Comfortable with that, I developed a bit of self confidence that the 13 year old me didn't have, and promptly found a girlfriend and then a wife. Then work, then babies, and now I was stay at home dad that still looked like a hippie rock climber. Except when you are single and in your early 20's and you look like a hippie rock climber it's awesome and chicks dig it (some of them at least). When you are in your late 20's and are carting around two babies, you just look like a dirty guy who doesn't want a job. The guy who has his wife go out and work while he barely keeps everyone alive and just sits home and plays video games all day. Sometimes, not all the time, but often enough, people treat you like that guy if you look like that guy. That sucks.
I could let it roll off of me pretty well, but I wondered about my kids. What difference would it make to them if they saw people treat me poorly as they grew up? I'm a kindly well educated guy, I read, I'm better off financially then my laundry habits might indicate, and I'm well spoken after I've had my coffee in the morning. People who knew me treated me well, I'm likable after all, but people who didn't know me often didn't. This might be hard to digest for my kids. Added confusion in a confusing world. To top it off, I don't meet many stay at home dads. Lots of people say they know another one, but there are very few of us that are identifiable in the wild. The checkout ladies at the store and the ladies at the bank soon knew me as "the stay at home dad" indicating to me that I was the only one they knew. Was I representing stay at home dads for the whole world? For even part of a population? Were people developing a lower opinion of stay at home dads because of me? That's bad.

Would you trust this mustache?

So I cleaned myself up. My mother couldn't convince me to do it. The job market after school couldn't convince me to do it. For some inexplicable reason my clean and normal wife didn't even seem to have a desire to do it. But having kids and having societal expectations associated with being the primary caregiver for those kids did it. I shaved more often. I wore clothes that were cleaner and had been purchased new instead of second hand from old guys who had exceptional taste in plaid pants. I learned how to buy a shirt that fit. I learned how to tie a tie. I learned how to tie a bow tie and wore them quite often. I might have gone a little too far with the bow ties, but I still think they're awesome. I have a suit that is nice enough that I can't ever gain or lose enough weight to change my size. I will be a 38R until I die. I didn't cut my hair though. I was that rare animal, a clean cut guy with long hair. I had long hair until 4 years ago when I underwent an unintentional, extremely rapid combustion based exfoliation event. The hair that survived that ordeal was cut off to even up the difference between the areas of my head that escaped harm and those that looked like the rest of my face. It's a long story but it's enough to say that I'm very lucky to be alive and as normal looking as I am.
So here I am, a normal, mid 30's clean cut stay at home dad and my mental self image is about what I see when I look in the mirror. It feels good. I never quite get used to seeing myself with a beard, and my recent super awesome Sheriff Mustache made me giggle every time I walked into the bathroom. It's good to see myself in the mirror and see who I expect to see again. Except for the gray hair, that's a bit surprising, the guy in the mirror is getting old.

This guy seems legit.

Literally the morning after I shaved my awesome cowboy sheriff mustache, I learned about Movember. Movember is sort of like breast cancer awareness month, but for dudes. Instead of wearing pink, you grow a mustache. It's used to raise money and awareness for men's health issues, especially prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men. Our friend Jake is participating in Movember out in Colorado. Jake is a cool guy. My wife and I interviewed him at a bar while she was 8 months pregnant. I'll leave the details to your imagination, but he was hired as an intern and eventually as a full time geologist. He was the best intern ever. When we went on vacation we asked him to cat sit for us, and he did. What's that? You're not supposed to use your summer interns for cat sitting? Abuse of power you say? Maybe, maybe not. But I still contend that Jake was awesome even without the cat sitting and there is no better guy to donate money to for Movember. You can donate to him here: http://us.movember.com/mospace/1828512/  Why don't I participate if it's so awesome? Well, I just got out of a long term relationship with my mustache and I'm not ready for that kind of commitment again so soon. Maybe next year. Movember is still cool.

Books this week:
For the Love of Physics - Walter Lewin
Innumeracy, Mathematical Illetracy and its Consequences - John Allen Paulos
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

For the Love of Physics is written by a professor from MIT who has all of his lectures online. He's awesome. You should watch them here - http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/ or on youtube. Do a search, he's awesome. I didn't learn much new aside from a few rainbow facts, but the quality of writing made it worth it.
Innumeracy is an interesting read. It's aimed mostly at people that are educated but for one reason or another suck at math. It give a lot of really clear examples of the problems that innumeracy causes and how simple math illuminates them. It also gives suggestions for teaching that would eliminate a lot of innumeracy in schools. The book was written in 1988 and a lot of his suggestions, story problems, estimating, real life solutions, I can see in my kids homework to a much greater degree than I had at their age. I suspect that Paulos, or others like him have had an impact.
Oryx and Crake - Fiction! I do read fiction, I love it. This was a post apocalyptic story. The basic story line was great actually. Separation of the haves and the have nots, increasing mucking around with genetics and creating new life forms, climate change, and all that those things together bringing about the end of man. The story was great, what was annoying was the back and forth between the present dead world, and the main characters semi crazy thoughts in it, and the linear story that got him there. I'm not sure that it was necessary or made the story better. I understand non-linear literary devices and how they can be used, I just think that good stories are often better told without them. Good enough book that I finished in in a day and a half and I'm going to get the sequel from the library.

Split Pea Soup

Split pea soup, otherwise known as ham soup if you're talking to a 3 year old who doesn't think they like split peas, is the necessary second dish after making a ham. It's just wrong to waste a ham bone by not making it into soup. When you decide to cook a ham, you're really deciding to make a ham and split pea soup, every time. Prepare yourself for the commitment.

Spit Pea Soup

Split pea soup photographs badly, especially when it's almost gone. 

Start this at 10:00 am. It's an all day sit on the couch and keep telling people that you're busy cooking so you can't possibly do any chores kind of meal.
One ham bone, lots of ham still attached to it, the more the better.
One pound of split peas
2-3 carrots, peeled and sliced
1/2 Onion - dried or fresh and diced
2-3 Cloves of garlic - dried or fresh and diced
First you need to sort the peas. The package always says to do this and I never thought it was really necessary until I got my first rock. For some reason, about every 5 packages or so, there is a small rock that looks mostly like a pea, but doesn't taste at all like a pea. I think it's probably part of the automated picking equipment or something. They manage to get most of the rocks out, but one occasionally slips through quality control. Just pick through them in a colander, it's worth the five minutes. Place the peas and the ham bone and, well, everything else in a pot. Put in enough water to cover, or at least come close to covering, the bone. The package of peas will call for 8-10 cups of water and this is usually about right in my experience. If you need to put in more, that's ok, you can boil off the extra at the end. Now simmer the soup on low for about 5 hours covered. If you started this at 10:00 in the morning as suggested it's about 3:00 and the ham that was left on the bone is now falling off. Scoop the bone and all the ham that you can and put them on a cutting board to cool. You need to sort the edible ham from the knuckles and fat and bone and it's easier to do that when you're not swearing at them for burning you. After 20-30 minutes of cooling, sort out those previously mentioned knuckles and bone and fat that you don't really want to eat and discard them. Take the rest of the edible ham and chop it up and throw it back in. Now you need to keep simmering and stirring every half hour or so until dinner time. If you had to add more water in the beginning then simmer with the lid off for a while and boil off the extra. If things seem a bit too thick, add water to thin it out. Taste it a lot. I wouldn't add any salt or pepper until it's time to serve as the flavor seems to evolve the whole time it's cooking.
Now enjoy your soup. It's a complete meal, meat and veggies all in one pot. If you have space in your fridge, you don't even have any clean up, just let the pot cool and throw the whole thing in the fridge for leftovers. Take a break after dinner, you've been cooking all day and you deserve it.

Candy! Candy! Candy!

Holy cow. I don't know what else to say. Holy cow. The kids were bigger and more mobile this year as I mentioned in my Halloween post. This meant that we were able to cover more ground than in Halloween's past. As a direct mathematical result, they were able to collect more candy. So much in fact that the two smaller kids were having trouble carrying their plastic pumpkin buckets by the end. It was a lot of candy. I just took a moment to weigh it. We have 12 pounds of candy. Holy cow.

Loot!

It must take us a long time to finish that much candy, right? After Thanksgiving? All the way to Christmas? Nope, one week. Our Halloween candy will be gone in a week, and none of the kids will develop major blood sugar issues in that time. You see, we don't eat a lot of sweets. We have dessert after dinner 3-5 days a week, but other than that, we just don't have sweets. We don't even have them in the house usually. My 3 year old doesn't really even like sweet things most of the time. More than once he's started into a piece of cake only to say that it's too sweet and he doesn't like it. We're weird, but we have a plan. The idea is, that of all the things in the world to eat, sugar is pretty much at the bottom of the list. The hope is to instill long term habits in our kids about food. Veggies, fruits, meats, dairy, whole grain stuff, then last, refined grains and sugar. Our kids will almost certainly call this some sort of communist brainwashing someday. Trying to program them with healthy habits against their will. It's some sort of evil programing. I'm ok with that.
So what do we do with 12 pounds of candy in a week? They get to pick one piece of candy each night for dessert. Four kids, 8 nights (one week, plus Halloween night) that's 32 pieces of candy plus whatever Daddy and Mommy filch after bedtime which isn't that much. Really. If you look at the picture, they have WAY more than 32 pieces of candy in that pile. You can't just throw away candy. It would cause much weeping. That would be mean and cruel. Much more mean and cruel than I can possibly be, so we pass it on.
My sister lives in Wisconsin and runs The Naked Elm , a bakery outside Madison. If you're in the neighborhood you should go buy bread/bagels/pizza from her. For the last 6 years or so she has been the recipient, often unwilling, of our leftover Halloween candy. We box it up and ship it off and the kids are happy knowing that they've shared their Halloween loot with Aunt Biggie. In the beginning she didn't have any kids so we convinced our kids that with no kids, she didn't get any candy, so sharing with her was really nice. Now she has a two year old, so technically she should have her own source of Halloween candy, but nobody had brought this up yet. Well no one but Biggie that is. She has mentioned that disposing of 5-10 pounds of candy isn't actually as easy at it sounds, especially because all of the good chocolate has been picked out by the time we mail it. Sorry. My kids are actually excited to send the candy on to Aunt Biggie. They keep talking about the other stuff they can put in the box to send to their cousin. Someday they'll figure out that it isn't completely normal to send candy half way across the country. That will be a complicated day for me.
In the name of complete honesty, I need to admit that the first 3 years or so of Halloween we were totally against giving our kids any of the candy. After we put them to bed we would replace the candy with bags of goldfish and pretzels and fruit snacks. They never noticed that their candy had changed form during the night, and after a week everything was gone. With very small kids, we were only able to stop at 5-8 houses though so there wasn't that much candy for Mommy and Daddy to eat, so we didn't mail it to Aunt Biggie. Finally, we sort of relaxed about sugar intake and we realized that we couldn't pull off the old switcheroo without too much suspicion. They were on to us.

Ham

Ham is good. After bacon, it's probably the best part of the pig. Yet, most of us only eat a ham if it's a holiday. I was puzzling over this recently when my son asked if he could make a ham for his night making dinner. I couldn't see anything wrong with the idea, ham is good and the boy should know how to cook a ham. It's a useful life skill of sorts.
Now that I have a refrigerator full of left over ham, I see why people generally only cook them when they know that the house will be filled with relatives. A ten pound ham, even after you take out the bone, is quite a lot of meat to eat. We're working at it though.
How to cook a ham:
Most smoked hams are actually already cooked. That's my assumption anyway, because every one that I've ever bought has been. So you're not so much cooking it, as heating it up. You basically want to follow the directions on the ham, something like "cook at 325 for 20-25 minutes a pound, until 100 degrees in center".
Turn the oven to 325
Put the ham, flat/bone side down in a pan and cover with tin foil as tightly as you can.
Roast for 20-25 minutes a pound, so a 10 pound ham would take about 3.5 hours. This is an all afternoon project.
Slice and eat your ham.
That's it. In fact, if it weren't for the fact that ham is so delicious and I feel that it's dramatically under represented on the tables of America, I probably wouldn't bother writing about it. Oh, but then there are the leftovers. Aside from a turkey, nothing has leftovers as good as a ham. Ham sandwiches. Green eggs and ham. Ham steak. Various ham casseroles. And my favorite, split pea soup. Split pea soup is half the reason to have a ham actually. You need to keep your ham bone to make split pea soup, so when you clean up after the meal, don't worry too much about getting the bone clean. Any extra ham stuck to the bone will just make your split pea soup better. Put that bone in a bag and put it in the fridge, because tomorrow or the next day, you need to make soup with it. My next food post will be turning your ham bone into the nest delicious ham based meal. Stay tuned.

Edit for a bit of pork trivia: Ham comes from what you would think of as the butt of the pig, it's rear leg. Pork butt doesn't come from the butt, it comes from the shoulder and contains part of the shoulder blade. It's the thicker part of the front shoulder, or the butt of the front shoulder. The cut that comes from the lower part of the shoulder is called the picnic. I have no idea why it's called the picnic.  Impress your friends in the meat isle with that!