Hello and welcome back to the farm! The old home place has been in a bit of hybernation lately. We have found ourselves in the middle of a summer of epic heat waves. When I was a kid, I remember those 103 degree days when the wind blowing across the expanse of sand and gravel that separates house from shop from barn felt like the hot, dry air from a propane blast furnace. Except in the winter a blast furnace feels so luxuriously warm, and in the summer one just hurries to reach shade before it sucks too much life and moisture from one's self.

This summer, 103 feels like a cold snap. We had about two weeks straight in June of temps over 110. Our thermometer recorded the highest at 115.5. Although the officially recognized high was 113.5 that day, so perhaps our thermometer is a drama queen. At any rate, B started leaving for work before the sun came up at 5:30, and coming home about 4 in the afternoon (it is odd for him to work shorter than 14 hour days) because his truck couldn't stay cool enough to run unless he shut down the air conditioner, and then he couldn't stay cool enough to run himself. We took to leaving the blinds shut, lights off, the house a shadowy tomb, but cool enough to keep the sweat from running down one's chest upon the slightest movement. One of those days, after the shadows had gotten longer and the animals had started to move again outside, I went outside and thought, hmm. Now this is tolerable! I did the chores, fed the animals, pulled a few weeds out of the jungle that my garden had turned into in the lack of my working in it, and came inside where I checked the thermometer. 105. I found that ironically funny. By now, we are back to the low 100's, and life is back to being lived, albeit slowly.

My poor garden. Tomatoes shut down when the weather tops about 95 degrees, and it hasnt been 95 degrees since they started blooming. I have about 30 tomato plants and so far, two tomatoes. Tiny little things that ripened because they just lost their will to grow any bigger. I am a little perturbed that I started 30 tomato plants, 15 cucumber plants, 20 pepper plants, eggplant and kohlrabi in the house, so carefully and lovingly, then put them out in the garden only to see them wither and only in the last month, rally and try to grow. Whereas I bought four watermelon plants and four zucchini plants at the hardware store because I had forgotten to buy seeds to start until it was too late, and they took off and are now huge and producing fruit like they mean it while my own plants, so lovingly started, limp along. Not a single eggplant or kohlrabi lived, their leaves becoming lacy from being a bug smorgasbord within two weeks. Surprisingly, those were the only two plants the bugs have really attacked. I planted an onion between each pepper plant, and maybe because of that, or maybe not, the pepper plants have nice, shiny, intact leaves. Nobody ate my spinach, or even my strawberry plants (nor the three miniscule strawberries they produced before giving up.) My lettuce fnally got enough water to grow after I accidentally left the hose on overnight, but also nearly overnight the pigweeds grew so tall they kept the lettuce shaded, which also gave it a little relief. Not enough, though. It was still inedibly bitter by the time it was big enough to pick. It is beautiful, though. My big, green lettuce plants make me look legit.

In the middle of the hottest spell, the poor goats ran out of weeds to eat, having taken the Kochias in the corrals behind the barn down to stems. They began getting very creative about finding weak spots and then pushing through through my fencing that I had been so smug about, since it had held them so well for several months. I began having to remember to go out and check them several times a day, to find them out in the yard eating weeds (fine), munching on the various trees in the yard (not so fine) or heading across the road to the neighbor's trees (so not fine at all.) I spent one of the hottest days I can ever remember experiencing outside running after them, coaxing them back with a bucket of grain, working with hammer and nails and bits of wire and cordless drill to close the holes they had created. Once I had found the holes. Which I often did not, and ended up closing holes that they were not even using only to look out ten minutes later to see them trotting purposefully across the yard toward the road, a road that vehicles rocket past on at highway speeds, in spite of the fact that it drops suddenly into a valley in which two farmsteads crowd the road, filled with animals and kids, and for whom turning onto the road is a blind endeavor, since we cannot see over the crest of the hill just above our driveways. (These yards, ours and the neighbor's, were designed during the days of 20 mph, not 70 mph. And nowadays, Kansas farmers drive like hell in heavy tanks of pickup trucks that feel stable careening over sandy, rutted roads and lull one into a sense of safety, even though it takes like a quarter mile to get one stopped. Especially with full fuel tanks in the back. I know. I have flown up to several corners hauling fuel to the husband's loader and I hit the brakes casually, thinking it will stop like my little Ford Focus does. It doesn't. Luckily, they have all been intersections, not dead ends. Explaining to him just why his nice Dodge Diesel is nosed into a barbed wire fence would really hurt my farm girl cred. I did, after all, grow up operating heavy equipment.)

But back to the goats. So I called their owner and discussed the problem with her, and she ended up coming and picking all but two of them up, because if they were just going to be eating hay, they could eat hay with her billy goat while getting impregnated. She left Ebony, the milk goat, here, as well as little companion for her, a baby from last fall that is too wild to pet, but sticks with her like glue. At that point, I didn't mind a bit. Fixing fence and chasing goats around the yard in 110 degree heat while experiencing pregnancy nausea, shaky exhaustion and hot flashes makes one's dreams of a bigger, better farm pale a bit in comparison to one's dreams of napping in a nice, cool basement all afternoon with streaming episodes of Private Practice on your computer's Netflix hooked up to your TV to distract you should you happen to open your eyes and be tempted to think about all the things you should be doing.

Until seven and a half weeks, I was wishing for an increase in nausea, anything to tell me that there was, in fact, something still in there. I had an ultrasound at six and a half weeks (yes, my doctor is awesome) and they found a heartbeat, which greatly eased my mind, but until then all I had to go on was the exhaustion and heartburn and queasies brought on by the thick, viscuous progesterone shot Bobby uses a ridiculously long needle and spends three minutes slowly injecting into alternating butt cheeks as I stand bent over the bathroom counter with my pants down every 84 hours. So nothing at all to go on, since it was all just a reaction to a synthetic hormone. We have gotten pretty good at this shot business by now, and B has gotten over his initial reaction to sticking a needle deep into the muscle tissue of another person. The first time, he had never given a shot before, even to an animal, and he so cautiously poked it in, like the nurse had shown him, and then I moved a bit. Which made the needle stuck in my butt cheek move while he was holding it, the tip catching on muscle tissue deep inside, and he tried to hold hiself together and not freak out...but suddenly he got pale and sweaty and panicky and he didn't want to let go of the syringe, but he also didn't want to toss his cookies all over me. I reached back and held the syringe while he went out in the hallway and sat with his head between his knees and breathed heavily, and by the time he felt well enough to continue, all but a half cc was injected. He finished it shakily, pulled out the needle, and lay down on the couch to recover, still pale, while Andy pawed at him, whining worriedly and asking if Daddy was going to be okay. I love how dogs know these things. I also love how much it took for B, who is seriously averse to the sight of blood, to give me a traumatically deep intramuscular injection in order to help keep me from miscarrying his child. I love that he is being forced to be more than merely a sperm donor in this project, at most happily accompanying me to the fun appointments, the ultrasounds, and leaving the incessant bloodwork and pregnancy monitering to me while he stays too busy making our income to be involved in all the endless nauseating details of growing a human being in a space that definitely was not built to comfortably accomodate such a project. I love that if I do lose this one, he will have also made sacrifices and will feel the loss beyond merely the loss of his hope and excitement for a baby. He will also feel some of the anger and frusteration of everything we went through to keep it, all the shots and worry and monitering and money spent. I hope that doesn't make me sound like a horrible person. I know he was excited about the last two pregnancies, but there was never the level of sacrifice demanded from him, just me feeling the effects of raging hormones and bodily malfunctions from them. And, of course, taking them out on him. But now there is also the nightmare of his having to face the one thing he hates most, needles and blood, for his family. It just brings us that much closer in our common fight to keep this kid, gives him that much more skin in the game. Which I will need if I lose the pregnancy, because this game takes all of a woman's skin and if it is all for nothing, we are left raw, oozing and naked, completely spent with zero reserves, and all we have to help us through it is the person who went through it with us and can hold us and tell us they know what we are feeling because they feel the same thing.

So far, the shots are working. Bloodwork shows that my own body's production of progesterone is too pitiful to support pregnancy, but with the supplemental progesterone, I am now nine weeks pregnant. That is at least two weeks longer than I have made it before, and I have never heard a heartbeat before. And while I have experienced smaller amounts of exhaustion and nausea in previous pregnancies, they are for real this time. I have turned into a couch potato without the potato chips, with an emergency bucket within easy reach, since my vomit M.O. of the past has taught me that buckets are my best friend. By the time I realize things are coming up, I may not make the toilet, even at a dead run. But I haven't actually thrown up yet, merely sat beside the toilet and prayed to the vomit gods to have mercy on me and let me chuck, only to have the level of nausea hold steady for long enough to let me know that there will be no sweet relief, I am going to have to process this cursed food the old fashoined way after all.  I try to go out and exercise, but even in the nice, cool mornings or late evenings, I'd rather cut my big toe off. The one morning this week I decided that while I didn't have it in me to walk far enough to wear the dogs out, I could do a bike ride, I missed my pedal clip, lost my balance and tumbled to the ground, catching myself on the heel of my hand in the gravel to protect the all-important uterus from hard impact. My palm is still a bit gray and tender from the resulting bruise, and it scared me. A bike ride is not worth losing this pregnancy over. Every week that passes, I wonder if maybe, just maybe, this is for real. Like maybe this isn't just a temporary condition that will inevitably end prematurely in a lot of pain, bleeding and crying over an ugly dead lump that would have been our baby, but that our kid really is growing in there, fingers and toes and all. I haven't dared to so much as look at bigger clothes, I am so afraid of jinxing it, even though I find myself with a total beer belly thanks to my digestive system being thrown into a bloated uproar over the smallest shred of fiber, and unable to wear any of my suddenly binding wardrobe except for running shorts, yoga pants and one pair of blue jean shorts that haven't been worn since the last time I was chubby in the summer, possibly the summer of 2006, the last summer I sat around and didn't spend it biking. Maybe. Just maybe. This is where we are right now. We hope, and we have blocked off the month of February as the big, shiny date in which we will be scheduling nothing but meeting this baby, should it decide to come in an alive state, but we also have to protect ourselves, lest we lose it.

I have lost three chicks since they have left the safety of their stock tank in the garage. All three of them have mysteriously gone lame. The third happened when the neighbor came over to do my chores once when we were gone. She reported that there was a piece of straw stuck down a little rooster's throat. Even after she pulled it out, it's head just snapped around to it's back and they couldn't get it to stay straight, and once it did that, it was lying on it's back in no time. The same thing happened once when I left B home to do chores. He didn't check it's throat, I am glad the neighbor thought of that, but after spending a long time trying to get it to stand on it's own, and recognizing that without standing, it could not make it to water in over 100 degree heat, they just did what needed doing and ended their lives for me. I am so grateful for people who do that for me. I had to once, and it nearly finished me off. I held it's feathery, soft head with blinking judgement eyes on a brick and smashed it with another brick, but at the last minute, I cringed away and didn't smash hard enough and it lived through it, flopping away, and I had to catch it before I could smash it properly. Sheer horror. I will never lose that feeling.

Oh, and Lady Mai, the graceful white and gray cat with the wide, ice-blue eyes, is suddenly enormously pregnant. I feel for her in the heat and let her spend afternoons in the house. Sometimes we even nap together, hormonal as we both are, with a mutual understanding that she is not to walk across my tender chest and I am not to pick her up. I pet her and feel the squirming of multiple little rat-like beings churning around inside her, and am very thankful that human's don't generally have litters. Marvin is puzzled by her, apparently, and frequently attacks her out in the yard, but he has also been known to spend his afternoons in the house, where he sleeps stretched out, flicking his notched ears at the flies that occasionally bother him. And Moto also spends the hottest parts of his days inside, because he is less able to handle the heat than any cat I have ever known. 95 degrees hits, and his head is low, his ears are drooping, his tongue is out. The neighbor who gave him to me, says his entire bloodline has been this way. So in the afternoons, Andy and Anouk nap on the cool bathroom floor, and Mai, Marvin and Moto pass out on various chairs or under the kitchen bar. And they all get along beautifully. Which tells me it's just this heat that is making everyone crazy and making Marvin attack Mai.

Anouk is big. Really big. Like 3/4 the size of Andy. She just lost her last puppy tooth the other day, and she also sneaked into the spare bedroom after I had accidentally left the door open and located my wedding shoes, which she then proceeded to chew the heels off of. She lost a bit of her popularity over that. But by now, all is forgiven, and she is back to being our sweet Nookienook, even though we can't trust her as far as we can throw her outside by herself- she immediately disappears across the road toward the neighbor's to go steal bones from their dog and play with their kids.

And that is the state of the farm. I am trying to decide how much longer I should keep milking Ebony, since I have developed major aversions to dairy, at least in any non-cheese form. And I can barely stay on top of my housework, let alone make cheese on top of other projects that aren't getting done. So I end up giving all the milk away, and in the meantime, milking keeps us home twice a day between 8 and 9 o'clock morning and evening. Which is hard to swing if we want any sort of a social life. Which granted, we don't have right now anyway, because anyone we would socialize with is also working 14 hour days, but we would like to have the option. As well as the option to leave for a few days should B's truck break down and have to go to the shop or should we get a big rain. We would like to go camping up where it's cool, if possible, in the next four months while I still resemble more human being than belly with legs. Don't get me wrong, I really hope to be a belly with legs soon. But if we should happen to keep this kid, this is also the last time we will be able to take long weekends, camper and dogs, trails and lakes, without having to deal with all of the extra stuff required to keep a newborn, an infant, a toddler or a young child safe and entertained.