Memory Ideas and Lyme Disease

Lilly's garden is looking beautiful!  Most of the "sugar love carpet lilies" are blooming:

This week, I came across a couple memory ideas.  One is for the children of fallen soldiers.  A woman makes teddy bears from soldiers uniforms, for the dead soldiers children.  She started this project after losing her son to enemy fire in Afghanistan.  You can read about her work and see some sweet pictures in this article:  "She Makes Teddy Bears From The Uniforms Of Fallen Soldiers To Help Their Families Heal."  Then in our electric co-op magazine, I read about a woman that makes all sorts of things from the garments of someone that passed away, such as bears made from blankets, pillows from neckties, Christmas stockings, luggage tags, laptop bags, aprons, purses, etc.  (See some before and afters here.)  Her website is Memory Lane Boutique.

I so appreciate people that make things like this.  I know how much I love our LillyBear!

Frank came home from work Friday with box of guinea keets.  They are not quite 2 weeks old:

Sleeping - exhausted from the car ride!

Guinea keet

Don't squish the little guinea, Solomon!

So what are guineas good for?  Apparently they are good protectors.  They protect flocks from hawks, dogs, cats, snakes, foxes, etc.  They're not super strong, but they are supposed to be LOUD.  Good for scaring away creatures that want our hens.  They are awesome for eating ticks!  And we happen to live in Chatham County, which is full of ticks this time of year.  So once the guineas are big enough, we are going to put part of the flock in with our goats (ticks love the goats unfortunately) and the rest can roam with our chickens, and be their body guards.

Speaking of our goats, I heard a bunch of thumping and bumping in our chicken coop the other day, and some angry chicken squawking.  I peeked in and much to my surprise found our three goats were busy eating chicken feed.

So I asked ... who let the goats out??  (mehhh mehhh mehhh!)

Pippi, Cloves, Christa

The answer was Hunter.  And it was an accident.

Christa looked ridiculous from this view - I still can't believe the goats got through the coops little door.

Early this spring I made an herbal bug/tick spray for the kids and I to use.  (Frank prefers the chemical laden store stuff.  But the red bugs in particular like him so much, I can't really blame him.)  Anyway, the stuff I made works fine for the rest of us.  But we don't often bother using it unless we're going to be in the woods for awhile.  Guess we're just lazy.

I do think about Lyme disease sometimes though, and pray we don't get it.  I was very interested to read recently that Shoshanna from Bulk Herb Store (I buy herbs and get lots of herbal recipes there)  and her son Jeremiah both had gotten Lyme disease last year.  Jeremiah also had Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Shoshanna has been writing about their experiences in trying to get help, her bad reactions from medications, and how she finally helped herself and Jeremiah heal from her own blends of herbs.

People who get Lyme disease are usually put on many rounds of antibiotics to try and cure them.  It can take a long time and antibiotics can have bad side effects.  But it seems Shoshanna has had good results with what she came up with.  You can read her story here and more specifics about the treatment she created here.  She plans to go around the country speaking about her "Journey Back to Health."