Beautiful Rocket

On Wednesday I was given a newborn baby raccoon, who had become orphaned. She had been born in an attic & her mum had apparently been trapped & taken away, leaving behind Rocket & possibly some other babies. She was found trapped inside the wall, the wall was pulled apart & the woman who found it didn’t want her in her house any longer. I tried to contact a few different places to take her, but when it became apparent that I wouldn’t be able to find a home for her, with other raccoons for a few days I set about getting myself setup to look after her until such time as I could find someone.

I found a couple of websites with a host of information on it about looking after baby orphaned raccoons, although to be fair, there wasn’t a whole lot on raising newborns like what I have & certainly nothing about how hard it might be to actually get a hold of someone with experience to do it, which is what I found. Many places will only take in domesticated animals & have a policy of putting down any others, which is pretty sad to be honest. Sometimes there is more cruelty that happens with animals than with humans & vice versa.

Care for orphaned raccoons & 2nd Chance Info, were the sites that I found most useful.

Rocket arrives

8 May 2013

I hadn’t anticipated that it would be as hard as it was to actually get someone from the wildlife sanctuary to respond to my request for help & have Rocket placed with a carer. I received Rocket on Wednesday night, sent an email (as the message bank on their phones answering machine was full) early Thursday morning & then didn’t hear back until late Saturday night. Rocket did pretty well up until Friday night, when she hadn’t pooped all day, I managed to get her to poop Saturday morning, but she had started to lose interest in eating from Friday evening to Saturday, perhaps it had to do with switching her to pedialyte, which I was doing to try to rehydrate her? At some point she ended up with fluid in her lungs, perhaps from my feeding of her or the person before? I know that she gulped a little too much on  a few feedings, but I tried tipping her upside down to allow it to drain (maybe I didn’t do it for long enough?) & cleaned her up, but maybe it wasn’t enough? I find myself questioning everything that I did & wondering what if?

Rocket is a girl

9 May 2013

I certainly went into it with the best of intentions & to find out after I took her to the wildlife rescue that she died a few hours later was devastating. She was found at 2am on Mothers Day, having passed away when they went to give her more fluids subcutaneously.  I had tried reaching out a few places for help, to no avail. I really do wish that the wildlife centre had checked their messages sooner, if Rocket had gotten there the day before I am sure that she would still be alive, possibly even a few hours earlier.

Levi has a pat

Levi loved helping with Rocket, here he’s having some cuddles

So many what ifs. As a few friends pointed out, I am not a raccoon mum, I’m a human mum, who is looking after a toddler & pregnant with another, I gave it my best shot & in the end I gave her a few more extra days than she would have had.

 

 

 

Levi checks on Rocket

Levi checks in on Rocket 11 May

 

Newborns of any species are very hard to look after, they require a huge amount of care & maybe in time I will find the knowledge in knowing that I tried, a bit more reassuring, but for now, I still can’t get past the failure

Rest In Peace, sweet Rocket, we loved getting to know you & sorry that your lifespan was less than a week in length.

Posted in Animals, Canada | Leave a comment

Rainy day…

We had some absolutely BEAUTIFUL weather on the weekend, the sun was out, the temperature up to about 22C, it was lovely. Rather encouraging when it snowed the weekend before, yep, snow in April :( Whilst it’s kinda nice to have the rain, I do wish that we had a lovely tin roof, that I could hear the pitter patter of raindrops on the roof, but alas, they are not as popular here as they are in Australia. Today started out a touch chilly & apparently is only predicted to get up to 15C, but I didn’t realise that it would rain, which reminds me that I really ought to get a nice raincoat for Levi, so that he can play in the rain if he so desires. As it stands, I think I might have to try to entertain him inside rather than out today.

He was rather grumpy this morning, he started out in a good mood, but I think that he got rather frustrated with me getting sorted for us to go to the local library for story time & a play before, that he lost it & when he loses it, it’s generally a sign that he’s far too tired & he should have a sleep. He’s been down since 10 (now after 12.30pm) so he obviously needed the nap that he was trying so desperately to avoid by being a grumpy bum.

It’s great to see Levi loving being outside so much these days. He adored our time in Australia, where he could go outside pretty much everyday, although we did stay inside a bit when it was bucketing down with rain, which it did a bit (there were a few cyclones etc, pretty typical for Oz). He also had a lot of attention from friends & family over there, all keen to get to know our mini-us. This last weekend was amazing for him, he was outside all day Sunday (except for his nap) & most of Saturday too. It’s so cute watching him trying to put on his socks & shoes so that he can go outside & play, he absolutely adores being out & doing stuff.

Posted in Levi, Weather | Leave a comment

Cleanup

I’ve finally decided to do a clean up of my blog subscribers, so if you decided to subscribe to my blog without using a legit name or an email that looks rather weird, be prepared that your “subscription” will be purged. If you want to re-subscribe, feel free to do it with legit details :)

Posted in Writing | 1 Comment

Yard Clean Up

(I apologise now for the poor formatting, whilst my “draft” post appears fine, once it publishes something happens & all the formatting becomes disjointed & out of whack, so please bear with the shitty layout)

What a weekend, we managed to achieve A LOT, although I think that tomorrow I will wish that we had a 3 day weekend, so that we can have an extra day to recuperate :)

Saturday, we decided it was time to go out & get some tools to help make things easier for us (well Geoff really, as I am sort of out of commission for doing as much as I would like to this year). We purchased a chainsaw & leaf blower – wohoo!

Geoff was having a great deal of fun using them & the difference made by using some decent power tools is quite noticeable too. We still had leaves on the lawn from last year, even though we moved so many of them last fall, yes, we have that many leaf shedding trees. The leaf blower will actually mulch the leaves as well, although only leaves, not branches, so I don’t know that we will be mulching many leaves at the moment, due to all the little branches etc that are now on the ground from over the winter. There are some beautiful sections of the lawn that are now clear of debris & it looks fantastic, thanks Geoff.

So many of our poor tree’s suffered this winter & we lost a lot of branches off some tree’s, some of which we were able to salvage, whilst other tree’s were unable to be rescued.

Juniper to be cut

Juniper to be cut

The damaged Juniper

The damaged Juniper

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
One tree that we were pretty happy to see the last of was the Juniper. It suffered the winter before last & then last winter finished it off. Not only was it now looking rather ugly, but the needles that it drops are awful to stand on & have rendered the ground around it useless for anything else to grow. With it no longer being aesthetically appealing, there wasn’t any reason to hold onto it. It’s actually kind of nice to see more of the house & as a bonus we no longer have to worry about parts of the tree falling onto the roof, as had happened in the past. :)

Juniper being cut

Juniper being cut

Juniper down

Juniper down

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The hedge after a trim

The hedge after a trim

Some of the damaged hedge

Some of the damaged hedge

 

 

 

 

 

Our poor cedar hedge was another part that took a hammering over the winter too, which meant a few parts had to be cut, which is a shame, but the damage was done, so there’s nothing left to do but try to salvage the bits we can. This weekend we managed to “trim” it, but in the coming weeks we will have to get some ropes & tie the hedge together in places to help straighten & strengthen the hedge as much as possible, in the hope that it prevents too much more damage in the future.

The inukshuk near the driveway, as you first come past the hedge, was getting hard to see with all the debris from the HUGE pine tree we have in the driveway as well. Poor, pine tree. It’s a beautiful big tree, with lots of limbs on it. I hadn’t realised that all the debris on the ground was from the one tree, until yesterday, when I looked up the tree to survey the damage. Whilst we were away in Australia one of our neighbours with a big tractor had ploughed our driveway (which they made a special point of mentioning the other day, we at least bit our tongue & didn’t say that we had noticed that they must have come in because they managed to remove part of the driveway in the process – so unimpressed, as we hadn’t even asked them to come in & they wanted us to be incredibly thankful that they had done our drive). So, I had assumed that they had damaged some of the tree’s in the process of doing the driveway (which is still possible I guess) most likely though the branches came off as a result of the crap weather we had.

After the cleanup can see Inukshuk again

After the cleanup can see Inukshuk again

BEFORE the cleanup, Inukshuk almost buried

BEFORE the cleanup, Inukshuk almost buried

Inukshuk has pride of place again

Inukshuk has pride of place again

All in all, a pretty successful weekend, we burnt a lot of debris & wood, although we did save some of the nicer wood for later. We will burn the cedar in the fireplaces inside the house & the pine will be used solely for the firepit. I foresee a few bonfires with marshmallows, baked potatoes & snags etc for a little bit :)

Posted in Canada, Our House, Outdoor | Leave a comment

America’s Guns

Well worth a watch if  you get a chance

The Daily Show: John Oliver Investigates Gun Control in Australia – part 1


Part 2

Part 3

Posted in Funny, Misc | Leave a comment

Ability not DISability

A while ago, actually after I had just found out that I was pregnant with Sprout I had an allergic reaction. A photo was uploaded onto FB & many people commented on it. I was actually in the hospital visiting a friend & had the misfortune of choosing that time to misread a label (the ingredients were split in two, with advertising between, so whilst the top part of the ingredients were ok, I discovered that 2nd part that was hidden were not, after I had consumed some of the food & re-read the WHOLE packet).

One of the comments that was made by someone was that if they were there they would have stopped me & whilst I know that the comment was meant to be nice, it has annoyed the shit out of me for several months now. There seems to be an idea by (most of) society in general that those who have a disability of some sort need to be helped, they need to be watched over & cared for, protected,  because they are less than everyone else. It might not seem like that to anyone without a disability of some sort, but to those of us that have something that then gives you that label, you can find yourself confronted by “well intentioned” patronisation on a regular basis & that gets more than a bit annoying.

I do not want to be seen as different to everyone else, I want to blend. I dislike having a spotlight put on me & my allergies (or even other health conditions I have), some people revel in it, me, not so much. Yes, I will roll with the punches & I can even get hyped up to a certain extent about my allergies when I am dining out, which has happened on occasion when those I am with make a HUGE deal about them, I am referencing a certain friends birthday party, where my meal was royally screwed up & I would have frankly preferred not so big a deal was made, but in the end had to try to gain some control of the situation, which was already very awkward.

Yes, my allergies are anaphylactic, yes, I carry 4 epi-pens with me in the event of an emergency, no, I don’t want to use them, but you know what, neither do I want to have a huge fuss made where all I want to do is melt into the upholstery & disappear because I am so embarrassed by the fact that those I am with think that I am completely incapable of looking after myself.

Newsflash, I am well into my 30′s now, I have survived this long without you, pretty sure I can do it for a lot longer too, back off! Stop focussing on the DISability & focus on peoples abilities!

Posted in Allergies, Canada, Food | Leave a comment

Cravings

Different circumstances mean quite a different pregnancy this time around in so many ways. Last time I fell pregnant about 3 months after we arrived in Canada from 6 months of starvation in Asia & craved lots of hot chips. This time all I want is sushi it seems (ok not much different to normal), I can eat a few hot chips here & there, but I don’t feel like them everyday for every meal.

Hopefully this means Sprout won’t be a huge baby when it comes to delivery :)

 

 

Posted in Baby, Canada, Food, pregnancy | Leave a comment

Shower

So, I have decided that even though it isn’t apparently tradition not to have a shower for the second baby you have, that I want to have a shower for Sprout too.

I really want to celebrate their upcoming entrance into the world & not just go with the idea that we are just having a second & it’s no big deal.

Not sure how I want to do it exactly, I don’t want anything huge, just a few friends over. A bit like what I will do for Levi’s 2nd birthday party. He’s 1.5years old today, in 6 months time not only will he be 2, but he will have already become an older brother too. Which is another thing I want to do, I need to try to organise his birthday party bits as much as possible in the coming months, because closer to the time & especially when Sprout arrives, there won’t be a lot of time or energy to do a lot.

This is what happens when you learn to be self reliant. At least I will be there for my kids as they grow up & when they become adults & chose to have a family of their own, breaking another chain of tradition from my family :s

Posted in Family, Toddler | Leave a comment

Baby lead weaning

It appears that Levi might be ready to wean from breastfeeding very soon. HIS choice, not mine, the way it should be.

He didn’t have a feed last night before bed, albeit part of that may have had something to do with him being naughty & being sent to bed without, but he never woke up asking for some. Then this morning, he ran out into the kitchen for breakfast straight away, not even asking for milk, like he normally does. He normally only feeds twice a day (morning & night). He enjoyed a bit of a feed before bed tonight, so not done yet :)

Oh well, I know it’s coming, it’s just a bit of a reminder how fast he’ growing

Posted in Breastfeeding, Levi, Toddler | Leave a comment

Icy outside

I had to quickly get some pictures of some of the ice that’s on the tree’s at the moment. Nothing fantastic, as I was trying to be quick, but still shows some of the beauty. Even though weather like this is rather wrong in April

Gazebo 12 April 2013Ice on pine tree 12 April 2013

 

 

 

 

IMG_0141

IMG_0142

Posted in Canada, Weather | Leave a comment