Thus, it was ironic today that Abraham fell (or something—I had gone with Phil to check the cows, and was coming back when I heard his screams). Somehow he hit his head on the coffee table hard enough to draw blood.
After giving him a compress of toilet paper to staunch the bleeding and giving him homeopathic arnica for trauma, I looked at the back of his head.
We needed a doctor.
The bleeding stopped quickly, so I didn't want to go to the emergency room. Happily our friend Dr. Zach had a time available about two hours later, so Phil took Abraham in.
Abraham had actually hit through to the skull (what a fall it must have been, on the rounded edge of our coffee table), and Zach was able to clean it out properly, then numb the area with injections all around (poor guy—I remember how much that part hurt Isaiah, and can only imagine on the back of head). It looks like he needed three stitches, as I predicted.
Then, since he had hit through to the skull, and since infections can set in and rapidly spread through the body, he also has a prescription for antibiotics.
I'm not a fan of antibiotics for general purposes (low-dosage for cows, pigs, or chickens: no; antibiotics for ear infections: no, I prefer garlic oil; antibiotics for sore throats: no, I prefer homeopathy). But antibiotics to prevent full body infection, starting near the brain? Yes, thank you, I'll give that to my son with thanksgiving.
When they got back, Phil said that he was so embarrassed by how dirty Abraham and Isaiah were. If I were there, I would have said, "Wow, I'm totally embarrassed by how dirty the boys are. Two weeks ago on Saturday, when we usually bathe, we had run out of propane. (Phil had gone to buy some, but the man who filled the canisters had gone home early). So we skipped a week, because we really had no choice. Then this last Saturday, the boys were sick, and we weren't heading to town, so I didn't haul them out into the cold wind to make them clean off. And Sunday we had no running water most of the day because our pilot light burned out, and now it's Monday, and bathing for a doctor's appointment wasn't on the list of things to do. So we really aren't ever this dirty, and I just want to make that clear."
But he suffered his mortification in silence. We'll bathe the boys soon.
While Abraham was being brave during that painful hour at the doctor's, I read in a paper I rather randomly picked up that it's good to get scion wood for grafting in January and February here in Virginia. This shocked me, and, since this was the last of the really favorable days in the biodynamic calendar in February, I headed out to prune as many apple trees as I could.
It just took the afternoon, but I ended up with a nice pile of trimmings. I was looking for scion wood between 3/8 and 1/2 inch in diameter.
When I measured with calipers, all but 46 pieces were too tiny. That's not much to practice grafting. It was a disappointing show.
As Phil and I looked into it a little more, perhaps I could have saved pieces down to a quarter inch. But I had not kept the detritus separated by tree variety. Any pieces I went to gather from the pile outside would be mystery twigs.
It's all part of the education here on the farm. Sometimes I wish the educational process wasn't quite so painful.
On the bright side, they are memorable!
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