10yo Megan and I were out on a trip to do errands and get birthday ice cream and while we were in Home Depot looking at light fixtures on clearance, she started thinking out loud.

“You know how stores will sometimes have great sales, like spend $100 and get a free $100 gift card? Even though it sounds like half price, sometimes that’s not such a great deal. A person might decide to buy something that costs $350 because they can get it for only $250, but that’s $250 that they weren’t already going to spend. Sometimes people might just want to spend money because of the special, and that’s not really saving money.”

Smart girl, huh? Sometimes it takes a lifetime to learn this. Some of us never learn.

Today after mom killed it, we did an autopsy on the snake that ate our barn swallows.

First, you see the little kids staring in morbid fascination as Lydia, and Megan cut the vile beast open with my knife, and below that you see the adult and baby barn swallows that we found in his stomach.

We found three birds in all, one adult, and two babies. The snake STANK of unspeakable things. I took a few pictures and then retreated to the house while they explored his insides in the name of homeschooling, and then cheerfully dumped the whole mess on the compost pile for the ants.

This whole adventure reminds me of the time when Mom and Grandma found a freshly killed armadillo on the side of the road, and then brought it home for an autopsy. We found his heart, his intestines, and his lungs, and then after failing to break open the skull, we disposed of it on the trash heap.

Like the total girls that we are both times me and my sisters squealed a little, and then settled down to a regular pattern of “ooohhh, aaahhhhh,” and “eeewwww, cool!”.

Once Lydia and I did an autopsy on a hog head, but I won’t go into the details of that one. It’s just too gross.

We have had a swallows’ nest in the gable over our back door. They raise used to raise a couple of broods of young every year and do did a beautiful job at keeping the mosquitoes under control. They even killed off the wasps that tried to establish a colony there. See the empty wasp nest below the bird nest?

Today, instead of the chorus of hungry baby birds, we heard silence when we opened the back door. Here’s what we saw when we looked up:

I feel sure you are missing the full horror of the sight, but this guy is dangling directly above my back door, precariously wrapped around a birds’ nest. I think we can assume the nest is empty.

The question is, what do we do now? And also, how in the name of all that’s good did he get up there?

I really want to get back to participating in Works For Me Wednesday, but I’m having a hard time coming up with any new ideas.  I have the usual suspicion that we have lots of unusual and helpful ideas in action around here, but I need to see things with a fresh eye.  I feel like I need a total stranger to walk in and say, “Oh, you do that! What a great idea!”  And I’ll be surprised that everyone else in the world doesn’t already do it my way.  Then I will feel unique and brilliant, rather than sluggish and pregnant.

I’m not sure what my point is.  Maybe you could offer a pregnant woman a pat on the back?  Have I ever shared an idea that changed the way you do things in your house?  It doesn’t have to be life changing.  Just tell me you liked the way I matched socks or motivated kids to kill flies and decided to do it my way.

A reader asked why we have our babies at home. The short, easy answer is because my parents had most of their children at home. It was the most comfortable place for me to give birth.

Of course, that’s not the entire basis for our decision! We did some research and learned that even according to the CDC (where one might expect to find negatively slanted statistics), for low risk pregnancies, home births attended by a trained midwife have a statistically better outcome for both mother and child than do comparable low risk hospital births.

So having established that birthing at home was a safe and reasonable choice, we moved on to weighing the reasons to do so:

• I’ve never enjoyed hospitals. Quite frankly, they give me the heebie jeebies. There’s just too many needles there.
• Labor is uncomfortable. I had no desire to hop in the car for a long bumpy ride during labor.
• I wanted to avoid unnecessary interventions and procedures that would likely slow my recovery, such as an episiotomy. Especially since an espisiotomy would require the application of needles to certain areas of which I am highly protective.
• Hospitals are generally for sick people. I don’t want to think about all the germs floating around there, and I don’t want to bring a healthy baby into an environment full of sick people and pathogens.

We really only saw one reason for us to consider a hospital birth, and it simply wasn’t enough to outweigh all of the reasons above: for most of our children, our health insurance did not cover the midwife’s charges at all, or only provided minimal coverage. Nearly every birth at home cost us more than a hospital birth would have cost. Until we became members of Samaritan Ministries, that is. Now we don’t pay a dime.

And so…we birth our children at home. Each labor has been uncomplicated, but our midwives over the years have had a strong medical background, up-to-date training, and the equipment and knowledge to handle most emergencies. They also have a very low rate of transport to hospitals, a very low rate of c-section outcomes, and they know their stuff. And we don’t forget this part: God is in control. Man proposes, but God disposes. We do our best to make a wise decision, and rest in the sovereignty of our Lord.

A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the Lord directeth his steps.

Proverbs 16:9

“There are many devices in a man’s heart; nevertheless the counsel of the Lord, that shall stand.”

Proverbs 19:21

You may have picked up on the fact that the females in our house wear mostly skirts and dresses, most of the time.  Apparently The Boy has picked up on this too.

Yesterday I wore a pair of shorts, thinking I might get my legs wet in the kids’ pool to cool off during the heat of the day.  They were long shorts, but they didn’t reach my ankles or mid-calves like my skirts do.

The Boy took one look at me and pointed and laughed.  “Mommy naked! Naked!”

I tried to convince him otherwise, but he just wasn’t buying my story.  Maybe I should have left well enough alone.

On another note, I am cute.  I am also darling, precious, and just the cutest thing ever. I know this because no less than 15 strangers told me this when I went grocery shopping a few days ago.

I think it may have been my outfit so I had my daughter take pictures to preserve my Day of Cuteness.  She generously offered to Photoshop out my belly button but I declined just in case my belly button was the true source of cuteness.