Week of busy bees

Well last Sunday night we discovered that Valentina had not seen the baby since she was born. Valentina is very shy with strangers, and like most of our students, doesn't trust authority figures. The hospital staff thought that if she wasn't talking to them, they couldn't leave the baby with her.

Monday morning, Victor, Max and Garry went to the hospital to talk to them. They were there for hours, but finally after talking to several people, including a doctor, they promised to put the baby with her.  When they were asked which of them were Valentina's father, Max replied "all of them". They told them there was a possible problem with the baby's heart that had been noted on Valentina's last ultrasound. The baby wasn't allowed to cry too much before the specialist appointment yesterday. Fortunately, there doesn't seem to be a big problem and they are finally cleared to come home on Monday. They couldn't process the paper work in time to get out Friday, we were told. We did get Valentina to send us a photo of Angela in her new hat and onesie we bought on Thursday. Valentina says that Angela eats and sleeps, so that sounds like a baby!

So everyday we drive to Zaporosia to drop off a bag of lunch and stuff Valentina needs (like baby wipes, bottles- we are worried that breastfeeding is not going well after the delay). Yesterday we went later in the afternoon and had a problem with the van so we returned home for the car, but got there after five, and the office that takes things up to the rooms was closed. If there wasn't a quarantine, the normal procedure is the patients would come out to see you and get the bag. So this morning I got to drive into the city with yesterday's bag. I stopped at a grocery store to try to find a better nipple for the bottle as requested and ended up buying a third bottle since there wasn't any without bottles. Hopefully they like this one, it looked like the right kind. She said the milk was coming out too fast.

So we have also been on bee watch, Victor spilt the hives from two to four and there was a mix-up on queens, one hive has an extra, so they will maybe kill one or she might fly off with a bunch of her subjects. The weather wasn't good on Tuesday, so Victor couldn't get in and try to fix things. So far, so good, but we'll see. Or not, they sometimes sneak away.

This week Garry and Victor also fixed upstairs, where the attic wall blew off this spring. No one fell off the ladder, but I heard they were more worried about a number of hornet nests up there while they were working.

It's really busy in the fields, they are still installing drip line, now they are connecting everything to the big hoses, which takes a while. They threw away some of the big hoses and are replacing it with new. Wednesday Thursday I cooked a big lunch for the guys working. Garry was mowing hay, by the time I collected him and we found the guys Max had just brought them bread and baloney, so they were pretty full with hotdogs, macaroni with tomato sauce and cabbage salad and dessert by the time they were done. Most of them still had seconds, although the bread I sliced to go with lunch mostly come home. We're still using it for toast.

They were hoping to make dry hay, but Friday morning they decided they'd have to turn it into haylage. The old chopper is hanging together so far, although the pieces are pretty long going in the bunk. It wasn't the nicest looking hay to begin with between alfalfa weevils and spring weeds.

Friday was Alonya's birthday and I made her a cake (she wanted Canadian chocolate) and we dropped it off before leaving on our unsuccessful trip to Zaporosia. We had bought her present she wanted on Wednesday since the shops were open in Zaporosia. She loves doing beadwork pictures, and we know to buy a big one we might want to keep, because it's the making not the keeping she wants!

The quarantine is phasing down a bit, so the students (with masks on) are hoping to go to Zaporosia to the mall for groceries tonight, and Garry has agreed, as long as the van is roadworthy. This morning he had a group of students go clean up the village church yard, the pastor hopes to have a service next week. Two months worth of grass and weeds were pretty tall. The students painting the well have been busy all week making a picket fence for a lady in the village, it's almost ready to install. They even have a second person interested in buying a fence.

Garry was breeding a cow last week when the lady asked if they could make her a fence like the ones they built for Kolya's house. He's been really busy breeding cows this week, three different days he's bred eight cows, tying his record for a day here in Ukraine. A couple times we bred cows on the way to or coming home from bringing Valentina's bag to Zaporosia. This lady was very pleased with the calf she had this spring.