What a Weekend!

Yesterday my son turned 21 - mind boggling.  My Dad turned 80, my Mom turned 81, my youngest son turned 8 and now my oldest son turns 21.....so much life in such a short amount of time!!!!  And such extremes from literally one of the youngest in the family to the oldest....

My 21 year old certainly doesn't live a normal life.  Last week he was busy with whale emergencies....It's safe to say drownings, hypothermia, and whale attacks are a constant risk for him....  Then, only, a few days later he was in an emergency room getting rabies vaccines because he'd been bitten by one of our cats that appeared to have rabies.  We are starting to wonder what every day will hold around here!

Normally we leave our barn cats pretty much alone.  We feed them, but the males stay outside.  The females are inside.  This one cat appears to be in a cat gang.  If he had pockets, I'm pretty sure they would be full of knives, guns and drugs.  He always looked pretty scary, but was always purring and approachable to us.  When we would see him with a scratch from a cat battle, he would always heal and be back to normal, but last week when we saw him, it was worse than usual and my husband, who normally would not care too much, suggested we should really take him in and see if we could help him.  We did this and my son, who wants to be a doctor, was the one who bandaged, medicated and took care of him.  The cat didn't love the care he was getting and wasn't particularly grateful!  During one of the bandage changes, he turned his head and bit my son very badly.  We were a little worried about it, but the wound healed within 3 days and there was no swelling or redness.  We figured he was ok, especially because he also had vaccines for his Africa trip.  However, after a few days, I noticed the cat wasn't doing well and seemed to be getting worse.  I hate spending unnecessary money, but knew we had to put him down.  Everyone agreed.  What I didn't understand was that the symptoms he was showing, like excessive drooling and problems walking, were potentially rabies symptoms.  With rabies, I pictured what you see in movies, frothing and crazy behaviour.  This cat wasn't doing any of that.  When we did take him to the vet, the vet did a routine check of the cat before putting him down and immediately noticed the symptoms as well and mentioned what he thought to my son.  "Rabies?  Really?  The cat bit me last week."  "Uh, that's a problem.  You have to talk with public health.  You might be in trouble, " the vet told my son.  Great.  Rabies?  All you have to do is google that and all that comes up is certain death if you don't catch it before the symptoms start to show themselves.  I was trying hard to not freak out.  Public health called within the hour and basically said, "Run to emergency now!"  We dropped everything, sent some emergency texts ourselves, asking for prayer, and off he went.  He was given a bunch of shots and will go back again for more this week.  We will find out 100% if it was rabies soon, but either way, he's going to be ok.  He had to take them.  It wasn't worth the risk.

But really.  A cat?  He dies by a cat?  He'd been with HUGE whales just days before, but no, a cat nearly takes him out.  My brother joked that he'd been in India and Africa, near all sorts of dangerous animals, but again, a barn cat.  What a terrible way to go!  So, now he's good.  Whew!  All I can say is I know for sure that he is being prepared for something because no one has as many life and death experiences as this guy.  Several years ago on his 16th birthday he was stung many times by a bunch of bees when he was beekeeping.  He always has a story, I'm telling you....

My other son, whose middle name happens to be "Valour", also had quite a weekend.  We got 3 piglets a couple of days ago and after getting their pen ready, we were prepping to release them into their new home.  This is always one of the highlights of our animal experiences and is always worth a laugh.  Pigs have this way of squealing like you are poking them with a branding iron even when you aren't, thus the expression "squealing like a pig"....We called everyone down because we knew it was going to be hilarious.  Sure enough, they didn't disappoint.

We made a little piggie shute and then my husband started to try to catch one at a time to put them in.  But, of course they ran away each time, so he got my son to get in the trailer with the pigs to guide them to my husband.  The squealing was so loud and so funny I was laughing the whole time.  The drama started with the last pig.  As my husband put piggie #2 in the barn, piggie #3 jumped down into the grass which was REALLY bad as he was going to try to escape and once a pig runs away, it would be very difficult to catch.  My husband saw this and yelled, "Don't let him out!"  My 9 year kicked it into high gear, and without thinking twice, jumped down and tried to grab the pig.  To all of our amazement, the kid got him and held on tight even though the crazy mad pig was doing his best to get away, dragging my son every where he went!  My son was getting quite banged around, but he held on like a professional pig wrestler and because of his amazing tenacity and stick-to-it-ive-ness, he managed to stop him from getting away, even though he got quite banged up himself.  I can only think he knew deep down that if he let go it was going to be bad.  We were all so amazed.  RM grabbed the piglet and got him safely in the barn after which we all cheered for my brave son!  One of the funniest things, I've ever seen and heard.  My daughter managed to record a little of it, so I'll try to include it.

This post doesn't even include the little bunny we found outside, caught by one of our other cats, that also sadly passed away, or the little kitten we decided to keep to cheer up the kids......there is just always so much going on......it's like one of the verses in the Bible describing Jesus' life...."Now there are also many other things that Jesus did.  Were every one of them written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written."  Ok, our life is hardly the life of Jesus, but sometimes I feel I would be here all day if I wrote it all down.....