our weekend flowed with blood and honey. not the good kind of honey. but first...the blood:

i am no good when it comes to blood. it's the only thing i'm pretty much terrified of when i'm solo-parenting, which, fortunately, isn't very often at all.

saturday night, adam slammed his mouth into an edge of a wooden piece of furniture. when i heard the screaming, i ran to him and held him tight (praying over and over that there would be no blood...something i do everytime one of them hits their head...blood has only happened one other time in front of trader joe's with sawyer. yes, i know how "fortunate" i am being a mother of three boys!). his screaming got louder just as kenny entered the room and noticed blood all over my shirt. so he took adam while i got a wet paper towel and some ice. he just kept bleeding and i just kept hiding while kenny tended to him. he noticed a gash on the inside of his lip, so i called the doctor. my parents were across the street this night as well, so they were able to come over and give a second opinion (and stay with the older two boys if we needed to take adam to get stitches).

i can do everything else that needs to be done in these situations EXCEPT actually LOOK at the wound.

i would be a terrible nurse or doctor.

fortunately, all is now well. his lip didn't really get that big the next day, and he's back to eating normal foods. but i have yet to look inside his mouth (that's kenny's job!).

earlier that same day, kenny decided to assess the beehives. he wasn't all that sure that they survived as we've been noticing many many dead bees in front of the hives on previous checks. since it was warmer than usual out, he opened up the hives and found what he had been worried about: the bees were dead. there are so many reasons this could happen...cold, mites, disease. we decided against medicating them since we left all the honey for the winter. we're not completely sure if this was the sole cause, but it could have been part of it.

he brought an entire box of honey supers up to the house, and we've been dipping our fingers into the raw honey and comb. the boys love it. the honey is very mild and light in color. eventually, when our next batch of bees make it through the winter, we'll have some good honey on our hands. until then, we order more bees this spring...make sure the bear stay far away, perhaps medicate (or add sugar water to their hives on days above freezing in the winter) them next winter.

i guess there's a huge learning curve in all these hobbies we're taking on.