Acres of Ability

We love chicken salad! In fact, Kyra and I make fresh, yummy chicken salad nearly every day… but ours is a little different than the recipe in your favorite cookbook. In fact, we should probably call our concoction “Salade Pour Des Poulets” instead, since it’s not about us eating chickens, but rather about our chickens eating salad. For years, we have taken in hens that a neighboring egg farmer has classified as “past their prime” (i.e. headed for slaughter).  While these feisty hens don’t lay as regularly or vigorously as their youthful counterparts, it is enough to supply us, our neighbors, our friends, and our extended family with plenty of bright, fresh, free-range eggs. And, Kyra and I have found that supplementing our hens’ diet with our special Chicken Salad improves the health of the chicken as well as the taste of the egg.  So, what is this Chicken Salad recipe?  In a word (or rather two) “veggie scraps". We prepare lots and lots of fresh veggies for our...

This week, Kyra and I attended our first cross-country meet to watch my 7th grade niece, Mali, run (and run, and run, and run).  We had a bit of a cross-country workout ourselves getting to the course, pushing Kyra’s wheelchair down the soggy ISU dairy barn driveway (Yes! We finally had enough rain to make mud!), dodging traffic to cross Mortensen Drive, popping wheelies over street curbs, and jarring our way across the course and up a hill to the finish line. About 20 minutes later, we clapped and cheered for nearly 250 young ladies running, jogging, walking, and stumbling over that finish line. Then we made the return trip, trudging across the wheelchair-jarring course, over the street curbs, through the mud, and finally, slogging our way down the gravel driveway to our van. As I consider the challenges we all face every day, I realize it’s not the difficulty of the course that’s important: It’s being there for the whole race. Because Kyra and I made the effort to be ...

How was your August?  August didn’t go, or for that matter, grow, so well for us.  This summer’s heat and drought seemed to dry up my energy as well as my garden.  The leaves on crops and trees alike are either brown and crispy, or dull and drooping with dust.   And my Kyra quit smiling. When someone is non-verbal and cannot write or sign or point or use other conventional communication methods, body language and facial expressions become your only true glimpse into their thoughts, hopes, fears, hurts, and joys. So, when my Kyra doesn't smile, it's a big deal around here. Come to find out, her lack of expression and frequent coughing episodes, which I attributed to exposure to new allergens during a several-state road trip, were caused instead by pneumonia.  And when we returned from our adventure, we discovered that our dog Anya was not lethargic due to the record-breaking heat, but Lyme disease. With her antibiotic treatments completed, and Anya's an...