Help with milk jars

I finally got around to two things on my to-do list.  No, wait, three things.  The first was the goat birth kit.  I will post about that soon.  I can assure you it is very, very minimalist!  I suppose I really need to look into things further to see if I should add to it.  The other two things were to organize the medicine cabinet, and to make up a new system to keep tabs on our milk. 

First, the medicine cabinet.  I can't stand clutter.  Never mind that I live in the midst of clutter.  Oy.  Jeremiah took all the kids with him to run errands a few days ago.  This gave me a good chunk of time to get some things done without all the 'help' given by wee boys.  So some before and afters:

 The dreaded before. 

After. Much better.  Now to try to keep it this way!

The second item completed was to try out a system this milking season to keep our milk in order.  What do I mean?  Well, with two goats in milk we get one and a half gallons of milk a day.  Now, we can run through our share of milk, but sometimes those milk jugs get jumbled up and I don't know which jar is the oldest (and therefore needs to be used up first).  So during one of my blog readings I came across this great idea over at Reformation Acres.  As I pondered if this system would work for our family I thought it best to tweak it a bit for a couple of reasons.  Quinn (at Reformation Acres) uses colored sticker dots. She tapes them to the metal canning jar lids.  She says that she has to re-do them every so often as the tape wears off.  I thought...Me?  Having to re-do something....hmmmm, I can see that falling apart right there!  Hey, I know my weak points!  Secondly the dots are taped to the lid, which means I would have to *search* for the right color lid when it was needed.  Oh, my...that could be a disaster over here!  So I came up with my own system.  Granted I do not know if it is going to work, but I have it at the ready for when we are swimming in milk from all 5 of our female goats. 

I decided to cut out colored circles from paint chips (each color is for each day of the week; Sunday: pink, Monday: red, Tuesday: orange, etc.)  I laminated them and put a magnet on the back.  This way all the magnets (theoretically speaking) will reside on the side of our fridge.  When we bring in our milk on a Monday we will grab the correct colored disk and put it on the lid.  When it comes time to wash the jars I can just take it off with ease and place it back in it's proper space on the fridge (again, theoretically speaking).  Here are my pictures of my future milk tracking system:

The colored magnetized disks at home. 

If anyone counted you would see that I have 8 colors, not 7 (for each day of the week).  The eighth color, brown, is for our yogurt and kefir.  Both can be a bit hard to tell from just looks.  So I have half the disks with the letter 'Y' on it, and the other half with the letter 'K' (y=yogurt, k=kefir).  This will also alert others that a mysterious jar with white stuff in it is my fermenting kefir, and NOT rotten milk to be poured down the drain.  Poor, poor kefir grains.  Aubrey 'killed' my kefir grains that I was using to ferment coconut milk, and a certain someone else 'killed' my regular milk kefir grains.  Thankfully I have a friend who is giving me some more!

The theoretical beauty of the system will be this:  A child sees three milk jars in the fridge.  This child knows we need to drink the oldest milk first.  According to the order of the rainbow colors (we are using pink as number one) they can clearly see that they need to grab the jar with the orange tab. 

See?  Magnetized.  I am a bit concerned that the magnet is on the weak side.  I can see that it may come off as someone is opening a jar.  That could get 'messy'.  Time will tell.


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