Back to normal life...

Ha, ha, ha!!!  Some joke, eh?  The break was great!  I am sure I will do one again in the near future.  I set high goals (with the idea we would aim high, and if we missed, at least we would have gotten a lot accomplished).  Not all of my goals were met.  Surprise :-)  I really need to get back into schooling, which will be hard since I still have a lot of work to do in that area.  But, for now, we must press forward, making do with what we did get done.  I am going to try to keep up a reduced computer time and put that time into the things that were left undone.

I made sure to add some fun things in our 'schedule' these past two weeks.  We had a birthday and a mock camping weekend.  We still need to do some major improvements of work habits.  Oy.  Not sure how to address that issue right now.  I suppose a lot of prayer and thought will need to take place to work that out. 

I suppose I will make a list of all that still needs doing and spread the work out over a week, instead of a day or two.  Sometimes it just seems like there is a never ending list of all that needs doing.

We had a cute little surprise yesterday.  Saoirse was going out to collect the eggs when she heard this cheeping from under the house.  She peeked her head into the open air vent (some of our grated ventilation spots do not have their grates anymore), and lo and behold one of our chickens had been laying eggs under the house and she hatched out 6 chicks!!!  Unfortunately one of them died this morning.  This chicken is a first time mom :-)  She's doing a great job, but sometimes I've seen one or two chicks go running off in the opposite direction.  These little guys are REALLY little...only a few days old, all yellow down.  The one that died got stepped on by a larger animal (a goat I suppose).  Poor little thing. 

I will try to get some pictures up to show you all some of what went on during our 2 week break.

PS: I am working on my blog design, so I apologize beforehand if things don't work, or if things look wonky.  I am having a hard time getting my side bars to not interfere with my posts.  Not to mention that I can not customize all of my text colors.  I am not digging the blue :-) 

Changing up the goats

The other day was some kind of "eyes open" day.  I sat on the couch, across from the window that Moira had just passed the goat milk through.  We use our family room window as a way to pass things that either need to go in or out of the house.  Otherwise you need to unlock the dog gate, and open the back door, and open a baby gate before you can do what you needed doing.  And since I have no intention of pulling a wagon or cooler through all that to do the goat milking, we use our family room window.  Unconventional, yes. 

So as I sat there and a big thought came to me.  Not sure why now, but it did.  Moira and I have been sharing the milking duty.  Jeremiah and I also feed the goats each evening.  With our females in milk, they need a lot of feed.  And here was where my thoughts lay:

We have two goats that are great producers.  They give us each more than a quart of milk, per milking.  Currently we are only milking once a day, since the babies are too young to sell just yet.  They each get fed 4 to 5 cups of food twice a day.  This is to be expected.  However we also have another full sized goat who's milk can not be drunk, but still needs this same amount of food.  And then the reality of the dwarf goats and their feed to milk ratio.  The awesome thing about dwarf goat milk is that it is higher in fat.  The bad thing about their milk is that they are getting (need) about 3 cups of food twice a day, but they only produce 2 cups of milk each!  So they are eating a bit more than half of what our full sized goats are eating, but only giving us 1/3 the amount of milk.  This is not a good return on our investment.  Not to mention they are our escape artists.  We are constantly trying to fortify the fencing to keep them in.  So far they are winning.  With our new fruit trees, that cost a large chunk of money, being planted out front, it may be only a matter of time before they find them.  And, yes, they will strip the bark off of them, killing the trees.

So I realized some hard decisions were going to have to be made.  Surprisingly the girls were totally on board with it all!  I was expecting a small revolt at least :-)  This is the plan as it stands for now:

We will be selling/re-homing the dwarf females, the dwarf male, and our yucky tasting milker...Pippi.  Pippi is the sweetest goat!  But her milk is totally undrinkable!  And feed costs money, quite a bit of money!  We don't have the land available to let them 'free range'.  We plan on keeping two of the current female babies, and purchasing an alpine male from a friend of ours.  Buying a new male is significantly cheaper than buying a female.  But we need two males for two reasons.  One, they will keep each other company, as goats are herd animals and can get stressed when alone.  You can not house males and females together for multiple reasons.  So our male needed a companion.  If we just got a new male and sold both of our current ones, he would still need someone in there with him.  So it made sense to keep our proven breeder, who's given us mostly girls, and have his companion breed with the two female babies we are keeping.  This keeps our upfront costs down. 

We really only need to have one more female, for a total of three.  However, our great producers, Lilly and Honey are now 5 years old.  Goats really only produce for about 10 years.  This gives us only 5 years left, possibly.  So we are keeping two, just in case, giving us four females total.  This will give us a possibility of up to 3 gallons a milk a day, at least for a couple of years.  I am assuming we will see Lilly and Honey's production decline in a couple of years.  This extra milk will be made into cheese, or frozen.  Though currently I am making all of our milk into yogurt of kefir and it is gone lickety split!  We are getting a full gallon a day of milk and it is gone in the blink of an eye. 

This will give us a total of 6 goats, as opposed to the 7 we have now (I'm not counting the babies).  That may not seem like a big difference, but it will end up being more cost effective in the long run.  I mean maybe we only keep one baby now, and take another baby next year, or the year after that.  But this will give us more milk for our money.  It will be sad to see these goats go, but every time I've been buying the feed, or seeing a new bale of hay (they go through two huge round bales a month!) rolled in, as I mix up their feed, and scoop it out into their dishes, AND see how much milk we are getting in return....well, all I can say is, money doesn't seem to grow on trees over here :-)

A long awaited dream, coming true

It is funny when I think back to pre-family days, and the dreams I had for my future.  Although those dreams did include being married and having a large family, not much else is the same.  When I first became interested in gardening, some 13 or so years ago, one of my desires was to have fruit trees.  As we've had more children that desire increased :-)  Fruit can be expensive.  I'm still wondering if it is possible to have our own banana plantation!  Ha, ha.  I'm only joking...sort of. 

Each house we've lived at I wanted to get some fruit trees.  But alas, it wasn't so.  When we were in the midst of building this house and I was serious that we were never moving again under any circumstance, I wanted to plant fruit trees before we even moved in.  At the time Jed was a newborn, and well, we were in the midst of moving.  And so the dream remained, in my thoughts. 

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of getting online and choosing our first trees!  With a budget to work with I chose 5 apple trees, and one each of peach, cherry, plum and almond.  Last week a very large box arrived, the delivery man stating that it was a box of trees.  I tore into it.  Well, I suppose I would have torn into it if it hadn't been for the many gazzilion of monster staples that I had to pry off first.  And yesterday, in the very cold and windy weather, Jeremiah and I planted those dream trees.  I suppose it was mostly Jeremiah doing the planting, now come to think of it :-)  My job was to help find where we would plant them, and then after the holes were dug, I was to hold the tree in place as Jeremiah filled in the hole.  Of course I had the very important job of taking pictures.  At least that is what I tell myself. 

Before we get to the pictures I must share what happened immediately before we went out to plant the trees. Over a year ago I was in Walmart when a gentleman approached me.  He asked me why I had so many canning jars in my cart when the canning season was over.  We started a discussion which ended with him giving me his card and an invitation to come to his home to pick apples this past summer.  He told me that if I could keep track of his card, to call him and we could come and pick as many apples as we wanted.  The summer came, and I had kept his card safe for those 9 months.  I called, but never got a response back.  All eventually was forgotten...until last night!  This gentleman called and apologized for never calling me back!  He said he had been out of town, and when he returned the apples had all dropped.  He explained that he and his wife's health has been poor and that he plans on giving up the apple trees.  He said that we could come by and take a look at them and pick out any ones we wanted.  I think the plan is that if we care for the trees then we can have their fruit!  I told him that we were just about to go out and plant our baby fruit trees and what a wonderful opportunity it would be if we could come by and learn how we should be tending them.  In the meantime, as we wait for our trees to mature, we will have this opportunity to still have fruit!  He also mentioned he had peach trees, but I'm not sure if we will be doing anything with those, he wasn't clear on that.  I am just excited to learn about orchard care from someone who has been doing it for years, and excited at the prospect of a source of fruit! 

Here are the pictures I was able to take yesterday:

All nine trees in a bundle.  I had just untied the small ropes that held them all together, and opened up the plastic bag surrounding the roots.

 The digging part :-)  I stood faithfully by taking pictures.   Except for the times I needed to run into the house to look up information (can tree roots grow around rock, do fruit trees have tap roots, and such).  Or take the baby inside, or get my boots on, or...ok, so I stood by some of the time.

 Jonah insisted on me taking a picture of him.  He and Aubrey we very interested in the tree planting process.  At one point they needed to be brought in as they were getting a little too close to the action.

 Flannery trying her hand at digging. I think she found it easier to use the pick ax.

 Hard work, I tell ya.

 There were only so many pictures to take of holes, so I found other subjects :-)

 More action shots. 

 Of course using my new camera for the first time had nothing to do with taking pictures of everything else!  I will have to tell that camera story some other time.  Let's just say that it will take some getting used to a new camera set up and getting used to using an SLR after being without one for a year.

 Total cuteness, even when blurry.

 Who can resist cute little booted feet?  Too large pants all scrunched up, wearing his older brother's sweater. 

 Our plum tree!  It's funny because when I woke up this morning I looked outside my window first thing to see my trees...except that from that distance they look like large sticks!  Ha, ha.  If it weren't for their tags still being in place I would have had to really look for them!

 We bought our trees from a site called "Trees of Antiquity".  They have a selection of about 150 trees!  Many were already sold out when I was ordering, which helped to narrow my selection.   It is pretty difficult to pick out apples based on a written description of their taste.  I went with a couple that we already eat, and a few that I've never heard of, like this Holstein above.

One last picture before I took the baby back in.  He was getting chilled.  You can see he is no longer wearing the sweater that he was in the above pictures.  He had already gone inside, gotten wet while trying to wash his hands, and re-dressed.  Here he is saying, "Cold, inside".  So in we went.

It was a great time working together on a project.  Many times Jeremiah or I are working on something independently.  But it is neat when we are able to work together to get things done here on the homestead! 

Finally, some pictures

Hey, I like pictures :-).  They make a post a lot more fun!  I've got some odds and ends ones.  After a busy few days I thought I would catch up with pictures. 

 Jedidiah was quite pleased with himself that he earned his reward for passing a long awaited milestone.  Potty training.  Yes, he's much older than most children who are potty trained at the tender age of 2 or 3.  I've shared here before that I was quite sure we would not be among the group of parents with an apraxic child who doesn't potty train until the age of 6.  Yes, six.  This is a very common thing among children with apraxia.  No one knows particularly why.  Sensory issues?  Miss wiring?  Not sure.  I'm happy that he beat the age six dealy, but not by much!  Not to mention he still has to tackle nights.  But, hey, I'm just glad he is day trained!  We had a much coveted reward waiting for him when he tackled the day time potty challenge.  Pet Shops.  Yes, the small, cooky looking animal thingies that are a craze?  Definitely not on my list of 'keepers'.  But hey, desperate times, call for desperate measures :-). 

He thinks the mailman gave them to him!  Ha, ha!  He was very excited to open up this box.

He takes them everywhere!  I try to limit where he can bring them, more for fear of him losing them, and a meltdown ensuing.

While the boys were on Plymouth Rock with the new Pet Shops, I was making a list, or lists as was the case.  Getting ready for our Boot Camp 2012.  Things are falling into place.  And lest anyone thinks this may be a bad thing, I can assure you I have a lot of FUN planned.  We have a hard time staying on target when we try to do some child training.  So I thought by adding some fun, good family time, and some fancy 'team' shirts, we would be on our way to a splendid Boot Camp.  I am looking forward to this challenge.  It won't be easy, but I think we will come out the victors, with some well behaved children, a renewed love for each other, and some fond memories to boot.

This is the pile of composted dirt we had dropped of the other day.  Not as impressive as I thought it would be.  It will still come in handy, we were just expecting there to be more of it!  Thankfully we found a free source of composted mulch.  We have plans to use the mulch pretty much all over our land.  No, really.  We considered renting a dump truck for the stuff.  No, I'm not joking.  Most certainly not after our fiasco tonight.  Currently, as I write this, Jeremiah's pick up truck is stuck.  Really, really stuck, right in our back yard.  It's under belly is in the mud!!  It's not going anywhere any time soon, especially when it's supposed to rain tomorrow.  We are seeing if we can get a hold of a chain to pull it out with our van.  Fun times people, fun times.

Speaking of fun times, we all had fun at a recent birthday party we went to over the weekend.  I still have not gotten Flannery's official birthday picture up (her birthday was on the 20th of this month)!!  But this wasn't Flannery's b-day party, her's is this coming weekend.  The party we attended was for a friend, who turned 5.  It was held at a local park.  This was good and bad.  Good, lots of room to run around, bad because there was lots of room to run around :-)  Trying to keep track of the boys was very hard to do.  Jed was obsessed about running around this fence.  Jonah...
 

 ...he was obsessed with finding all the balloons he could get a hold of.  Aubrey?

He was obsessed about trying to climb the stone stairs.  Stone.  Baby.  Not a good combination.

At one point as I was grabbing the baby away from said stone stairs I caught Jed chasing his balloon.  He was just running out of sight when I called out to him.  I really try not to think about what could have happened, but that can be hard to do.  After I called him back, we went together to get his balloon.  Had he ran after it himself he would have gone all the way out by the road.  And I can assure you he would not have found his way back!  Scary.  This is why these types of events stress me out big time.  It only takes a moment for a child to get lost, in a big, big park.  Thankfully all ended well.  We had fun, Jed got his balloon back, and I'm still sane....sort of.

Saoirse peeking out of one of the old buildings on the park's premises.

We seem to have a new problem here at my house.  A problem between Flannery and I.  You see Flannery has fallen in love....with bokeh.  Oh, yes!  Don't know what bokeh is?  It's the blurriness you get in the background, or sometimes foreground in photos.  Like the picture above, you can see the flowers, but the background is a blur of color.  I have to practically wrestle my camera away from Flannery to get a turn with it!  And this has gotten worse, *after* we just bought her her own camera!  When I brought up the fact that she has a camera of her own now, she responded with...yeah, but it doesn't do photography.  Ha, ha!  She's talking about the bokeh people!  Too funny.  But I will say that she's getting pretty darn good at this photography thing.
  

For the record, I love bokeh too :-)  I also like this picture I was able to capture as we were leaving the park...ya know, after I wrestled my camera away.  I like it in color and b&w.

A beautiful sight!  Our front herbal garden is complete.  Well, except for the actual herbs.  That will be the easy part!  See all that dark goodness on top?  That would be the free composted tree mulch.  Black gold!

A Flannery picture.  We went out in the back yard to start on the corner garden area.  It's filled with weeds, vines, brambles and such.  Flannery decided to take pictures.  That wasn't helping to get the weeds up.  But after all the work we did I was hoping she did have a picture of "before".  Unfortunately this is the only before picture she took of the area.  Trust me, it's a lot worse in real life.  This looks tame to what we had to deal with.  I may have to bring my camera out the next time we work on the area.  It was kind of discouraging to work, work, work and stand back to see that we didn't get too far!!  Some before pictures may help boost the moral of our crew :-)

Another Flannery picture.  Warning, bokeh not only in the background, but the foreground as well.  She loves when that happens.  I only have about 1500 pictures of her trying to get the best angle and bokeh from a shot.  And NO I am NOT kidding.  My memory card can only hold about 500 pictures at a time (I lost my bigger mem. card), and I've had to delete the card multiple time in the last two weeks.  Multiple times.  I have enough goat pictures to last me a life time!!  But hey, that's how we learn...by doing :-)

Because when you keep practicing, and keep 'doing', you end up with something cool like the above picture.  This is a picture that Flannery took today.  Maybe not amazing (although I think so), but for a ten year old?  Hello!  I was taking a picture of my sister making bunny ears over my brother's head at ten years old.  Wait...I don't think I used a camera till I was in my teens.  Keep up the good work Flannery!  (yes, she reads my blog :-))

Some Answers to Prayer

In my last post, on the happenings around here, there were still some things that needed to be bought or found.  We were disappointed in how much dirt actually got dumped in our yard.  We have been looking on Craigslist for free composted trees/yard stuff.  So far the pickings were slim, and very small in quantity.  But yesterday we hit the jackpot!!  Jeremiah didn't even want to contact the person as he was tired of finding out that each place he called/emailed only had a small quantity of compost (maybe a garbage can full at most).  I urged him to at least email this one guy, I mean, you never know unless you ask, right?  Come to find out this gentleman is in the tree clipping business and has aged composted trees/brush.  LOTS OF IT!!!  Jeremiah estimates he has about a third of an acre of huge 8 foot hills of aged composted tree material.  He picked up two truck loads of it last night.  The stuff is WONDERFUL.  It's exactly what we were looking for.  We need a LOT of it to cover all the garden areas that we plan on having.  Not to mention I wanted to put some down in front of our goat barn to help absorb the wetness that always accumulates, causing issues for us and the goats.  Right now it's raining, so I can't get out to take a picture of our 'gold mine'.  It will take many, many more trips to get the amount we need, but we are just so thankful that we found what we were looking (and praying) for, for FREE!!

My other answer to prayer came after talking with someone from church who has taken over the veggie co-op I used to be apart of.  I am grateful for all the healing we have seen on the GAPS diet.  I know we could have been having more success if we could obtain 'real' meat... the natural, grass fed kind.  There are still various health issues that more than one of us are still dealing with.  And although we've gone from these issues causing us to have to use antibiotics, to them just being a daily annoyance, the fact is we are still dealing with them!  But we can not afford to buy such meat, not unless we could cut costs elsewhere.  In the meantime I wanted to put us on a juice feast to help jump start our bodies healing from these health issues.  But that led to a dead end as well since we can't afford for all of to juice.  I felt trapped.  I gave this issue over to the Lord.  I wish I did this more often, as He seems to be able to take care of things so much better than I can :-)  I asked the woman who is doing the veggie co-op if I could come with her one day to see about buying some bulk produce.  I knew it would be cheaper, I just wasn't expecting it to be THIS cheap!!  Apples, 45 cents a pound, 50 pounds of carrots for 12$, etc.  I mean, WOW!  The kick is you have to buy a bushel of apples, or the whole 50 pounds of carrots, or 50 pounds of potatoes, etc.  With the large quantities we will need for juicing this will work out just fine.  And for future purchasing, this will save us money to put towards the grass fed meat we need to be buying.  I can buy in bulk and *dehydrate* the leftovers, and use them for the weeks we don't go to the farmers market. 

We haven't started our boot camp yet.  I came down with the tummy bug last night, making any kind of work impossible.  I can work through pain, but NOT nausea.  Yuck.  Call me a wimp, but I can't handle nausea :-P

Additions to the homestead

If any of  you have read my "Big Changes" series then you know that we are taking our family vision seriously.  With the illnesses we have been experiencing we have had some relapse into old habits (more from the adults!). But we are determined that we are not going to fall off the wagon.  Maybe our wagon was stalling, be we haven't fallen off.  During the past few months Jeremiah and I have been discussing how we were going to use our tax money when it came in.  I am sure there will be many who may not agree with how we decided to spend that money.  I can assure you it was with prayer and thoughtfulness that we made our decisions.  Like many people, we have debt.  I am glad to say that the debt we do have is about 90% or more medical debt.  Not that I am happy that we had such things come up medically that it got us into debt, but at least it wasn't from reasons that got us into debt in the past.  We made a promise to pay off some of our debt with this tax return, so we can chip away at it.  However the rest of it was needed to further our family goals.  One of our goals is to be debt free, but our priority is in capturing the hearts of our children, something that we had lost.  Seeing the results that we have gotten so far from the changes we've made all the more cemented our resolve to do what we could to further the relationships within our family.  Although I hate the idea of owing people money, it is much more woeful to have lost your children.  We can continue to work on paying off our debts as we are able.  I am sure we will make greater strides once we are all working together, here at home.

Alright!  So all that to say....we made some purchases to further our wee homestead.  There are still a few more purchases that need to happen, some will come in the next few weeks, and others will have to wait for a few months.  We tried to stick with the idea, 'what God gave us in the here and now' to work on, and some of the 'things we would really like to try.  With all of our purchases there has been a renewed excitement to work on our homestead.  Here are a few of the things we have obtained so far:

Meet Red Beard, or Buddy.  Not sure how Buddy can be the nickname of this goat that they decided to call Red Beard, but hey, I leave the animal naming up to the girls, and this is what we got :-)  This is our new Nigerian Dwarf billy goat.  We recently bought a Nubian billy this past fall.  Now we will be able to have our means to securing milk :-)  This will not enable us to expand our herd, as we would need more males, but this will give us the milk we need in the coming years.  Maybe in the future we can work on herd diversity and expansion.  But for now we are happy with our current herd size.  Along with drinking the milk we plan on using some to make cheese.  The cheese supplies are something that is on the "buy in the next few months" catagory.  We also plan on making soap with the milk.  You can see below that we bought the supplies for that venture, now we just need some milk :-)  I do have a few gallons in the freezer that we plan on using to try our hand at soap making.

 Next up, supplies for our gardening venture. Above you can see our new shop light, that we hung from the bottom of one of the shelves that we have in our laundry room.  The trays you see below will not be orientated that way.  The girls were just trying to figure out how many trays they could fit underneath.  After hanging the light we realize that we will probably need two lights.  But for now, this set up will do.  Tomorrow we have a truck load of dirt/compost being dropped off so that we can make up our garden beds.  I envision lots of outdoor work in our future :-)  In the next few weeks we will be purchasing some fruit trees and possibly some more heirloom seeds.  A friend of mine offered us some blueberry bushes!  I am so excited about that.  We have plans to put them in our backyard, along the back of the house.  I think those are all the near future plans we have for our garden.

 We took the plunge and purchased an Excalibur food dehydrator.  After pondering all the ways one can store food, we realized that for our size family, dehydrating would be the best way to do so.  The number of canning jars we would need to store food for our family?  Oh my.  I have been buying 3 five gallon pails from Walmart each pay period.    In the next few months we will be purchasing a food vacuum saver along with some oxygen absorbers and vacuum bags. 

   These are our soap making supplies.  These will also be used to make some hair conditioner and cleaning spray. I purchased most of my oils from the Soap Dish.  The prices were reasonable and they were quick to deliver.  If I had more money I would have bought a lot more as the shipping was pretty high, but mostly a flat rate, so in the long run I would have saved  more money,  but I can only do what I can do :-)  The essential oils and the castile soap were purchased from Vitacost.  They are always quick to deliver and so far have always had the best prices of what they carry.  The crock pot you see will actually be used for our cooking.  I bought it for soap making, but it is a nicer model than the one we have for our food making! So I will trade my intended purposes for each crockpot.  This crock I picked up at the Goodwill.  I forgot to take a picture of our stick blender.  Oh well.  If you are not sure what a stick blender is I am sure you can do a google search.  My camera is currently in use :-)

There you have it!  Lots to look forward to.  Along with the above we have a major outside 'spring cleaning' that we need to do.  Thankfully it has been a mild winter and we should not have any problem with getting out there to do so.  We have some fencing to put up so that we can make another area for the goats to live in.  Goats are very, very prone to worms.  In order to keep them healthy you need to have separate areas for them to rotate living in so as to cut down the worm population.  In the mean time we will focus on what we can do, which is to make one extra living area (they need more, but that will definitely be a future project), put down some diatomacious earth, and supplementing their diet with herbs and greens.

I tried to add a new button to the top menu of my blog.  Let me just say, for the record, I computers are like a second language for me...foreign! Ha, ha!  I want to be able to record our homestead's production.  I want to be able to know what has worked for us, and what we need to try differently.  It is hard to do that just on memory.  The girls started notebooks for this purpose, but I would like a back up to make sure we don't loose our information.  

Big Changes #4**Outside Activities

Along with our church change, this was the second biggest change we made.  By outside activities I mean things like sports, meetings and the like, not outside play time.  Jeremiah and the girls, minus Moira, were involved in soccer.  Between Jeremiah playing soccer on his own team, and him coaching two of the girls teams, soccer took up 5 days a week.  One of those days happened to be half of our Saturday.  That time on Saturday was just game and travel time, not the time it took for everyone to rest from all the activity.  That left our Saturdays totally unproductive. 

After we made a family goal plan we were able to talk with the girls about how our outside activities were not helping us to achieve our family goals.  Not only was soccer not helping to meet our goals, but it was hindering our goals.  We determined that we needed that Saturday time to work on our outside projects (animal care and gardening).  So, even though they only played half the year, we made the hard decision to pull them out of soccer.  Not only for the girls, but for Jeremiah as well.  Although there were tears shed, I think they got over it faster than I anticipated because we were not asking only them to give it up, but Daddy was giving it up as well.  They saw that the sacrifice was being made by all.

In soccer's place we were adding in the gardening and animal work, which the girls wanted to do.  We were also committed to adding in fellowship time with the saints.  This was definitely lacking in our lives.  We made sure to get that fellowship time up and running.  The girls are very much enjoying this fellowship time.  They are also enjoying all the planning and dreaming of making our slice of land as productive as it can be.  Just take a look at that picture of Isabella in my last post.  All the girls have been getting homesteading/gardening/animal care books out of the library.  Isabella, in particular, has been taking notes from them.  All on their own!  Isabella and Moira are also keeping a record book of everything we produce.  Currently that amounts to how many eggs a day we get.  When we start milking and gardening we will be weighing what we collect.  They keep notes off to the side about any supplements or changes we make.  This way we can look back and see what worked and what didn't.  They had seen this record keeping on a blog and they decided *on their own* to keep a record for our family. 

In the past we have made, or attempted to make, changes to our family.  But as the word 'to' implies, it wasn't a collaborative exercise.  It was forced.  As parents, that is sometimes what we are called to do, but when making changes it is never a good idea to just take things away without adding something in it's place.  It is also not a good idea to leave the rest of your crew upset about the changes, feeling helpless and a victim.  There is a balance to be had.  We didn't have that balance in the past, and that is why I feel our past changes did not last, or were not accepted.  This doesn't mean you have to have your children's permission to make changes, that is not what I am talking about.  But to make this work, they do need to 'get on board' with your new ideas.  For example, the girls were not happy about giving up soccer.  But they were excited about making our place into a small homestead.  When they saw that by giving up soccer we would have more time to make our place into that dreamed of homestead they were willing to let soccer go.  It was *very* important for us to make real, concrete plans for them to see we were serious about making the homestead one of our family goals.  We made sure to come to the pow-wow table with ideas before hand so that they knew we were already thinking of these things.  And we made sure to write down all their ideas and discuss ways in which we could implement them into a workable plan.  We then started to do simple things like go online in search of books to educate ourselves to make our dreams a reality. We also talked about what we needed to buy, and put a time table together of when we could obtain the needed items.  We are having the girls help us search for free items on freecycle and craigslist (with us watching over them).  We also ordered gardening catalogs to look over seeds and fruit trees/bushes. 

We talked about how we could save money to purchase the things we were going to need.  Again, by putting it in their hands, and giving them ideas as needed, they have come up with lots of ways to save money.  Not only that, but they want to do them, as they see we are being serious about our goals.  In the past, when we took things away (and they needed to be taken away), we either left a hole there, or gave a token idea of what we could/might/should/would put in it's place.  But then that was as far as we got.  Nothing ever materialized from those scattered thoughts.  This time we put it on paper, they see us rearranging our budget, they see us giving up things ourselves, and they see we are serious in wanting their ideas as well.  We are talking about these things almost daily.  We rearrange plans when needed.  We are working out times/schedules and the like to make the time available to reach our goals.  We are reading books and watching videos that all have to do with our goals.  And our children are, for the first time ever, EXCITED about what our family is doing.  It truly is a *FAMILY* affair.  It's not every man for himself, which was how we were living before. 

Now, before I sign off, lest you think we are perfect...we are NOT.  We are making mistakes, we fumble, we have to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off.  Our children will try to read a homesteading book when they should be reading about Archimedes, or they are looking at the prices of Jersey cows when they should be doing their math :-)  The children have squabbled about who's idea was better or should be implemented first.  We are learning how to work together and love each other, which is one of our biggest family goals, besides the number one: Glorifying God and enjoying Him forever.

Outside time

A few days of pictures from the out of doors.

Just starting out.  Bucket in hand.

Leaves are always a good thing to fill a bucket with.

Jed becomes apprehensive over the goats.

This picture and the next are out of order.  This would be Jed after I have reassured him that the big goats are not in the middle area.

This is Jed worried that the big goats may come after him.  They have a tendency to nibble on his ears, and he does NOT like that!

Moira decked out in a dress and work boots.  Who says you can't have style when you are raking leaves?

Jed and Jonah love to push Aubrey on the swing.  Jonah prefers to twist Aubrey around.

As you can see, Aubrey doesn't mind one bit.

Jed's turn to rake the leaves.  He still prefers the two colored boot look.

Aubrey enjoys being on the ground now to explore.  Unfortunately that involves test tasting!  Yuck!

He was showing Saoirse his new found treasures, which dropped out of his hand right before I clicked the button.

Flannery's swing is up and running.

Trying for that sun flare look.

I had to ask Flannery to be still so I could take a picture.  Getting a still picture of Flannery is hard to come by.

Contemplating life.

The sky looked really beautiful the other day, with the moon out.

One of our favorite rocks (the big one on the left).

Jonah was very upset that he missed out on helping Daddy fix the porch pickets.  He had to make up for lost tool time :-)

He decided to dig up a bunch of dirt with the hammer.  At least I didn't have to worry about a banged up finger!

These wood boards serve as a ladder for the girls to get over our back fence.  Sometimes they have to catch a chicken, or an escaped goat, and with no back gate, this was the easiest set up.

I've really been into sky pictures lately.

Pippi. She's such a sweet goat.  No, really.  I never thought that goats had personalities....until we had some ourselves.

Our new addition to the farm.  This my friends would be a male.  That means we should have some baby goats in about five months, and that spells m.i.l.k.  :-)

Some two handed photography going on.  Ha!  I just went around taking pictures of all sorts of odd things.

Trees, lower branch in focus.

Now that lower branch is out of focus, but you can see the rest of the tree.  I love aperture :-)

Hammer.  All alone.  No boy in site!

Just some weeds up front.  But I thought they looked nice.  At least up close.  They reach about 6 feet or so.

The gate that children MUST stop at when we go fetch the mail.  They always run ahead and this is the designated stopping place.  The road that we live off of is 55mph. 

Walking, or running for some, back from the mail.

The majority of the trees around us are oak or pine.

Only two leaves were left of on this tree.  I really loved the deep color.

The next couple of pics are of Aubrey and I had to desaturate them as the orange in Jeremiah's shirt was reflecting off of his face.  With as round as cheeks as he has, he sort of resembled a pumpkin :-)

This sweet babe is getting his top teeth in.  Ouch.

Ok, I'm melting now.  I just want to eat him up.

Aubrey has learned a few handy skills, such as pointing.

And waving.

The sky above our house this evening.

I surrender.

Well, not before I find some more treasure.