Two Questions

So, say your husband is on a business trip to Alaska.

And you stay up until 2:00am cleaning and writing and making the parts for stuffed shells and doing laundry and showering and gathering stuff by the front door. And at 6:00am your alarm goes off, and you want to sleep but know that today is not the day, so you get up and make yourself some coffee and try to listen to your audio bible and put on a farm dress. You make breakfast and wake children and scurry around putting more stuff by the door. You put the baby in his chair and give the 10 year old some Organic Toasted O's to feed the baby while the 10 and 5 year old eat breakfast. You race around outside doing chores and looking really stupid because you are limping from the jammed toe you self-inflicted five days before. The dog steps on your toe. You run back in the house and wash up and put on your going-out clothes.

You get the kids and backpacks full of schoolwork and diaper bag and purse and cooler full of stuffed shell ingredients and a bag of empty pans and an exersaucer that you are returning to your friend and your cell phone and your bible and bible study book and notes for a meeting and cup of coffee and, oh yeah, the keys, all loaded into the van. And off you race to the big city for an 8:30 am meeting with your priest.

Get to church, settle big kids with schoolwork, have meeting while trying to keep baby from killing self with mirror on wall, electrical cords, rocks on floor. You're glad the priest has a flock of young children because you have to nurse the baby several times during the meeting just so you can hear yourself think.

Meeting ends, you load everyone in van again after bathroom visits, and head back out of the city, in the opposite direction from home. During the 45 minute drive to your friends' house (who once lived within biking distance but now are an hour and a half away) you stop at a feed store to see if they have any bales of alfalfa hay. They do, so you buy one since everyone in your area is out of them and you are trying to get your dairy goat to give you more than three sips of milk a day. You and the kids and all the aforementioned stuff are in the minivan, so you tie the bale on the roof.

You drive to your friends' house and are so happy to see them again... a playmate for everyone, even the baby and Mama. Everyone pairs off and rejoices in reconnecting. Lunch comes and your friends graciously feed you. Time for the baby to nap, and you're really happy since you think today would be a great day to take a nap with him (what with the four hours of sleep the night before). But the baby thinks today would be a great day not to nap. So you give up.

You get the five year old girls to wash their hands and have a special treat... helping you assemble stuffed shells! You are pleased with yourself that this arrangement works for everyone! ;-) As you finish up the project you realize that the clock you have been watching is actually slow, so you shift into overdrive and load everyone and all the stuff (minus the exersaucer) back into the van. The van looks like it has been ransacked. You drive off, heading back to the city to go to your bible study, where you are the provider of dinner tonight. The baby falls asleep instantly. You spend your last $2 on a Pepsi at a Taco Bell drive through.

Despite a later-than-anticipated start and rush hour, you arrive at your destination 25 minutes early. Not wanting to impose on the family who is hosting (since you are there 25 minutes before the 45 minutes early you were already planning to arrive so you could cook dinner) and since the baby and the 5 year old are asleep, you park on the street and try to nap a tiny bit. You don't succeed. Eventually the baby wakes up, screams, you nurse him.

At the appointed time you go into the house and start baking the stuffed shells. You have a very pleasant evening with friends, sharing dinner and having a nice discussion about the passage for the evening, with the special gift of having a good 20 minutes to talk without chasing the baby, who is getting better at being with the caregiver.

At the end, you try to quickly load everyone up to go home, but the 5 year old disappears into the bathroom, causing a long line at the door, and when is finally pried out, is shoeless and does not know where her shoes are. You try not to be exasperated because one of the verses that night was "Do not exasperate your children" and you figure you should model that. You decide she really won't need that pair of shoes this week, but your hostess finds them and you leave. The baby screams a lot.

It is now 9:00pm. You have been gone from home for 13+ hours. You have had a full day. You had 4 hours of sleep the night before. You have an hour drive through the dark Texas countryside. You have no money. But you have a gift card.

So, question #1:

Where do you think you are at 9:07pm?

Good answer! That's right! You are at Starbucks. In the interest of not driving into a wall, you use your gift card to purchase some caffeine.

It's in a nice part of town. The neighborhood where your friends who host the bible study live does not have yards manicured by chickens and dogs and gophers, like you do. The people who live there put their money into fresh paint and nice bushes, not fencing and feed. You are far from home.

As you load your crying baby back into the van for the fifth time that long day, you see four or five beautiful, nicely dressed young women come out of Starbucks. They look toward you and start to laugh.

Which brings us to question #2:

Why are these girls laughing at you?

Yes, that's right, very good. This IS why they are laughing at you:



And you laugh too, because it IS funny... the whole thing... hay on the van, crazy kids, all of it. It's funny, and fun, and just a bit exhausting.

Epilogue:
The caffeine works. When you get home you are so wide awake from it you blog into the wee hours of the morning. :-)

First glass!

Well, I've milked Domino every day for a week now, except Sunday. Every day, for one reason or another, I've had to dump the milk. Today I was DETERMINED that no matter how much we got we were going to try this milk!

Here are the results of about an hour of work (with some of today's freshly washed eggs):



And here are the Princess and Farmer Boy trying it out (we had to split the above amount three ways... a swallow each). Note the suspicious looks on their faces. :-)




The Princess' comments: "It was good. Well kind of strange. It will probably be better when it is cold, like after it is in the refrigerator."

Farmer Boy observed: "It was fine. It just tastes goaty."

I did it all by the book... washed and sterilized the supplies, hobbled the goat while on the stanchion, washed and dried her udder, milked and milked and milked, carefully covered the bowl to keep stuff out of it, put the bowl in ice water and stirred to cool it rapidly, put it through the special milk strainer. Took a lot of picturees of a pitiful glass. And after 30 years of waiting drank a mouthful of milk. :-)

I am not giving up! I am still getting the rhythm of milking properly, especially since she has small teats. I realized I may not be feeding her enough to produce for us and the two babies who are still on her. I can also separate her from the babies during the night and she'll give a lot more in the morning. And of course once the babies leave we'll get all the milk. Right now they are actually helping her teats to become more user friendly. ;-)

We're well on the road to really having our own milk! Yippee!

Milking stanchion

Stephen spent Saturday building our new milking stanchion. Here is Domino trying it out for the first time:

First milk

On Wednesday I milked Domino for the first time. Here are the results:



I know, not much, but it's something! After about an hour of preparation (figuring out how to mix up the udder wash and the dairy soap and the sanitizing spray and how to get all the supplies to the barn without them becoming contaminated, etc, etc), I loaded the baby into the stroller along with lots of supplies and headed down. We didn't have the milking stanchion built yet so I attached Domino to a fence with a 2 foot dog leash (she has a collar), hobbled her back legs just in case, gave her some food and tried to milk. I managed to do it, with lots of interference from the kids (the four legged ones) and the puppies. It was VERY frustrating.

The next day, more frustration, but good news, which is that it seems Domino has a good milking personality (goat-ality?). I didn't hobble her and she didn't mind me milking her.

I've tried to milk each day, just so we can both get practice, but haven't been able to save any of it yet because of constant interference (and therefore contamination) from curious puppes and goat babies. One of the challenges is that Domino has fairly small teats so it feels awkward to milk her. Even when I use only three fingers with the thumb, I sometimes end up with milk dribbling down my hand. We'll figure it out.

Today Stephen built the milking stanchion (pictures to come) so tomorrow I will be able to milk her in the barn and CLOSE THE DOOR! Thank goodness.

They're here!

Well, golly gee whiz, I was right! Yippee! Domino is the proud mama of twins!

I kept checking on her today, and all of a sudden there were babies! :-) She birthed unassisted and did just fine without us.

Here is baby #1:



And baby #2:



Domino was not very interested in them at first. I found them still wet and shivering, so I raced back to the house to get towels, and iodine for their navels. Of course the human kids couldn't be left out of the fun! Farmer Boy took this picture of a very happy Mama, toweling off baby #1:



Baby #1 wanted to nurse and kept following The Princess around and trying to nurse from her pink dress and pink boots. He had the color right at least, but the species (and a whole lot else) wrong!



We ended up having to help the babies nurse. Stephen held Domino while I got the kids to latch on. It was not as easy as it sounds like it should be. But eventually everyone figured it out, and after the kids had a good drink, and we saw that Mom had licked each of them, we left them in peace for a while:



Names to come!

Well... maybe tomorrow...

Domino seems ready to pop! I have a gut feeling that the babies will be born tomorrow. I may well be wrong (I don't have any experience to go by here) but it'll be fun to see if I have any natural instincts about goats.

When oh when oh when?!

You know the saying "A watched pot never boils"?

Well, Patti Brown's farm corollary is "A watched goat never gives birth."

We have had many babies born on this farm since we moved here, but I have never felt like this before. For one thing, we've had goats for two years now and this is our first successful pregnancy. Snowy, our old doe, has had a series of questionable bucks in her life (first one left a lot of does he bred with open that year, second one was ancient, this year we're still unsure because Esau was so little when he tried).

When Domino and Elf came to us, I wrote down that Domino was due 3/15 and Elf 4/1. When Domino was overdue I wrote to her original owner and found out I had the dates backwards. Domino was actually due 3/30. Elf, our dear departed doe, had been the one who had bred first. So I've been thinking "Any day now!" for about three weeks.

Poor little Domino... I've spent a lot of time looking at her rear end for signs of imminent birth (don't worry, not touching, just looking!). I know those babies will come out eventually. But when?! I'd so love to be here for it. But it wouldn't surprise me in the least to go out one day and see them already born and frolicking around.

On top of all this, I have wanted goats for milk since I was seven. That's thirty years of waiting. I suppose I have earned the right to be a wee bit impatient.

Time's a flyin'

Farmer Boy was shocked today to realize that it was Friday. Again. It seems it has not only been for me that time has been passing at break-neck speed.

March is always a busy month on the farm. We've usually had lots of babies... chicks, ducklings, calves. This year we have the puppies, and are expecting goat kids any day. The weather becomes lovely and incredibly enticing, making it hard to stay indoors to do the housework. This leads to later nights trying to get the inside work done, or more time outside in denial, trying to ignore the appalling state of the house.

We've been eating lunch and dinner outside sometimes, and using the grill more. Wildflowers are exploding all over the fields and we're crunching around the house on a thin layer of dust because of the open windows.

I love Texas in March!

We finally broke ground on our garden, after two and a half years here! I am SO excited! I think with the fencing we will be able to keep most of the critters at bay, although the gophers are going to keep our mental muscles flexing, and I don't even know what to anticipate bird-wise. We'd have to build Fort Knox (including below ground and overhead) to keep all the interested parties out. For the moment I am going to blissfully pretend that we won't even have to think about insect visitors. Oy.

But busy-on-the-farm seems to equal not-writing-on-the-blog-as-often! Kind of funny, since the blog is about the farm. But now you know what I've been doing. Along with the usual kid-raising, homeschooling, carting everyone to ballet, piano, park day, library, grocery store, bible study and church stuff.

Outlaws and inlaws

Observed by the Princess (age 5), while driving in the car:

"Hmm, I get it! Outlaws... outside of the law! So... in-laws are inside of the law! They follow the law!"

Mama, mumbled under her breath, "Well, most of the time!"

Blue eyed Belle

Belle has one bright blue eye:



Little Guy thinks the puppies are hysterical. Zeke thinks Little Guy is delicious:

Demolition

I mentioned a few weeks ago that Stephen and some young friends did some demolition work while the kids and I were away in PA. Here is some of what they did...

This is the barn, when we first bought it:



And here it is minus the rotting "roof" over the loafing area:



We also have a structure that we call "the falling down barn." That is what we have always called it because it has been falling down since we bought the place. We blocked off the entrance and it has just been sitting there being dangerous. We fully expected it to have blown over by now, but it took a few pushes from the tractor in the end.

Here it is from the front when we first bought it:



And from the back:



Here it is today:



This weekend the rest of it comes down.

When you have a 5 year old daughter...

...you may spend the day wearing a necklace. Even if you are a big tough guy digging holes on a farm. If necessary, scowl ferociously to offset the softening effects of the jewelry:

Domino

A few months ago we bought two new goats, and I am finally getting around to blogging about them.

As you know, we had three goats, Snowy, Sylvester and Esau. Snowy and Sylvester are La Manchas (the "earless" breed), and moved in with us 2 years ago. They grew up together. They have different moms but probably the same dad. Esau joined us from a different farm in December of 2006. He is a Nubian.

Domino and Elf, our new goats, shared a dad, but had different mothers... the mothers of Snowy and Sylvester. So the four LaManchas were all half siblings in some way.

Sadly, a few weeks ago, Elf died due to pregnancy ketosis, a metabolic disorder that can affect goats during pregnancy. We did not realize what was going on until she was too far gone. It is actually easily treatable if you recognize the symptoms early enough, but poor Elf was stuck with us, the people who don't have a clue. It made us very sad. But we have learned, and I don't think it will happen again.

Thankfully Domino had lived with the other goats for long enough that she felt she was at home and did not seem to be affected by Elf's death.

Domino is a very sweet little goat. She is pregnant, and due any day now. We are SO excited to be having kids, and soon thereafter, milk!

You can see how she got her name:



The baby loves the goats, who are patient with him:



I think she looks like she is smiling in this one:

Breaking the cuteness meter

They're like a cutesie poster from the seventies...



Zeke (on the left) and Belle (on the right) are three weeks and two days old. Mama Molly is having no trouble with her postpartum weight loss program while nursing her mammoth babies.

Horse Lesson 47

Today's guest blogger is my beloved husband, Stephen...

(This lesson builds upon horse lesson 12 - corelary to Murphy's Law)

A horse can spin in a circle much more quickly than you think it can. Why is this important? Because it means that a horse can kick you in the head, even if you think you are safe. So let's give a practical example of how these two lessons come together.

The horses were separated from the cattle by a fence, and had been for some time. I could feed the cattle grain without worrying about the horses. Because of short supplies of grass lately, the other day I opened the gate to let the horses and cattle share the same fields.

I knew full well that it would take quite some time before the horses discovered the open gate, so I decided to feed the cattle. Let's look back at lesson 12: "The horses may not come when called, but they will come if you don't want them to, so use proper caution." Now you can see that I've failed to heed lesson 12. So what happens next? The horses immediately chase the cattle away from their feed and start eating it.

Problem is, the cattle feed makes horses sick. So in this real life example, I had to try to get the hungry 700 lb horses away from the feed and into stalls. And this is where we learn the lesson of how quickly a horse can spin around and point its backside at you, already locked and loaded. Chasing a horse away from feed makes him mad! I figured as long as I kept in front of him, he couldn't kick me. But much to my surprise, a horse can turn around and point his back legs at you faster then you can scream "I'm going to die now!" The Good Lord clearly has more work for me to do down here, and I avoided being hit by the horse.

I got a scoop of horse feed, and tried to lead the horses away. No dice. I chased the horses hoping they would head far away. No dice - they just ran in circles around the feed. After a while, the sly animals would stop about 50 feet from the food and nonchalantly eat some grass. Then, as I walked toward them (and away from the feed), they would suddenly bolt past me back to the feed.

After a 15 minute wrestling match, requiring physical stamina and a whit sharper than that of any horse, I finally managed to corral the horses, and so completed horse lesson 47.

Patti's note: Not knowing the whole story, I watched this transpire through the kitchen window. I thought Stephen had decided to break the horse (who can not currently be ridden) in the middle of an open field. I thought he had gone mad. I saw Joe try to kill him. I prayed and prayed. Later when he came in I said, "I was praying for you," and he said "That explains why I'm not dead."

Storms

We've been having some pretty strong storms coming through in the past 24 hours. As I type this I hear thunder in the distance. I'll be shutting down the computer right after I post tonight.

Last night, as the computer was shutting down, the power went off. Poor computer. It was pretty mad this morning. Took the Midas touch of Stephen the computer genius to get it to even turn on.

I didn't get a whole lot of sleep. There was the sudden rain, and windows to close. Then the baby with a cold who wanted to nurse. The dogs wanted to come in and sleep in the laundry room. Molly was going to leave her babies behind but Stephen wouldn't let her. They were way under the back steps out of his reach so he made her stay with them.

We got settled in bed again then heard a crazy racket which turned out to be huge hail stones attacking our roof. After they stopped, MY cold kept me up coughing and looking through my books for herbal remedies that are safe to use while nursing.

I got to sleep only to be awakened by more heavy rain and piteous whining from the puppies. Molly was trying to move them in the downpour. So Stephen brought them in and Molly and I dried them off (I used towels and she used her tongue. Ick).

Eventually I did manage to get several fitful hours of sleep. Sounds like we may be in for another night of adventure tonight!

Here is one of the hail stones that came down last night:



We seem to have a trend here. Everything is Texas-sized... first puppies, then hail... what next?!

Belle and Zeke

The puppies will be three weeks old now in a few days and they are shockingly large. No wonder Molly could only fit two in there! She moved them into a larger doghouse, and a few days ago had to move them under the back steps. They are going to be some big dogs!



We've named the boy Zeke (on the right) and the girl Belle (on the left). Zeke had just been getting a bath from Mom. Belle needs one... happens frequently when your floor is dirt.



I included the picture of Molly nursing Belle to give some perspective on her size. Her eyes have been open for less than a week!

Snow for the Texans

Little Guy had a rare chance to bundle up when we were in PA on vacation.



He lay on the floor waving arms and legs, unable to even roll over. He reminded me of the little boy in A Christmas Story who can't put his arms down when his mom dresses him up in his snowsuit.

The big kids had fun. They played in snow, shoveled and swept snow, and caught snowflakes on their tongues. They sampled maple syrup drizzled on snow (yum!) a treat enjoyed in childhood not only by their heroine Laura Ingalls Wilder, but also by their very own Yankee mom! Farmer Boy even got to go sledding and sprain his wrist. He had a blast earning his ace bandage. A time-honored tradition!

Hard work on the farm

(Our guest blogger today is Little Guy)

You know, this farm thing, it isn't easy.

I'm out there in the afternoon, and I'm watching Mama feed the goats. Then she's watering fruit trees. Then feeding cows. Then carrying gallon waterers to the chickens.

She's wearing me out!

Picking up toys from the yard. Sweeping the front porch. I finally just couldn't keep my eyes open any longer when she started shoveling chicken manure to move to the garden.

I'll tell you, the woman doesn't know when it's time for a nap!

All the rage among the laying set

Apparently the flowerpot idea has caught on...