Bloody April

(Flowers Claire brought in and arranged on the windowsill) 

I'm really kind of glad April is over. It turned out to be a rather bloody month. 

My sweet Ethan went outside to play with Matthew and the two little ones for a while, so I could start dinner. I gave the bigger boys instructions to stay close to the house and keep an eye on the babies for just a few minutes. Well, Ethan "forgot" what I had just said and took off for parts unknown leaving Matthew playing with Claire and Emmett on the back porch. Matthew realized after about 5 minutes that Ethan wasn't coming back and started calling him. When Ethan didn't answer he took off to find him taking the little ones along. Ethan in the meantime had climbed up a tree and fell out head first. He managed to knock himself out and Matthew found him in the woods on the far side of our goat pasture, dazed on the ground in a pool of blood. Matthew slung Ethan over his shoulder and carried him wounded soldier style, telling the babies to follow him and screaming for me to come help. Thankfully we had the windows open and I heard Matthew as soon as he started screaming for me to come help. By the time I made it to him he was over half way back to the house. Poor Ethan ended up in the emergency room and had to get 3 staples in his head. Other than the cut just inside his hairline on his forehead, he was fine. 

My boys make bows and arrows out of sticks and string. They also have toy bows and arrows with rounded safety tips that they use for practicing archery in the yard. They set up straw bales with paper targets and shoot into them. They are quite good at hitting their targets. But before I tell this story I should probably throw in here a little side note so it makes more sense. 

One of our English bulldogs Ginger was bred two months ago and her due date came, and we got puppies!!! Four adorable bulldog puppies, with wrinkles and spots and puppy breath! All four boys, we have a lot of boys around these parts it seems! 

So the morning that Ginger had her puppies I was helping her get situated and latch all the puppies on to nurse. Claire and Emmett were being very "helpful"! So I sent them out of the room to go play with toys somewhere else. Emmett went and found Ethan and they went off to play together, and Claire went to the big boys bedroom, right next door to the room I had Ginger and the puppies in. Just a second later Claire started screaming! Matthew (who was helping me with the dogs) and I jumped up and ran to see what was wrong. Claire had picked up one of the boys safety arrows (you know, the ones with the rounded tips!) and somehow had fallen and impaled the roof of her mouth with the arrow. The arrow was on the floor before I rounded the corner. There was blood gushing out of her nose and mouth, and she was screaming and choking. I ran to the bathroom with her and and told Logan to call his dad, and I tried to calm her and wipe away some of the blood so I could see how bad it was and what I needed to do. Matthew went back to the puppies to make sure they were ok, and I decided that I needed to get Claire to Children's Hospital ASAP! I left all the boys home with Logan watching the baby, and took off as quickly as I could. Rodrigo met us on the way to the hospital, and finished driving us there. Turns out the arrow had scraped her soft palate, bounced back further and actually cut all along next to one of her tonsils.  In the end, they decided not to do anything for her, since the bleeding had stopped. But it was really scary! 

And now the arrows are way up, out of reach...but all of the sticks...? We live surrounded by woods and trees. There are "dangerous" things everywhere. So I pray, a lot. And I warn them to be extra careful. And to please never, ever, ever put anything like sticks or arrows into their mouths. But they all still climb trees and they still play with sticks, and I try to remember that ultimately I can't wrap them in bubble wrap and keep them on the floor next to me 100% of the time. I worry, more than I should probably, but I'm the mama, and that's what we do. I just try not to let that be the mama that my children know. I want them to know that I love them and I want them to know that I am very concerned for their safety, and their well-being, and I want them to learn to take care of themselves and be smart. But this whole growing up and having accidents really scares me some days! 

In other news, both of my goats had babies! Daisy had twin boys and Larkspur had a single boy. So now we have to figure out what to do with three little bucklings. I was hoping for at least one doeling...but no. We all just seem to have boys around here :-). Having Claire was a total surprise, I mean I have boys...it's what I do! But what a fun surprise she has been!

P.S.The park pictures are from a new to us park that we found close to home and went exploring last week. I love catching pictures of my big boys playing with their littler siblings. They hold their hands when we walk and talk to them and teach them things, under no prompting from us. They are usually (but not always:-)) extremely patient and attentive with them. I love watching that, it makes my heart swell! 

Single white females in search of a friend

Late last spring before we sold our house we got a pair of dairy goats that were both already milking. I had milked them successfully all through the many showings of our home , the eventual sale of our home, moving to my parents house, and finally moving into our own new home.

At first I was worried about having the responsibility of having to milk the goats twice a day every day through all of the craziness that was our lives last year. I thought it might be too much for me to handle on top of everything else. But turns out that for the most part my fears were unfounded.  On the day we were actually moving from our old house and putting all of our belongings into storage I asked a good friend of mine to goat sit until we could get our selves and our stuff out of one place and into any other. As soon as we were installed in my parent's house, I ran to get my "girls" as fast as I could. 

Turns out I loved having them with me. No matter what was happening, the milking and goat chores got me out of the house for a minimum of 20 minutes twice each day. It was always so peaceful, the goats had adjusted completely and were quite happy to jump up onto the milk stand and be milked, without making a fuss. They were always affectionate and so happy to see me. I told Rodrigo several times during those tumultuous months that if possible I never wanted to be without goats on our homestead.  Emmett and Claire often joined me playing in the yard and toddling around under the giant old shade trees playing or standing close to me petting the goats and "helping" me milk them. 

October came and we moved into our own home and relocated the goats to a lovely large pasture here on our new land. As cooler weather arrived the goats came into heat for the first time. My goats, like most dairy goats, are seasonal breeders. That means they only come into heat for a few days each month for a few months each year and if they aren't bred then, we will have to wait an entire year for them to get pregnant and freshen again. (Give birth and come into milk again!) Without baby goats there is no milk...so we need baby goats! 

In order to get baby goats we needed one thing... a buck! We do not have a buck (male goat) and I did not want to own a buck! They are rumored to be bad tempered, stinky escape artists with precisely one thing on their minds! But without a buck, the plain fact is there will be no baby goats! I asked around and scouted every farm I passed in hopes of finding a good looking guy to visit my girls but a couple of months passed and I had no leads. So I did what any respectable newbie homesteader would do... I posted a personal ad on Craigslist! 

In my ad I described my goats (Nubian-Saanen crosses) and explained that I was searching for a healthy goat of an appropriate breed to do us a favor. ;-) Within a couple of hours a gentleman with a herd of full blooded Saanen goats contacted me via email and said he might be able to help. After a nice long informative phone call he gave me his address (turns out he lives just across the mountain in the same tiny town we had moved to) and I drove over to borrow Cooper.

Cooper was quite large and really, really stinky! He was not exactly bad tempered and while he never attempted to butt us, he did repeated ram the fence and break out/jump over while he was here. Mostly the escapes where to get out to eat the pretty bushes just on the other side of the fence, and thankfully he never wandered off of our land. He was also very easy to catch, we just called and shook a bit of grain so he could hear it rattling in the bottom of the bucket and he would come running. But I did find his enthusiasm a bit disconcerting. A very large goat, with very large pointy horns running full speed towards me made me slightly nervous. He honestly never tried anything rough towards me, and the children were all warned to stay away from him, just in case! Because of his escapes we invested in a strand of electric wire to circle the top of the fence around the goats' entire pasture area. After that he never tried to escape again. He stayed here rooming with my goats for a total of 5 weeks. We wanted to be sure that both of my goats did get a chance to get bred before we returned him home. 

And now we wait. If I managed to guess correctly when my goats were in heat then I think the first birth should be sometime in the very first week of April! It is very exciting! Both Daisy and Larkspur had one baby each last time, and it was the first birth for each of them. According to most other goat people I've spoken with, goats often have one baby their first time around and the second time they will often have twins or even triplets!!! I think both girls are already looking plumper, but it might just be their thick winter fur... after all they are only about a month or a month and a half pregnant right now. I'm not sure how soon goats start showing. I've got lots to read up on over the next couple months so I am ready when the time comes for them to give birth. I can't wait, I just hope they both are pregnant! We are undecided about what we are going to do with the babies right now. One of the doelings (assuming we have a doeling!) will be going to the man who lent us Copper, and for the others, we will just have to wait and see. If we have little bucks we will probably raise at least one for meat. The boys are talking about keeping a buckling to train as a cart goat. :-) 

Goat Cart image found here.

How I stop goats from kicking while on the milk stand

As I mentioned in the last post about my goats, it was a really steep learning curve for me and the goats while I was figuring out how to milk and they were figuring out how to behave on the milk stand. I finally got the hang of milking after a week or so, but I was having to hold one of the goat's back legs and only milk with one hand. Since no matter how sweetly I asked them or threatened to make sausage out of them they still danced and pranced while they where in the stanchion. The excited children running around and the neighbours' dogs barking at the fence did nothing to help the situation. 

So I went to my friend Google and searched "how to stop a goat from kicking" "how to restrain a goat" "goat hobbles" you name it and I looked it up. Basically everything said that the goats would eventually calm down and stand still. A few sites referred to "goat hobbles" These were nylon straps that go above the goats knees and are supposed to prevent the goat from kicking, and they cost $20, plus I had to wait for them to get shipped to me. I kept mulling it over whether or not I should go ahead and buy the things even though I had read in several places that they didn't really work and were a waste of money, I was desperate! After nearly a month we still almost never managed to get any milk for ourselves. The dogs were getting fatter, but I was not about to give my family milk that the goats had stepped in! 

One day it occurred to me that I might be able to fashion a hobble of sorts myself. That morning as I led the goats out of their pen onto the milk stand I realized that it might just work using what I already had on hand. A dog leash!! It took a little bit of trial and error, but I finally came up with a way that works for us! 

My method of goat restraint should be pretty self explanatory from the pictures above. But just in case you need a written description of what we do, here it is: 

• use handle side of nylon dog leash
• place goat's hind feet through handle of leash, bringing loop of handle just above goat's knees
• wrap leash around handle, initially I wrapped it twice to make sure it was tight enough to prevent goat movement, now as long as it is there they don't really try to kick anymore, so I usually only wrap it once. 
• wrap long end of leash around far side of stanchion post, hooking leash back on self
• in the last picture Larkspur the goat is actually kicking, and as you can see the milk is perfectly safe!

It only took two times milking with the "hobble leash" and the goats settled right down. The first time they freaked out a bit at having their legs restrained, but within 2 days they stood patiently while I put their feet into the strap and tied them up. No more kicking!! We finally got to drink goat milk ourselves! 

Linking up with the Barn Hop this week!

Milking the goats

Meet Daisy and Larkspur. They are Snubians, that means they are a cross breed of Nubian and Saanan dairy goats... mutts really. :-) When we were looking for a few goats to add to our family, these were the only two I could find for sale locally that were both in milk. They are both yearlings and this year was their first freshening (first time they have given birth). The had never been hand milked before I got them. Their previous owner left their kids with them to help develop their udders and had never trained them to the milk stand. I bought them 4 months after their kids were born. The lady I got them from told me that they were both already trying to wean their kids and she wanted to sell the kids as well. So I bought these two does and brought them home. 

My idea that first morning was to milk her while sitting on a tiny stool in the grass while she stood patiently chewing her cud allowing the frothy white goodness to come pouring out of her. I envisioned it would be just like the stories of goat herders in the Alps, like in the story of Heidi! I went outside imagining all the the wonderful milk I would be getting from my goats, the cheese I would be making with the excess milk that we didn't drink fresh, all of the picnics in the shade of a huge tree eating crusty homemade bread, smeared with fresh butter, and jars of fresh ice cold milk to drink with creamy goat cheese spread on our crusty bread while my children gathered wildflowers and made daisy chain crowns of them and danced around a maypole singing folk songs and... yeah it was going to be just like that! 

Well, that beautiful vision lasted just about 20 seconds! They were friendly curious goats, but they had not been touched or handled much before they came to live with us. The first day they were here, milking time came and I got my supplies together and took Logan outside to help me figure this out. I took a dog leash out with me, hooked it on one's collar and brought her out of the pen to milk her. 

I had to drag the poor animal out of the pen on the leash (they had never been trained to walk on a lead either) while she protested loudly.Then Logan held onto the lead while I situated myself on the little stool next to the goat. The minute I touched her she moved away. So I scooted the little bench I was sitting on over a bit, to be within reach and she promptly moved out of my reach again. We were both pivoting around poor Logan who was trying desperately to keep a hold on her leash while I tried desperately to keep a hold on her teats! We had left the milk bucket behind and at this point both Logan and myself had milk running down our legs and into our shoes. He was laughing so hard that the amount of help he was actually providing at that point was negligible. 

While the goat and I were orbiting my ever helpful son, he quipped "With people like us living here the neighbours don't even need to watch TV anymore. They'll just see us head out the backdoor and start popping the popcorn, and sit by their back windows to watch the show!" *After that I was afraid to look up, for fear that he might be right! 

After about 20 minutes we repeated the entire spectacle with the second goat... it didn't go any better than with the first one. If anything it was even more difficult because this one was more nervous after hearing her herd-mate protesting the whole time! We finally went back up to the house with a grand total of nearly one cup full of very dirty, stepped in milk, which I dumped unceremoniously into the dog's dish as I passed by. I called Rodrigo at work and told him that he needed to plan on making me a milk stand before that evening's milking time after he got home from work! 

My darling husband did come home and make me a wonderful milk stand. We had numerous books about goats and homesteading in general with plans for DIY milk stands. We looked at all of them and took what we thought were the best points from each and he built it for me. Two things I asked that he specifically include in the design were #1 that it have a back "wall" that way the goat couldn't move away from me while I was milking her. And #2 that the stand be made about 8 inches wider that the goats actually needed so that I could sit next to them while I milked. My thought was so I could lean my shoulder into the goat to help her feel calmer and hold her still while she was being milked. After having the stand in use now for more than two months I am very happy with these design choices! 

Within about a week's time of having the milk stand, the goats were settling into our routine. They realized that I had no intention of killing them when I went out twice a day to lead them out of their pen and onto the stand. They decided that quite liked the grain they got while being milked. I caught on pretty quickly that they would stand still (well, fairly still) if I only let them eat grain while on the milk stand. The rest of the day they have free choice of browsing and good hay.

During that first month I I read every book, blog post, or magazine article and watched every single video I could find, trying to figure out how to get my goats to stand still! There where several good suggestions, but none of them really worked for us. Mostly they just came down to this, "Be patient, eventually your goat will stand still on her own."  I'm not terribly patient and I was sick of never even getting to taste the milk that I was working so hard to get out, since the bucket (Or large stainless steel bowl in our case) was being kicked over and stepped in before I ever had a chance to save it. Finally, I figured out a way that works for us that I had not seen posted anywhere else. I had Rodrigo shoot a short video of how we do it, in the hopes that it might help someone else that might have the same problem! I am editing it now and I'll post it next week. 

*P.S. The aforementioned neighbours, who Logan predicted might be watching our crazy antics... Well at least 4 different times I have seen and heard various neighbours outside talking on their cell phones about me while I am milking. They lean over the fence to get better shots of what I'm doing. They have texted pictures of me milking to their friends and families, they have posted pictures of me on facebook... You know, I think they might miss us when we move! The rest of this neighbourhood is pretty boring compared to us... I guess they'll just have to go back to watching TV next month! 

Linking up at Homestead Revival: Barn Hop.

It finally happened...

We chose contentment, indeed happiness to just be here in our little house on our little piece of land in our little neighbourhood were we have lived for the past 6 or 7 years. We decided that since we were not really going to ever sell our home, that we would begin to "homestead" much more seriously right here in our little backyard. Rodrigo and I talked and planned for weeks and months, just how to best use what God had given us to work with here. We planned on how to make our large family feel most comfortable in the small confines of this house. We talked with the (oldest 3) children about these things too, we asked for their ideas and input about everything we were considering. We talked about what we needed to get rid of, sell, or giveaway. We discussed what we would need to build, buy, plant, or breed and raise to become as self-sufficient as possible.

We were positively sure that putting our house up for sale was totally pointless, because no one was really buying houses just now. Our house had a 6 month contract on it with the real estate company, and we had so many showings. For 5 months, at least once a week, sometimes as many as 3 times in a week, we would have to maniacally clean everything in the house, and make sure everything was totally spotless and leave. Everything was scrubbed, polished, dusted, and straightened to perfection or as near as I could humanly get it. And then a bunch of total strangers would go traipsing through our home, never to be heard from again. I hated it, but I knew that without all of those strangers snooping about my house, we would never get to sell it. But as the weeks wore on I felt more and more resentful at having to prepare my home for something that would never happen. Rodrigo encouraged me just to hang on and finish out our contract with the realtors, so I did... but I wasn't enjoying it a bit!

In the meantime we decided to go ahead and start really living here again. We began to implement our homesteading, self-sufficiency plan. We bought fruit trees, 7 of them, and planted a mini orchard, with room to add a few more trees next spring. We got meat rabbits and started breeding them to eat eventually. (At the moment we have 10 adult rabbits for breeding, several of whom are pregnant and one with 5 babies.)

We planted a bunch of veggies in the flower beds since all of our dedicated gardening spots had been reseeded with grass, to make our lawn more desirable to potential home-buyers. *rolling eyes* We made plans to greatly expand our gardening area next year!  And we decided to go ahead and get a couple of dairy goats!! 

Yes, I finally got my milk goats. We have been talking about it for ages, reading, researching, talking to people who had goats, and finally Rodrigo told me that he thought if I was ready to start milking them twice a day that I should go ahead and locate a few. No sense wasting our lives waiting for something that may never happen he said, better to live our lives that way we want right now while we are young enough to enjoy it, instead of waiting for "someday" only to realize that someday either came too late, or never came.  Thus Daisy and Larkspur were welcomed to our little homestead in the neighbourhood! (I'll post more about them soon! I love my goats!!) 


They lived in the backyard and slept in a little plastic "barn". Rodrigo was not happy with the "barn", and stated that the goats needed their own shed, purposefully built just for them. We spent a couple of weeks researching exactly what type of housing would be best suited to our needs as well as theirs. We wanted something large enough to house them, a place for milking, a few kids next spring, and even to house a small flock of laying hens that we wanted to get. (Remember, we got rid of our lovely chickens when we decided to put our house on the market? We thought having a flock of chickens in the backyard would scare off prospective buyers, Haha! We had tons of "prospective buyers" just no actual buyers!!) So materials were acquired and work was begun on the new goat shed. 

So basically everything we did, pretty much seemed purposefully designed to scare off any house hunters in the area. We still had showings, but in the 5 months that it has been on the market we didn't have one. single. offer. Not even a really low offer, nothing, zero, zip, nada! I didn't even care anymore, I kept asking Rodrigo if we could please just break our contract with the real estate company and get on with life. I was sick of having all of my books and pictures in storage. I was sick of paying (!!) to store books and furniture that we could be using. So a couple of weeks ago we had one last showing. A few days after that the realtor called Rodrigo. It was July 4th and we were picnicking with the kids at the lake. 

Rodrigo was out in the water with the children paddling them around in one of our inflatable kayaks. When I saw who was calling I didn't even answer the phone. I had no intention of cutting our fun short to run home and clean, for yet another showing! Rodrigo had the day off and we were celebrating! Later, after we were home that evening, I remembered the missed call. I told Rodrigo that he probably had a message from the realtor and that he might want to check it. No message, so Rodrigo called him up to find out when they wanted to show the house. I didn't really even like the guy, so I surely didn't want to talk to him! Ro got a funny look on his face when they started talking and went out to the porch to talk where it was quieter. He came inside in a few minutes and told me that we had an offer on the house!!! 

It had finally happened! Now, after we had decided that we would choose joy and contentment. We made up our minds to be truly grateful to God for all the wonderful blessings He had given us right here, and make the very most of those gifts. After we had invested so much more of ourselves (not to mention time and money!) into making this house of ours exactly what we wanted~ a functioning homestead. Someone wanted to buy it?!?! And so now we are in the midst of looking for a new place to call home, we had completely stopped house hunting for ourselves since we were sure we would have no reason to need another place! We close on this house on August 16th. So we are feeling a bit of pressure to hurry up and find somewhere to live! And to make things feel even more adventurous not only do we have a family of 7 people to worry about housing, we have 2 dogs, 2 goats (that must be milked twice a day!) and 15 rabbits to deal with now as well! 


What an adventure!