September 20, 2015

When I realize how much time has passed since I last peeked in here, I feel overwhelmed with where to begin again.  This space was created to chronicle my children’s early childhood and make a keepsake for them.  As I shared pieces of our lives, (the exciting, but mostly the mundane), this space came to mean so much to me.

I miss it.

And I am a little saddened at how much time has lapsed between my posts.  It has also happened with how often I am picking up my camera, too.  And how much spinning I’m getting in there ~ or knitting, or sewing, or quilting, or…  We are living pretty full lives right now with a farm bursting at the seams with critters and gardens and children running about.  And please don’t mistake this for complaining!  I love our full and busy lives here on the homestead.  We have had a full summer of building and fencing and acquiring even more animals.  At the end of the day, I feel just so completely tired ~ in a good way.  Bed calls, and that is where I go.  But then…this little blog of mine….

I want to catch up so I thought I’d share a few moments from the past few months.  I’ll rewind to May when our goats arrived…

We also allowed a few hens to go broody in our coop.  When one of our girls decided to abandon her nest just one day (!) before hatching, we took things into our own hands.  It was so much fun we collected a few batches of eggs and hatched out nearly 30 chicks.  Such fun!

While the chicks were hatching out, day after day (we randomly added eggs here, there, and everywhere which made for several arrivals, at all hours of the day ), the sheep were getting their first shearing.  What an exciting day as the shearer arrived to our valley, stopping at various farms along the way.  I also admit I had to turn away several times as he maneuvered the sheep in various yoga holds (so it seemed) to get the job done in just 5 minutes a sheep.  This is what my girls looked like beneath their woolly winter coats…

Aren’t they so cute?!!!  And this is how much fleece came off…incredible!

(Here we are in September and just yesterday I finished washing one of the merino fleeces (the white ones)).

I remember thinking how much I love the merry month of May.  The grass is lush, the gardens are growing, and there are no mosquitoes yet.  We had a flock of nearly 50 layers, 6 pigs, and 4 newly shorn sheep. We were still working on our homeschool lessons and spending a good deal of our days in our gardens.  The greenhouse was being built and summer was just beginning.  Yes, May was a lovely month of growth and energy and momentum.

And flowers, of course…