Goings-On

Life is, as always, busy and never, ever dull.

The goats, they keep milking.

The children, they keep growing.

Markets are always enjoyable, every Saturday evening is spent regaling each other with customer comments or people observed, which is never dull.

We are working on some significant changes to our herd management that we are very excited about. In large measure these changes are driven by the need to cut costs due to drought-related feed and hay price increases. Beyond these external factors forcing us to assess costs and the effects on our bottom line, we are always tweaking what we do in an attempt to ensure that we are being the best stewards possible of our herd. The one thing that never changes around here is that things always are subject to change! We hope to be able to share more about these changes on the farm in the next week.

Changes are in the air for the household as well as for the dairy--we just found out that baby number thirteen is on the way! This is somewhat of a surprise as, frankly, I am not getting any younger. I will be 46 when this new baby is born. Tim has suggested that I blog about the pregnancy. I am somewhat reticent about this, seems a tad bit like grandstanding and one thing that I have always tried to do is downplay my pregnancies. It figures that this gets to be old news pretty quickly--after all, I have now been pregnant (get this) NINETEEN TIMES. This number obviously includes a handful of miscarriages along with the dozen children now in the home--five of which are laying on my bed right now chatting about the day. (This seems to be a particularly teenaged trait.) The truth is, though, that given my age, odds are good that this will be my last pregnancy. Might as well go out with a bang, right?