Vacation's over!

Well, not that I think my children would call it a vacation, in fact they seem pretty psyched to be moving on to "real life"!

You see, in the past year we have had...

*a new baby

*a grandfather in hospice care here in our home (and the subsequent loss of that grandfather)

*loss of dad's job (that led to the dairy being built)

*a trip to Colorado to return the other grandfather to where he wanted to be

*designing and building the dairy

*a trip to Montana and Idaho to pick up new goats for the dairy

*getting our license

*starting selling in farmer's markets

*started kidding season with a boatload more goats than ever before!

*two of the older and more essential daughters gone for two months to Europe


Suffice it to say, things have been in crisis mode for a while, now. Thankfully, with homeschooling, we had the luxury of flexibility; we could do school when it worked best and limit it to the bare essentials required. Also thankfully, we have a good team here in our family that pulls together well under pressure. Despite these facts, the house is a disaster, we haven't read to the kids in who knows how long, we have been cooking survival meals, not family feast and fellowship type dinners and living off paper plates. (How green is THAT?!) It is time, now, to look ahead and say "enough, time to move back to normalcy". So, this is the week that we buckle down.

We have our schedule ready to be printed up and posted. We have checklists for me to use to see if everyone is doing their jobs. We are working on menus and commensurate shopping list for the month of May. We are going through clothes and culling those outgrown/stained/holey clothes and packing away winter coats. Who knows, we might even finally get those boxes of Christmas ornaments out of the front room and into the shed!

Life looks good, rich and full. Now we just have to get it whipped into shape!

Pray for us!

They just keep coming!

Lightnin' had our first ever totally healthy set of triplets! Two bucks and a doe.

Prada had a buck and a doe.

We are now currently at 24 baby goats here on Swede Farm. Y'all ought to come out and see them sometime, there is nothing cuter than a baby goat no matter if their ears hang down, are upright or, in the case of LaManchas, totally missing!

We have four more does due to kid--one alpine, three nubians, the lamanchas are all done!

And the puppies are getting fatter by the hour.

Oh! How could I forget?!

Besides all the baby goats being born we also had a litter of nine Great Pyrenees puppies born!