Adventures in Dairy Goat Farming: It's Not You It's Us...But Mostly It's You

    In every endeavor there comes a time when you need to step back and assess what's working and what's not; what is worthwhile, and what is driving you bonkers leaving manure all over your yard and destroying your landscaping.  G and I recently conducted one such assessment of our farmstead (which we not-so-fondly have been referring to as Freeloader Farms) and decided it was time to move on from attempting to turn non-dairy goats into dairy goats with no prior goat farming experience.  Though the small herd had it's endearing characteristics, it was getting expensive to feed glorified pets that continuously wreaked havoc on our property.  The free-ranging baby goats had been fun for awhile. We had enjoyed the companionship and found amusement in the FedEx guys' reactions to them.  But at some point the manure on the patio, the trampled shrubbery, and the inability to grow a garden without fear it will be grazed into oblivion began to outweigh the fun. There is a reason, actually several reasons, it's not common practice to have free-ranging pet goats, and while I liked the quirkiness of miniature goats running around, this is just not the time in our lives to have manure all over our yard and driveway. Especially with two boys that crave neatness and order and a baby girl that puts everything in her mouth. 

       The original plan had never been to keep all the goats. After we lost so much livestock last winter we had decided that keeping all of them was cheaper than therapy for the boys. But that was when we thought the goats would eventually be too big to squeeze through the slots in the fence and GD was sure he could train then to be riding and cuddling goats. At almost full-grown they were still able to contort themselves through the spacing in the fence and graze in our yard at will.  While at one point the boys would have been devastated to say goodbye to their farm goats, they too were ready to move on.  GE can find the positive in any situation and declared, "Well, when we're ready for more goats, we just get some at Walmart. And I LOOOOVE the piggies, because we're going to EAT THEM!"  I thought GD would have a harder time with it but he has been silently beating himself up inside that he wasn't a good enough goat farmer to train them for bareback riding. And the manure everywhere and the inefficiency of free-loader livestock was getting to him too. 

         Last Saturday G listed them on Craiglist. We hoped to get some cash for them, but we were prepared to give them away for free; after all, giving them away free is more cost-effective than feeding them. Right away people were interested. 

      On Sunday afternoon, Farmer and her daughter Bushhog were taken by a very nice lady to a wonderful new life on a goat breeding farm. Farmer even had a boyfriend waiting for her. They were going to live with other goats, sheep, alpacas, and even some emu. They were even covered with a blanket for the ride to their new home.  We felt really good about the transaction. I think they will have a happier life than what we would give them, and we felt good that we had raised desirable goats for breeding. 

     On Wednesday another lady came for Tractor and her daughter Mower. While she was meeting them, Weedwacker, our only boy, charmed his way into her heart and she ended up driving away with all three. On some cardboard in the back of her minivan. Because "a few goat nuggets never hurt anyone."  They were going to get to be free-ranging goats again at their new farm; obviously the goat manure all over is not an issue for their new owner. 

         I miss the goats a little, but I think we're all a little relieved. It lessens the farm chores and takes the pressure off to make them worthwhile.  And GD did get to feel like a real goat farmer selling the goats he raised. Even he says he doesn't miss them.  We felt they all went to better places more suited for them. 

        This is not the end of our goat farming journey. In the future, when the kids are older and we know more what we're doing, we would like to try real dairy breeds. And G was so encouraged by the money we made selling the goats he's started talking about breeding them (this is not an idea I am encouraging). Mostly though, all three boys want to take the money we got from the goats and the space we have in the barn and get some different livestock. So far, we are going to try to fit turkeys, baby piggies, broiler chickens, an alpaca, a calf, and maybe a Pygora goat in the space vacated by the goats. 

        I'm sure G will show up with something someday soon, but for now I'm just enjoying my clean patio. 

         

Monsters

      GE was very reluctant to give his crib up to his baby sister.  It was a several-week-long process to adjust him from crib life to sleeping in a big-boy bed.  Even though he had been able to climb in and out of the crib by himself, and did it freely whenever he and GD played garbage truck in the crib, he refused to climb out of it by himself in the morning and after nap.  Which was fine with me, at least he was contained.  But even after he moved permanently to his twin bed this summer he was still unable to get himself up in the morning. We didn't think much of it at first. After all, this is the child that regularly pretends to be stuck on the floor and then becomes convinced that he actually is stuck and starts screaming for help. Finally one morning it all made sense. 

       He told me that a monster came in his room every morning and woke him up. I asked him what the monster looked like and he thought a second and said. "It's purple.  It's KM's color!  It must be KM's monster!"  And ever since then he's gotten out of bed himself in the morning. 

      You see GE is a little more imaginative and not nearly as skeptical as GD. GE has seen Monsters Inc, where each child is specially matched to their monster in order to produce the most energy from screams.  We also had a book out of the library where monsters are trying out to see which monster fit a little kid the best to get the kid to sleep at night because each kid needs their own monster. GE is thoroughly convinced that each child has their own monster or monsters specifically selected for optimum scaring. 

     He was talking to GD one day soon after he started getting out of bed himself and asked him, "Do you have a monster?  I don't. Just KM's. It wakes me up in the morning."  So evidently when he realized the monster belonged to KM, he decided he shouldn't be afraid of it then. 

(It just occurred to me that maybe this purple monster wakes up GE in the morning instead of bothering KM because it is confused as to why KM has yet to move out of our room.)

     However. A few weeks later an orange monster moved in under his bed.  Because this monster belongs to him--it has to if it's orange--GE is terrified of it. It has not caused too many problems, just occasionally waking him up during the night. It was quite active the night we let him watch Rudolph, menacing around the room with the Abominable Snow Monster. GE was awake until 1AM that night. (I declared no more monster movies after that. And then proceeded to let them watch A Muppet Family Christmas, telling him "There are no monsters in this...well, actually it's mostly monsters..."  Muppet monsters do not seem to be a problem though).

     GE is doing better about the monsters now.  Recently, this orange monster has brought his buddies along, who are also orange.  But we have figured out how to handle them now. If there are any monsters causing problems at bedtime they are swiftly vanquished by Daddy throwing them over the balcony or Big Brother GD pelletting them with Nerf bullets. 

Insights and Ramblings About New Year's

     The other day at lunch I explained the tradition of celebrating New Year's Eve to GD. I told him about staying up late, throwing confetti, and blowing noise-makers. My ever-practical five-year-old was terribly unimpressed. He looked at me as if to see if I was just making it all up, blinked a couple times, and then asked very blandly, "Why would people do that?"

     "To celebrate it being a new year. It's 2017 and it's going to be 2018."  

     Again, he stared and blinked at me and said, "But it's just like any other day."

      Then my husband chimed in and told him about the ball dropping in Times Square and how everyone stands outside in the cold waiting for a lit-up ball to fall and then makes a mess with confetti. 

     GD looked very perplexed about the inefficiency of it all. "Maybe we could just watch a movie and get out the new calendar or something."  

      I'm with you, kid. I don't understand all the hype about New Year's either.   With all of the Christmas festivities over the past couple weeks my kids are holidayed out. My toddler doesn't even want to celebrate his birthday this week. So if they want to eliminate the New Year's celebration I'm ok with that. KM would just eat the confetti anyway. 

      But then G and I started to wonder as we boycotted watching the ball drop, Why do we celebrate New Year's Eve anyway?  What are we celebrating?  The passage of time?  (This was part of an extended conversation involving humans celebrating in general and our lack of endurance for extended partying). I asked the omniscient internet this question, and it took me to a Psychology Today article that said that the celebration of New Year's is intrinsically linked to our motivation to survive. 

       Now I feel like we should do more that just watch a movie and change the calendar.

        I also had told GD about New Years resolutions. To be honest, I just told him because I was curious what his unfiltered efficiency-minded opinion on them was, and I was not disappointed.
        "I really think all this New Year's stuff is pretty silly," he told me.

       I'm not totally opposed to New Year's resolutions. I just don't understand why they have to be made at New Year's (in case you were wondering, these too are linked to our motivation to survive). G and I have, in the past, made resolutions for our family for the new year and kept them.  And we've also made resolutions and quickly realized that we were just trying to be people we are not and joined the 88% of people that do not keep their New Year's resolutions.  

      Like last year, we decided that we needed a break from house projects and would not be starting anymore projects in 2017.  Before the ball even started dropping we were discussing what walls we were going to cut holes in for more windows and how we wanted to redo the kitchen.  

     Or the year I decided that we needed to be "organized."  I downloaded pretty planner pages I found on Pinterest and even bought a pocket calendar.  I was going to be an organized "planner person" (I do believe in the blogging world this is an actual term).  I didn't even end up printing the planner pages.  The five days I kept that pocket calendar updated were so very stressful for me.  I ended up giving the calendar to GD because he liked the "teeny tiny numbers" in it and went back to just remembering everything.  Writing things down just takes too much time.  

     So, for 2018 we did not make any resolutions, we did not throw confetti, and we did not watch the ball drop.  We did get out some noise makers for the kids, but did not end up watching a movie because they were so busy playing with the noise makers and passing around slobber (which might explain why we've all been sick for the past week).  I don't know if we'll even change our wall calendar in the morning.  It still says November.  

S-W-I-N-E

    GD told us a couple years ago that he did not want to raise animals for meat if those animals had eyes. I guess he didn't want to look his food in the eye, which I don't think is unreasonable for a preschooler.  However, about a year ago, right after eating a delicious Christmas ham, G started talking about getting some pigs.  

     GD was excited about the prospect of pig farming. My mom asked him, "Would you be all right with raising pigs for meat even if they have eyes?"

     "Well," GD answered, "I really like bacon." 

     And so it was tentivitely decided that we would be getting a pig and naming it Christmas Ham. 

     But after a rough winter losing 21 chickens and a goat, we decided it was best to wait to add to our livestock collection.  Until a few weeks ago when we were sitting around the table watching the boys chow down on ribs. That's when G started talking seriously again about getting some S-W-I-N-E. 

      G has learned it is unwise to just show up with livestock without warning me first. I don't mind surprises, I would just rather they not have four legs and require food and housing. So over the next couple weeks he asked me several times about getting a S-W-I-N-E.

      And then gradually that became two S-W-I-N-E, because "it really wouldn't be much more work for twice as much meat."  Whatever. 

       

         Now, there are two reasons to refer to your pigs as S-W-I-N-E. 

1.  You automatically spell everything because you think you're fooling your children but, really, there's no fooling them (after all, I have been trying to teach them to spell). 

2. S-W-I-N-E is much less endearing than calling them P-I-G-S. P-I-G-S conjures up images of prancing piglets and children's storybook characters. It's harder to become attached to S-W-I-N-E before you send them off to the butcher. 

After putting a down payment on two partially grown S-W-I-N-E (yes, around here you do need to reserve your craiglists swine before someone else snatches up the bargain), we did finally tell the boys we were getting some future bacon.  

     They were pretty ecstatic at the prospect of being swine farmers. They insisted on going to pick up the swine and go out to check on them everyday saying, "We're going to eat you someday."  We do have an agreement with them that they won't be required to do any chores for the swine because they don't want to become too attached to them. 

       I think that's wise.  I don't do any chores for them either. The pink one is just too happy to see me for me eat him someday.   He (or she?  I didn't ask, I don't want to know, my food does not have a gender) looks at me with those happy eyes and all I can think about is Babe or Wilbur. 

     And that's why food shouldn't have eyes. 

(No picture of the swine, we may get too attached to them if they're in our photo album) 

How to Make Everything

     GD is a kid that always wants to know "how," especially how things are made.  And then he wants to make the things himself. A few weeks ago he came out to the kitchen with a spool of thread and started cutting lengths of it and laying them out on the table, announcing that he was going to make his own fabric by weaving thread. He said then I would never have to buy fabric ever again. Sometimes his ideas get a little grandiose. 

     This led to me getting out my old loop weaving loom and an all-out investigation into weaving. While perusing YouTube for weaving videos we stumbled upon the How to Make Everything Series, watching a segment where they showed how to hand-weave threads made from natural materials into fabric for a men's suit. GD is now hooked on the "How to Make Everything" channel and he gets to watch an episode every night before bed.  In this series the host, Andy George, attempts to make everyday items like a book or a sandwich completely from scratch, even collecting his own raw materials.  

    It's an interesting series. I have been enjoying watching it with him and it is educational. We've learned how to collect silk from silk worms and that silk worm moths can't eat because they don't have mouths so they just mate and die (something he found very disturbing). We learned that acorns are actually not poisonous to humans and you can make flour out of them (we haven't found any acorns to try it yet, much to GD's disappointment). We leaned how to make our own cheese and butter, how to bind a book, and how to tan a deer hide. 

GD has also picked up some new vocabulary. In the episode showing how to collect hemp to weave into pants, GD was introduced to the word "marijuana."  I hadn't expected Andy George to go off on a tangent about how legalizing marijuana would be good for the hemp industry, and I thought GD would just gloss over it, but evidently the word "marijuana" has a ring to it and he started letting it roll off his tongue, trying it out in different voices.  We had to pause the video to discuss what marijuana is, why we can't grow our own hemp, and that it's not a word we should go around saying for fun.

That's why he doesn't watch these thigs by himself.

   Recently we watches the series on how to make Thanksgiving dinner from scratch in preparation for Thanksgiving.    We were kind of disappointed that there was only 8 episodes because we were hoping it would last us until Thanksgiving. But Andy used a lot of leftovers from when he made his sandwich and his root beer float so we watched those too.  

    A few nights ago we watched Andy go wild turkey hunting. If I had known how much footage there would be of the turkey flapping around after getting shot in the head twice I probably would not have shown this at bedtime, but in my defense I thought the video was going to be about Andy raising his own domestic turkey  (Yes, maybe I need to pre-screen these things).  Fortunately GD fully understands and accepts where meat comes from and has been inspired to hunt his own wild turkey.

The next day he and GE set up a turkey blind out of some kitchen chairs and GE's security blanket "Bee" and proceeded to hunt stuffed chickens with air pumpers.  While GD instructed GE to aim for the head, KM took a more hand-on approach.

While they were setting all this up I realized that when we made the "our kids do not play with pretend guns" parenting decision, wild turkey hunting had not been a factor we considered.  I texted G at work asking what our parental position was on using pretend guns for hunting and if that decision extended to using pretend guns for hunting if your brother is pretending to be the turkey.   His opinion was both of those were ok, but I'm still not too keen on pretending to shoot turkey-siblings. 

After that GD hauled the chicken-turkeys to his kitchen and plucked and cooked them.  He then proceeded act out the other 6 videos in the series, collecting cranberries, sugar beets, acorns, and potatoes.

By the way, Andy George does not include pie in his Thanksgiving dinner.  It just seems wrong.

My Favorite Thing About Fall

    I actually wrote this last fall and never published it.  I found it in my drafts and I have been celebrating the end of sunblock for the past couple weeks so I thought I would finally post this. 


   My oldest son is kind of obsessed with fall.  I've already written about that, but the level of his love for all things autumn is really beyond description.
    I, on the other hand, do not have warm fuzzy feelings about this season.  Well, I guess I do if you're referring to the two layers of fleece sweatshirts I put on when the temperatures dip below 70 degrees.  There are a few things I do like about fall....the colors, the crisp air that reminds me of running high school cross-country and marching band at football games with my favorite drummer, and the festive feeling of the approaching holiday season.  But mostly my thoughts about fall revolve around how we're entering 6 months of freezing darkness and doubts that my house can withstand the forces of two little boys cooped up inside for days on end.  Basically, I just can't enjoy fall because I have a really bad attitude about winter.
  But, I have found a silver lining to all of this.  This realization was the highlight of my week last week.

    WITH THE END OF SUMMER COMES THE END OF SUNBLOCK.

    I feel very strongly about the importance of sunblock application in young children.  My husband would tell you I'm tad bit obsessive about it (well, maybe more than a "tad bit"--I have been known to use up an entire 8 ounce bottle of kid's sunblock in one week).  My fears of my children being expose to too much UV radiation are not unfounded; I have two very light-skinned boys, one with red hair, and a significant family history of melanoma.  So two or three times a day every day from March through September my boys get a thorough slathering of Banana Boat.
    Research shows that when applying sunblock only 25-50% of people use the dermatologist-recommended amount of lotion; most people apply much less than the 1 ounce recommended for adults and most don't re-apply it every 1-2 hours.  I can assure you that, at least when it comes to sun protection for my children I am not a part of this statistic.  Despite being outside for several hours a day every day in the summer, my boys are just as pale as they were last February.  Their pediatrician actually said I deserved a standing ovation for my obvious diligence in their skin protection when I took them for their week visits in July.

    But despite my zeal for broad-UV-spectrum protection, the twice-daily sunblocking ritual is not something I --or the boys-- enjoy. The four-year-old usually sighs and rolls his eyes like a teenager as he plops into our official "sunblocking chair."  Meanwhile the toddler takes off running through the house screaming "Sunblock!  Sunblock! Sunblock!" until I chase him down and all but sit on him to get him slathered in sunscreen (I've actually considered filming this whole process and marketing it as an exercise video). 

   So, last Thursday on the first day of fall as we got ready to head out to the pool in 90-degree heat, I looked out at the north-pointing shadows and decided that the intensity of the sun's rays had waned enough that the boys could survive 45 minutes outside without sunblock. 

    When I told the boys they could head outside without sunblock they exclaimed with delight, and I almost thought I heard the sunblocking chair sigh with relief.

Freeloader Farms

We had big plans for our little homestead this year.  Our hopes, dreams, and expectations for 2017 were beyond optimistic. Just to name a few:

-Continue our successful chicken farming

-Become successful dairy goat farmers. Get buckets and buckets of goat milk, never have to buy milk again, make our own goat milk yogurt, maybe even make our own soap. Sell the baby goats and make some money for more livestock. 

-Harvest enough garden produce to can and freeze to feed our growing family through the next year with enough leftover to sell at farmers markets. 

-Start a vineyard.

-Add more trees to our orchard.  Harvest some apples, peaches, and pears 

-Add a pig named Christmas Ham and maybe some turkeys to our little farm. 

This was just the homesteading goals.  Also on our to-do list were things like "refinish the kitchen cabinets," "add a mud room in the garage," and "knock out two windows in the living room and fill in the existing one." 

Oh, and raise three children. And there's that place my husband has to go to every day so we have money. 

So let's take a look at how all of our goals panned out so far this year. 

-We lost 21 chickens this past winter in three separate horrifying coop invasions, including a few chickens that were beloved pets. We replaced them with chicks that grew into chickens that refused to lay for so long our toddler would chase after them shouting "You bunch of freeloaders!"

-Mr. Goat died under our care. (We actually lied about this to our children because they were already too traumatized by the chicken massacres.  We just said he went back home.  I thought it was worth lying to save their little hearts.  GD figured it out though.). One of our own goats died. We got one cup of goat milk total. We kept the baby goats because they're cheaper than therapy for the boys.   We now have freeloading goats.

-We got a late start on our garden. It got flooded three times. Then it got overtaken with weeds. Then we didn't get rain. Then we got bugs. Then the baby goats ate half the stuff. And then we stopped caring. We froze a couple bags of beans. I thought I would miss the excitement of canning. But I didn't at all. Walmart has plenty of frozen vegetables. 

-Everything else failed so we didn't test our luck with a vineyard. 

-We had about 50 gorgeous bug free peaches we were so excited about. Some critter came and ate all of them just before they were ripe enough to pick and left us nothing but a pile of peach pits. And we had lots of pears but they tasted bad. 

-We were too traumatized by the chicken massacres to add edible livestock to our plate (pun intended). 

The only produce our farm harvested this year was 100 lbs of apples we picked out of ditch down the road. Just call us a bunch of freeloaders.