Thumbelina

She is just so sweet and cute, I couldn't resist posting her picture. This little baby was born last Monday. She is about 1/3 the size of her twin brother - I think she weighs barely a pound! She's lively and vivacious though, so no worries. I do so love the little babies. New life is always such a miracle.

Signs of Spring

Spring has definitely sprung here! Strangely, one of our first signs was this cheery little robin. Why strange? Isn't that traditional? Well, I have lived in Arizona most of my life, and never saw a robin here in the desert until this spring! Now my dad says that he saw plenty of robins when he was a kid here, but for me this was a new and exciting experience. The little robin and his mate spent nearly a month in our backyard. With that delightful introduction to spring, here are some photos around our yard and the many signs of new life this past month...

Peach trees in the front yard.

Popcorn popping on the apricot tree.

Our new nectarine tree.

Warm enough to wear shorts!

Broccoli blooming and going to seed.

A little nest in the compost tumbler!

And a sweet little hen setting there.

New leaves on the grapevines.

Cabbages almost ready to harvest!

An abundance of sugar snap peas.

Our filly, Stardust, munching on sweet spring grass.

Ponies, dogs, and kids, kicking up thier heels for the pure joy of Spring!

Happy Spring!

Kaiser's Day Out

Every now and then we have a visiting peacock that wanders over to our house for a few days. He struts in front of our peahens, and generally drives our peacock, Kaiser, crazy! Well...last week it was just too much for Kaiser and he somehow broke out of his pen. Fortunately, he didn't seem to wish to fight with the intruder. They just paraded around and squacked at each other.

Kaiser is pretty tame, so it wasn't too hard for Lucy to retrieve him and return him safely to his home. He had flown up onto the barn roof though, so she had to climb up there and then figure out how to climb back down with a slightly nervous peacock in her arms!

She held him gently and securely, spoke to him calmly, and he settled in to her arms while she carefully came down the ladder to safety. He is such a beautiful bird!

One Small Change

I'm a little late getting around to this post, I know. When the new year rolled around and I noticed this project created by the ever-inspiring Suzy of Hip Mountain Mama, my wheels began spinning wondering what we could do in our family. Many of you know that we drink our own goat's milk, and some of you also know that our oldest daughter Jill just can't take the taste. So, our small change came about quite naturally after all. We had been purchasing milk for her - and to supplement the goat milk when there just wasn't quite enough, at the grocery store. Sometimes organic, sometimes not. Jill has a very sensitive taste for milk and can tell us exactly what brand she is drinking without looking! I knew there was an organic dairy down the road from us, but was put off by the price and the inconvenience. However, it has finally come down to the desire to make a difference in the world, and in the health of our family. Our dairy sells raw, organic cow's milk and cream. They take wonderful care of their cows and seem to care very much about thier impact on the world. And the milk? Delicious! Jill took one sip, then a few more as a blissful smile spread across her face. "Oh, mom! This is what milk is supposed to taste like!"

If you would like to join in on this amazing and growing project, click on the button above. One small change at a time we can make a difference for our families and our precious Earth.

A Neighborhood Nativity

Every year our neighborhood gathers for a Nativity play and dinner. Our family helps by providing Mary's "donkey" (our pony) and various goats for the shepherds. This year a new neighbor family brought a "camel" (llama) for the wise men and a darling miniature jersey cow! The cast is the children, with the nine year olds traditionally up on the scaffolding as angels, the oldest 11 year old girl and boy as Mary and Joseph, anyone brave enough to hold a goat as shepherds, and three 9-11 year old boys as wise men. All the other kids join in the Children's Choir. It is a beautiful and sweet event usually held the first Saturday in December. It is such a lovely way to start our season focused on the true meaning of Christmas.

Natural Dye

We have a ton of beautiful sunflowers in our yard. They came up voluntarily, apparantly from wild seeds washed in through the irrigation.

No, really, I mean a ton! Enough for a whole sunflower forest, complete with secret tunnel...and that's not even showing the huge sunflower plants that have grown up in my garden and various other places in the yard.

So...Michaelmas is coming, and we have been charmed by the idea of dying our own golden capes. Trouble is, we don't have any marigolds. Hmmm. Would sunflowers work? We decided to experiment. We started with a whole bunch of whole sunflower heads...

which resulted in this lovely yellow-green, but not really what we were going for.

Then we tried sunflower petals mixed with Mexican Bird of Paradise blossoms and buds.

The pot looked beautiful, the water was kind of murkey, but turned a lovely orangy-pink when I stirred in a sprinkle of citric acid. But when we added the wool, it just didn't seem to be holding the color. We boiled for quite a while, but it just turned out light beige....hmm...

Finally we decided to try just sunflower petals. Just the petals! Nothing else! So tons more flowers were picked. This time we decided to put in a silk scarf too. It was looking very promising, I added a little sprinkle of Tumeric for some intensity....

Now that is color!!! Wow! I couldn't believe how bright it turned out! Now, I don't know how much is sunflowers and how much the Tumeric, but I had a whole pot of sunflower petals and maybe a 1/4 tsp. of tumeric, if that. Anyway, the result is definitely sunflower yellow!

Here are the results, left to right: Sunflower petals and tumeric; onion skins (I only had a tiny bit, so we just did one little pot. It turned out a gorgeous golden color!); sunflower petals and Mexican bird of paradise; sunflower heads.

All the wool and silk was pre-boiled in half water and half white vinegar with a teaspoon of alum added for color fastness. We pre-boiled for one hour, at the same time pre-boiling the flowers for one hour. Then we strained off most of the petals and added the rinsed wool and silk. We then boiled this mixture for about another hour. With the onion skins, though, I just added the pre-boiled wool into the pot with a handful of onion skins and boiled the whole thing for about 45 minutes.

We are thinking that this weekend for our Michaelmas capes, we will do the sunflower petals and tumeric with a few onion skins added for a deeper yellow...All 5 kids demanded to be a part of it! I didn't think the older 3 would want yellow silk capes, but I thought wrong! They still love dress-up!

Grade One, J & B

Letters J & B
Waldorf Alphabet Book
A Journey Through Waldorf First Grade
Oak Meadow Kindergarten
Kit'n'Tales

Stories:
The Water of Life - Grimm (a prince brings his father a JUG of the water of life)
Flora Flutterbye - Sieglinde de Francesca (Kit'N'Tales)
Hummy Bee - Sieglinde de Francesca (Kit'N'Tales)


Activities:
Make clay jug
Make jam
Make bee and butterfly from Kit'N'Tales
Bake bagles




We actually spent most of the week last week on J. I was under the weather with a bad cold and just couldn't seem to focus on academics. We told the story of "The Water of Life" and illustrated the jug and fountain in our MLBs. We made strawberry jam, but I couldn't find clay I liked so we didn't make our jugs. We did have tons of fun dying silk and wool with flowers from our yard - more about that in another post! We also spent a lot of time with our goats and our new neighbor- a little calf named Sassy...

We did all of B on Monday of this week. Well, actually, we were talking about B all weekend as we observed the bees in our garden, thought of all the B words we could think of, baked bread, and talked about butterflies. Elsa was very ready for the two stories on Monday, and was very happy to finally enter her picture in her MLB.

The highlight of our B lesson was making a little Hummy Bee using our sunflower dyed wool and the instructions in Sigi's Hummy Bee story. So cute!!! Elsa loves her little bee and has been taking very good care of her.

We also started the butterfly from Sigi's Flora Flutterbye story (downloads free on the Kit'N'Tales website!) But this morning Elsa discovered that her wings needed a little more color so she had to repaint them. We will finish that one before bed tonight.

It's a Filly!

Last night our Haflinger mare, Grace (affectionately known as "Kleine") finally had her little foal! We have been so excited this past 11 months waiting for the grand event. Last summer we bred her to the most adorable POA stallion, Tough Rocket. He is a ghost leopard appaloosa and has thrown spotted babies every time. What would we get???


After watching Grace all day, we finally looked out at about 11:30 p.m. and saw that the baby was on her way out. Jill ran out immediately while I grabbed the camera and everyone I could wake up! The foal was born around 11:45. Everything perfectly normal and healthy.

She was trying to stand within just a few minutes, but it took a while to build up the strength. Jill went in to the stall and dried her with a towel as the poor baby was shivering a bit. The vigorous rubbing really motivated her to try to get up. Here she is almost an hour old reaching out with her neck, up on her front knees....

...and she faceplants! So wobbley and funny/sweet!

Finally, at almost exactly an hour old, she's up on her feet. Grace is laying down again though, and the baby began to look everywhere for something to suckle!

Ahhh, at last! Found that nice warm milk! She nursed long and strong, even went around and tried the other side.

Here she is, five hours old and just adorable. She was trotting around her stall and curious to see us when we went out to check. So what is that color anyway? We had really expected a chestnut appaloosa. Well, after much searching we discovered that black is dominant over chestnut, and since Rocket (dad) is genetically black (I know he looks white in the pictures, but that is the appaloosa gene) the baby would not be chestnut. So why that silvery color? That is from the pangare gene (also known as mealy) that is dominant in Haflingers. It acts as a dilutant and gives her belly, legs, and muzzle that lighter color, and softens the black throughout. Anyway, we think she is gorgeous!

And we love her!

Princess' 1st kidding

Our little blue-eyed Princess kidded yesterday with two darling doelings! They are amazingly precocious and adorable. Of course, all baby goats are adorable...
If you would like to see how a goat is born, visit our goat blog for a pictorial of her birth. But be warned, it's not for the squeemish!

County Fair Fun!

This was our sixth year as a family showing our animals at the Maricopa County Fair. It was a very fun and exhausting week, but well worth the effort. We took 14 goats, 5 chickens, and our 2 turkeys, and they all won ribbons!
After the goat show on Friday we all took some fun time and rode the rides. David loves this time of the fair as he can ride all the scary rides with the kids. I usually just do the tame rides with Elsa as I am really, no I mean REALLY not in to being spun, dropped, and turned upside-down!

Jesse's only entry in the goat show was his LaMancha doe, Pirouette. He bottle-raised her from a baby when her mama rejected her last spring. If you go to our goat blog you will see him feeding her on the blog banner. She won first place in her class of senior yearlings.

Here are all our goat ribbons! The biggest excitement of the day was our little Merci, who took Grand Champion Senior Doe and Grand Champion Nigerian Dwarf! Hers is the big black and gold ribbon.

Remember our lovely Tom Turkey? Well here are all the prizes he brought home!! I guess I'm not the only one who thinks he's a handsome devil! He won a blue ribbon, Champion Turkey, Class Champion, and a trophy for Champion of all other fowl. He actually won more awards than any other bird at the fair!!

I will have more about the goat show on my goat blog just as soon as I get the rest of the pictures from my mom...