Have you missed me? I suddenly am inundated with blogs to keep up with and I haven’t quite been able to separate it all in my brain. The ranchy stuff I’m now posting on Wandering Springs <--click to see!) so that part of my life is segmented off there. And Stu and I are also working on a parenting blog. So that's another segment that's separate. Though I often feel that I have more parenting fails than successes these days. I've pretty much given up on the homeschool blog for now simply because I can't keep up with so many pieces of the pie. 🙂 All of that to say that I've yet to figure out exactly what I'm supposed to do with THIS blog now! But I was thinking about it last night and figured that this blog for the past 6 or so years has been my online journal and I can keep it that way! It's where I talk about what's happening in our life and family, and even though my "ranch specific" posts will go to Wandering Springs and my "parenting specific" posts will go to the other blog, I can still talk about what's going on here. 🙂 So there we go! The twins are 8 months old today! Can you believe that?! I can't!! I was thinking this morning while I trudged up the slippery slope to the LRB to do the milking that this time last year I had a LOT of difficulty going up that hill and it wasn't because of snow. 🙂 I'll do a "twin update" post later in the week. It's been far too long for one of those! And yes, I've been milking our goat Polka in case you haven't been following the ranching blog. I started that the day after she had babies, and we're starting to get into a routine. The milk I'm getting now is being frozen to make soap later because it's apparently not yummy to drink for the first couple weeks. Plus I've had to toughen up my wimpy hands to do the milking. 😉 Tomorrow or the next day I'll start separating the babies from the mama at night so that in the morning I can milk her out full, then they will hang out with her all day and drink as much as they please. I've got all kinds of plans for the milk we get but realistically to begin with on milking once a day we'll be lucky to get a quart a day. And since one of the first things I want to do is get the twins off formula, they will likely be getting most if not all of the milk to begin with. I tallied up the amount of formula they drink on a daily basis and between the two of them it was like a quart and a half. Whew! So in effort to get them off of quite so much liquid, I'm starting to up their actual food feedings. They had been getting food only at lunch time. Yes, I'm a lazy mom. 😉 But seriously I spend probably 5/8ths of my life feeding everyone/everything! So I've been relying a little too much on the convenience of the liquid diet that the twins can so easily feed themselves. 🙂 Anyway, hopefully it'll work out, and then if things go as planned, Polly will have her babies in March and we'll be able to get more milk. So my grand plan is to have the whole family on raw goat milk by April. 🙂 There ya go! I've been stressing out about the whole greenhouse/garden concept for this year. As I read more about planting and growing things I find it amazing that our few bean plants even survived last year! Ha ha ha!! So much to learn! Growing plants from seeds is a very difficult task, and for whatever reason I had it in my head that we needed to grow absolutely as much as humanly possible to eat all year. And while its our hope to eventually grow nearly all that we eat, the reality is that it's unlikely to happen on our first try. And I'm thankful that we don't really have to stress about it happening on our first try either. So I took a deep breath after spending several hours yesterday kinda wigged out and overwhelmed and I whittled down the list of things that I want to grow for the garden this year, and I looked into methods of winter sowing, which I'm going to give a try with since we really don't have the set up for growing sprouts inside. And we'll see what works, and we'll make note of that and try different things the next growing season. Meanwhile I can still find watermelon at the grocery store so all is well. 😉 Anyway, that's a bit of a peek at what's been going on. I'm going to try not to neglect this blog quite so much now that I've got a better idea of what it's purpose is. 🙂 TTFN