Reed Ranch- Cute & Tasty

Sunday February 18, 2007

The preschool Valentines Day party was fun. We had a little trouble getting there. Grandpap took Addisson to school but when he came home he parked in a bad spot and got the car stuck. We all pitched in to get it unstuck only to back it up to get it really stuck. I then tried to get my vehicle out. I was able to back up and with lots of Reverse then drive and back and forth motions I was able to get my vehicle out after about 20 minutes. I made it to the party just in time. It wasnt a pleasant seen on the Reed Ranch trying to unstick vehicles. Grandpap had a huge frozen runny nose stuck in his beard. Grandma was ticked because "no one should have to live this way, this is ridiculous and soooooo on". It was very cold. It was in the negatives while trying to get the cars out. When I returned from the party at preschool I noticed right away our drive way had been plowed. I thought our neighbors must have rescued us. Yeah. And sure enough they had. When I had entered the house Cheryl (Grandma) was quite pleased. She said I was just about to go off on these conditions and not being able to go anywhere and I noticed our neighbors were digging us out".
The snow pile is about even with the top of the roof of the house. The kids love it. With in a few hours the big snow drift was back across the drive way and even bigger. But we were still able to get out.

Grandma was doing laundry on Friday and came across the famous yellow dress which had what looked like cat poop in the dress. The dress was in the laundry basket. She asked the girls what it was and where it came from. Through lots of questions and lots of patients we discovered that Quinlyn had squished the poop right out of sparkles and she tried to clean it up with Addissons yellow dress and she put it in the laundry basket to get washed. And through out the process Addisson supervised and helped Quinlyn clean it up. We all had horror mental pictures in our heads; knowing Quinlyn sucks her thumb. Did she wash her hands? Did she get it on her hands? Did she really squish sparkles to poop? She said a_huh and nodded her head yes when we asked her if she squished the poop out of sparkles. We didnt come up with that question until much later. We thought the cat just stopped using its litter box and pooped on the dress. But after further questioning the truth prevailed. We just had to ask the right questions! It was gross but after it was all over we had a chuckle over it.

We signed up to be in a study for the Cornell Extension office. We are in a pilot program of Mentors and Mentees. There are few alternative farmers around this area. Most are dairy farmers. We are the second phase of the mentor program. This is where new farmers or ranchers like us get a Mentor. In our case someone who has goat experience. We were contacted by our this weekend. She is very nice and has milking goats but has had meat goats in the past. She is very knowledgeable. The Mentor was designed around kidding season. Asa and I know very little about kid birthing and she is here to help. She is currently kidding her dairy goats and we will be going to visit her farm soon but for now she came to visit ours. She spoke to us about vaccines, what they should be eating, minerals and deworming. We knew and had started this process already but we were giving our goats the wrong dewormer. She said it works but many of the goats already have a resistance to the dewormer we were giving them. Most of the knowledge she pass on to us is not found in books but through experience. She was out at the farm today and was very helpful. We had our buck in with the girls and some days they would look pregnant and other days they wouldnt. She said they maybe pregnant but none anytime soon. She liked the look of our goats. We think she was expecting the worst and came up surprisingly pleased. We did vaccinate the goats today and she gave us a bag of minerals which we didnt know we should be feeding them. She said especially in winter. Overall she provided great information. Now we will visit her farm and fill out a report and send it back to the Cornell Extension office.

Addisson and Quinlyn had ice skating today. They did very well. They started their routine for an end of the season performance. They are going to be little sailors skating to "Yellow Submarine". It will be cute.