Back At The Keyboard

First off thanks to Alicia and Mom for encouraging me to get back to work!  It has been a long break from the keyboard and not because I haven't written about 37 blogs in my head.  Since my last post we have been pretty swamped here on Sunny Toad Farm.

I April I broached the subject with Breadwinner of us having a shared hobby.  It is not very reasonable, considering the size of our brood and our distance from any cultural metropolis, that we have outings alone together as in "dates".  I thought it would be fun to learn to weld together.  The couple that plays together stays together, right?!  I would like to make lawn statuary and he could learn to fix his own equipment.  We already have a couple welders that were parts of machinery crucial to specific business ventures.  They aren't presently being used.  Because they are already in our possession I thought it would make it easy to make this hobby happen.  In May he decided to get a milk cow...

We were both raised on farms.  He on a hog and row crop farm.  I on a hog, cow/calf, row crop farm.  Neither of us on a dairy farm.  We bought Rosie from a dairy with 300 or so cows.  She was used to living in a barn and being milked by a machine surrounded by hundreds of her friends.  She spent her first few weeks here with her nose stuck in the corner of the barn.  She was so stressed out her milk was salty!  The kids refused to drink it and we wondered what we had done.  It wasn't a huge deal because she only gave a gallon of milk a day.  That is about 2 gallons short what she will after she calves in October!

So Breadwinner and I have our new hobby together.  We get up and milk the cow at 6:00 A.M., he sitting on one side and I on the other.  Up until last week this was repeated again in the evening.  Now we are down to once a day in the morning until we let her dry up at the end of this month.

We make our own butter and mozzarella cheese.  Our food is getting more fresh and the days seem to be getting more long!  This is one of my excuses for not having enough time to sit and record the happenings of Sunny Toad Farm.  Stay tuned and I will provide you with more!