Baptism, Babies, Birthday Party, and Bones!

 Baptism, Babies, Birthday Party, and Bones!

As always, lots to catch up on! I'm going to have to make two posts...maybe three. 

Luke was baptized! We chose Saint John the Baptist as his patron saint (we had picked him ahead of time, and it just so happened Luke was born on the feast of his nativity). We had Fr. Edwin do a partial submersion. It was wonderful! Rachel and Mathew are his godparents!

The goats had babies! Una had twin boys about a week before Annie had a boy and a girl. 

Unfortunately, Annie's son didn't make it. He didn't seem that strong to begin with. We probably should have bottle fed him, but I didn't think about it. I had been keeping an eye on him to make sure he was nursing, and he was...but he wasn't healthy. 

The plan was to keep the girls and sell all the boy goats, but the white boy goat was so pretty with his tri-color coat that we had to keep him! We named him Tristan (since his mom was Una...for all you Stardust fans out there), and we named Annie's little girl Mollie. We did end up selling Annie's little boy. 

I also learned how to milk the goats, which was really fun. It was a bit of a struggle figuring out the time to milk them so that I didn't have to wear the baby on my back while I did it. It was also hard because it started out taking me 30 minutes per goat to milk them. By the end of the two months, I could milk each goat in 3-5 minutes. I was pretty proud. 

The milk was too goaty for us to drink because the boys kept getting out (hormones make the goat flavor worse), but we were able to sell some of it for people to feed to their animals (apparently, people feed it to dogs???) and we were able to make a few batches of super yummy chèvre cheese. 

Thanks to the lovely donation of Nene, we now have a little grape vineyard in our fruit orchard. She gifted us several Concord grape plants.

The kids had a great time helping us plant them, and we were able to trellis the vines up using old wire that used to stretch from the house to the barn. I'm anxious to see what they look like next year! This year was a little dry for the orchard. 

William turned TWO! He's getting much too big. (Yes, this is a picture of Rylee. It is at his party, though). 

I made him an oreo cake! Chocolate cake with marshmallow cream icing. I tried to make ti only in the middle, but the icing spread down the entire bottom half of the cake. So the top half is chocolate buttercream.

We bought Will Will a bike for his birthday. He can't quite reach the pedals yet, but it's a pretty awesome bike. Once he gets comfortable riding it as a tricycle, we can move the back two wheels together to make a bicycle. 

We surprised the kids this summer by taking them to a free dinosaur exhibit at the local library! 

Rylee was beyond excited! Especially when she got to see her favorite dinosaur. 

A lot of the big ones were cast fossils, but some of them were actually real! 

Apparently, the collection is owned by a dentist in Danville, or so I've been told. Either way, we were so thankful the kids got to go visit!

And now some random photos that I couldn't leave out because they were too cute!:

Luke smiling at his Nonni.

This is what happens to the poor baby when you forget to bring the egg basket outside when it's time to feed the animals. 

A boy and his dog (and crazy hair). 

When Nonni got to help Sam move the bee swarm box. Unfortunately, the bees did not stick around. 

Our beautiful girl with her new brother whom she already loves so much and takes such good care of!

Pax Domini cum spirito tuo temper sit,

Torey, Sam, Rylee, William & Luke

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