It's been a particularly difficult month to conjure up the emotional energy and carve out time for blogging! But that doesn't mean that life doesn't keep trucking along and providing plenty of "blog-worthy" moments! So here on this Halloween night, with the storms rolling in, Kali doing dishes, Jason tucking squashes into the root cellar for winter, Alida cleaning up from her Halloween costume preparations and Terah searching for my knitting needle so she can "knit," I will attempt to share a few recent highlights!
Since September, I've done 3 cheese workshops for different groups - apprentices from Radical Roots farm, second year fellows from Allegheny Mountain Institute (AMI) and students from CJP. Yes, it was maybe a bit much, and ended up being a tad stressful as it coincided with a dip in milk availability. I was wondering up to the last minute if there would be enough milk to "play" with! It all worked out fine and was really fun! On the last one we went all out and made ricotta cheese, mozzarella cheese, cheddar cheese, farmers cheese, yogurt and butter in 4 hours! I was entirely too busy to also photograph these events. This is one of the only pictures I snapped...
The AMI fellows joined us for a full day, so in between steps making cheddar and mozzarella we attempted to give them a taste of other things on the homestead they wanted to learn more about. They didn't help narrow down the options as they were interested in everything from seed saving to chicken breeding to cover cropping and crop rotations, to humanure composting. It was a whirlwind of a day! Another not well photographed day but a good one. The girls seem to enjoy having others around from time to time and since the working title for my cheese workshops is "how to make ____ with a kid under foot" it is probably good that Terah filled the role well of the "kid under foot!"
And then there was a very different kind of day for us. This one requires a bit of background. Our girls love the summer reading program. It especially motivates Alida to read a lot and this year she put a whole bunch of extra reading slips into the pot to win a trip to the Massanutten WaterPark. She won! I think I never thought she would win so didn't really think through the repercussions of that possibility. It didn't feel good for just one of us to take her and not let Kali and Terah enjoy the outing. But if we took Terah and Kali then we needed both adults to manage the age differences and thus differences in what kids would enjoy doing. So that meant a family outing to the water park - Jason willingly gave up his choice of October family outings to make this be that (as we knew we couldn't add anything additional to the month)! 
Let's just say the water park is pretty strategic in their giving of free coupons. It works out really well for them. It wasn't until we were at the cashier that we learned Alida's free ticket was a "twilight" ticket meaning it was for evening-only. So we could "upgrade" it to an all day pass - anything is possible if the "price is right." We certainly planned to go all day if we were going to go at all - I was hoping we might at least attempt to "get our money's worth." After forking over about $175 we entered. You more or less need a locker to store your things and you pay $25 and then get either $10 cash when you return the key or $15 towards their arcade. I tried to not think of all the schemes for getting more money of people and turned my attention to enjoying the time we had there as much as possible. 
We did pick a perfect day to go. It was a school day. We went for the whole time they were open (about 12-8 p.m.) and we enjoyed very little waiting for any of the rides. It was no wonder Terah fell soundly asleep on the way home! It was a mega dose of stimulation for all of us for sure! Alida found her favorite slide and Terah found hers and they went around and around. Jason, Kali and I got to enjoy going in pairs with each other to the big slides at various points. And Jason and I each took a few short stints in the over-18 hot tub. For me the biggest benefit to the day was that I was away from my computer for over 8 hours. That was a treat!
Let's circle back to Tangly Woods and end with a piglet update! They are over a month old now (going on 6 weeks) and they have discovered their appetites! They now relish their mama's milk and also the scraps from cidermaking we have, weeds we bring them and are now even diving into the slop - and I mean that quite literally as they are too short to reach over the pans so they normally just jump right in! They enjoy play fighting with each other and they tear around their house. The one day when we were watching one piglet took off one direction and another the other way and they both came around a corner and ran right into each other. The short video at the end will show that they provide a good deal of entertainment and giggles!
No comments:
Post a Comment