The BABY GOAT is here!!!

Jun 17, 2023

Happy Saturday friends!

I've received such nice emails from you this week, addressing my question on forgiveness—thank you! Condolences, a story of someone's father not allowing her mom to receive last rites, quite a few about how anger hurts only me, and then something that took some of the sting out of the situation. A friend offered up what I call a "God Pop"—something that just popped into her head: what if I burned something and claimed the ashes as my mom's? Huh! Interesting idea. The more I mulled it over, the more I liked it. I talked to my little family and then my brother and my aunt. We all really liked it. I thought about what we could burn and the thing that popped into my head was to go to Mom and Dad's house, take cuttings from a bunch of plants in her backyard, hang them from my basement rafters to dry and then the next time we are all together, we can have a ceremony. She loved her garden and would usually come home after work, put on her "play clothes" and go out into the backyard to water, weed, deadhead—usually with a glass of wine :-) Her garden is such a piece of her. Dad is selling the house soon and he and Delores just bought one, so it's time to get out there while I can!

Thank you Katie!

Did it solve the forgiveness problem? No, and I'm not sure I can forgive what happened. I can work on getting the anger out of my body and I can work on moving forward. That's enough for now.

Also, is it possible that a part of my anger is just that there is something inside me that NEEDS to be angry as it's a part of the grieving process? Things were done/said that were not okay and that is a fact. But maybe ALSO he is the easy target for anger over her illness and death? Maybe.

•••

I hosted another free Fairy House Workshop this week and had 8 wonderful people join! As you know, I've been practicing letting my 4 girl goats loose out with me each time I do chores. Sometimes they just hang out with me as I go back and forth feeding everyone and sometimes we go for a walk in the woods or around the pond. All that practice paid off and for the first time I took the goats with us when we went wandering in the forest for the workshop!

Also new this time was to allow Sweetness into our workshop area! He was thrilled! I asked that he stay out of all the wires in the middle and to keep his curious mouth to himself—no picking things up that weren't his! He listened :-)

As usual each fairy house was an interesting and creative creation!

And at the very end a big glob of my hot glue landed on my pinky and did this!

I tried to quickly swipe off the glue and ended up wiping off my skin. Ewwwwww!

THE RANCH

This gorgeous girl just keeps blooming and blooming and blooming! I've not seen her this happy since Mom was well!

Propagating an African Violet is easy, clip a leaf with a long stem, put it in a glass or bowl of water—stem in the water, leaf out. Change the water if it starts looking cloudy. In one month-ish you'll have little roots like this:

In about 2 months you'll have tiny leaves like this:

Apparently each of those leaves is it's own plant! Eventually I'll be planting these in special African Violet soil but from what I've read, I'm supposed to wait until they are a little bigger.

We were out walking I Love Lucy and saw this. I think it's a rat snake so completely harmless. Lucy walked right by it and neither flinched:

Sunset but facing east:

Still practicing allowing the horses some time to be loose—it's creating calmer horses (and donkey), giving them something else to do, see, eat. I wonder if they will ever get to the point where they can go on walks in the woods with us while we are foraging for a class?

Rayn figured out that the backyard had extra yummy grass:

I love to see my angel horse in a sunbeam like that :-)

Up until this week we've only seen one baby goose. Then suddenly yesterday there was a mom and dad with 3 tiny babies and later another set with a group of 4. I love seeing the babies but at this time of year when the geese are pooping everywhere and molting all their feathers so it looks like a goosey crime scene and seem to have doubled their friend group...enough already. I'm hoping their friends will eventually take off and we'll be left with our normal group!

WEEDS!

The Polar Bear's hair gets intertwined with everything, including flowers:

Isn't this one just stunning?? I wonder what it is? My plant app is unsure darn it.

Now that they follow me everywhere due to my "invisible leash" (grain) I'm starting to teach them to ride in the cart with me 😂. Alaska and her baby, Dancer the Brave rode all the way around the pond with me this week! Denali and Snickers trotted along with us but haven't yet gotten courageous enough to ride.

And now, the moment you've been waiting for...

My friend Bonnie went with me to pick up our new little buckling. She is new to loving goats but it seems she's falling hard! Look at that sweet, fuzzy white belly:

He's a good size for an 8 week old! Hopefully he'll be a little smaller as an adult since he was a triplet but we'll see.

He got the royal treatment and rode home in her lap. He was very quiet and snuggly all the way home:

I held him in my arms as he chatted with the girl goats and met the horses and donkey and Poppy our other buck. But then I put him down and he started calling his herd, his home, his mommy and it was the saddest thing. He was pretty scared and not wanting to be held anymore:

Poppy was like, "Just...why?" Doesn't he look like Yoda here??:

Oh hush. You were lonely and you know it. Poppy is a sweetheart and has raised up several bucklings. His mom is Denali and she taught him to be kind.

But also, "Just...why? He's so loud!"

Also this week was ManChild's 16th birthday! I still think of him like this, itty bitty, sleeping with my mom when we would come visit NC:

But he's this tall, cool, half adult person now and is so much fun to be around (most of the time anyway lol) (Check out Tessa's head on his foot)

OTHER WORKSHOPS!

The next event at the ranch is this mixed media workshop on June 24. You can still get $25 off the class using the code: SAVE25.

We'll be working on this:

No experience necessary, I will be walking you through the steps, including giving you a tracing so you don't need to draw! This is a fun and easy class that will be indoors in air conditioning but we'll be spending some of the time out with the animals too!

There are two more summer Fairy House Workshops, you can find those here.

MEMES

This one is from a friend who has a crazy love for my mini donkey lol: