But wait! There's more!

Poor Mista! We showed the kids how to braid, and they took it a little far... We (the camp counselers) couldn't agree on whether she looked like an octopus or a dinosaur... What do you think?

Getting artist with the views on my camera...!

Eating lunch at the creek!

Busy...Tired...Content

Group Picture of the first group of kids!

You must be wondering what on earth I was talking about in a previous post... Well I'll keep you hanging no longer! I've been a camp counseler at a horse camp nearby! 6 AM counseler trail rides, 8 AM kids come - along with chaos. But what is camp without a skunk, broken finger, bloody nose, falling off the horse, and your horse kicking you off? Yes, I was dead tired by the end of the day, I was in bed by 9 almost every night!

Showing how to vaccinate horses using an orange as a replacement. Would you trust kids with a needle that huge?

All pictures here are from the first half of camp!

You never know what will happen in this house!

Long story or short story? Long? Okay!

My mom is down working in the kitchen when you hear this big BOOM and glass shattering, soon you hear her calling for help. We (my sister and me) all go downstairs to find Mom frantically cleaning up and asking for a towel.
One of our jars of milk cultures had exploded. And I literally mean EXPLODED. There was glass shards all the way to the dining room and across the kitchen!

So to fully grasp the magnitude of the scale of this chemical/biological/my mom's culturing attempt we have to back up to Wednesday. We were doing our milking time and our neighbor's have been drowning in milk, so we helped them by taking quite a bit off their hands. We skimmed the cream to make butter and added milk culture to the skim/now fat free milk.

If you know anything about culturing your own food, you know that it will expand and apply pressure to whatever vessal it is in. The milk culture for our chickens was no different. One of the many (and I mean many. Our kitchen is hidden behind canning jars!) decided to explode tonight after dinner.

So that is my story of this evening. And no, this is not what I talked about in the previous post. ;D

Llama!

I've just figured out, I think, how to get pictures up with my posts. We'll see how this goes... =D

About mid April this year, one of out llamas had her first baby! It was a pasture birth, we just walked out there about lunchtime and there she was! A beautiful, healthy cria!

The llama that had her baby almost a month before this mama, lost her baby... =( We think that it was premature and still born... so when we found this vibrant little one, we were all extatic! She very quickly became everone's favorite llama on the farm!

From what I understand, crias can grow about a pound a day- so she has grown fast!

All Powerful

Honestly, farm life is never boring and will always keep you on your toes. Last night was just another example...

It was hot and muggy, so all the windows in the house were left wide open. At about 4 o'clock in the afternoon it became black. Everthing was dark and something didn't feel right about that at all. I look out the window and, sure enough, massive thunderheads billowed just south of us. The sky turned an ominous hazy green and pinkish-brown. Who wouldn't be thinking "tornado" hasn't done very much studying on weather. Then the wind hit - hard. I've never seen a storm front come in that fast! As if on cue, all of the south facing doors inside the house slammed shut as we were rushing to close ever single window.

Once we closed the house down- my mom remembered all the animals and patio furniture we had outside. My brother and I bundled up to close the chicken coop and barn, but the dust was already kicked up and leaves and branches and who knows what else was flying everywhere! It felt like a Winnie the Pooh moment... What a blustery day! We got the girl llamas in, barn shut (except for the slight opening for the swallows that nest in there!), chick tractor secured, and loose yard art collected, we went inside thinking we were done with battling the uncontrolable forces of the weather.

We forgot about our male llamas in the neighbor's pasture - down the big hill - but by this time it had started dumping the hugest raindrops I had ever seen, and our neighbor warned us that it might hail- big time! It didn't take long to get down the hill (we were running, bad for you knees though...). When we reached the pasture gate you couldn't see the nearby water trough. That's how hard and fast it was raining. Keeping half and eye on the ominous sky above and trudging through deep, wet grass we finally reached the llamas. They didn't move very quickly back up the hill... so by the time we reached the barn we were soaked through. I wish humans could get water by osmosis... but it we did, we most likely would drown in cases like this...

Anyway... Dad got home from work and, of course, the weather lightened up a bit with some sunshine! But then we went inside and it started raining again. Later that evening there was a showy thunder and lightening storm but no tornados in our area. Thank God!!! My mom says that it's times like this that prepare us for the actual thing, which I would really rather not think about...