An Anniversary of sorts

I've been thinking about and writing this post for more than a few days now.
Today marks the second anniversary of this blog you can see the first post here, I wrote it and started this blog the day after our offer was accepted on the acreage in hopes of chronicling our journey.

Rather than doing the Sunday Round Up I wanted to talk about the BIG picture. What we've done and where were headed (hopefully). To be honest it's not the greatest week to be doing a re-cap. Having Little One abort her pregnancy means we're at 3/4 of the hopeful offspring and milking ability that we wanted this year. Both Chris and I are frustrated right now. But we are working on some alternative plans. Like buying goat milk from another local producer and spending the summer experimenting with cheese and soap recipes anyways.

But before I go into a lot of detail about what were planning on doing I want to show you some of the successes and failures we've had in our almost 2 years here.

When all the snow melted in the spring we discovered that there was a lake in what was suppose to be a yard. One of our first major undertakings was jetting water from the yard to the field.
(or as you can see by Nathan and Maggie in the picture the major goal was splashing and playing in this fun new lake)

Next came A LOT of fencing. Poor Chris. The wire addition was an attempt to keep a tyrant two year old out of the dug out. Who knew it might also come in handy for penning in future goats.

We made an attempt at a garden (FAIL) with morning sickness it became nothing but an untended weed patch.

In May we started to add animals. What's a farm without animals. Most of these attempts were MAJOR FAILS as you can probably guess by the fact that only one of the above animals still resides here. (You can click on the pictures to read the stories.) or here is the stories of what happened to Mac and the baby goat

We added our first (only) piece of farm type equipment in July. Wow did that make mowing over an acre of yard easier.

We also made discoveries about the water cistern (like if the float shut off isn't working properly the entire basement may flood) leading us to make the acquaintance of small local creatures like this salamander, who thought the nice wet basement might make a good new home.

The fall finally saw us add a pick up truck. Nathan and I loved (okay mostly me) to take it bumping across the field to gather some firewood in the trees.

We also added Jasper to the mix that fall. Our second Pyrenees but really? our only official guard dog since Maggie is a little to city-fied, read sissy.

Of course our Biggest and smallest addition was the surprise arrival of Greg in 2009. On Christmas Day. He wasn't due until January. But what a sweet Christmas present and way to finish off the year.

Since this post is getting awfully long and crowded already I think I'll break it up and talk about our second year 2010 in a post tomorrow stay tuned...