Oh Wow! Blogging Again!

I know I fell off the blogging wagon for awhile, but our old laptop suffered cardiac arrest and we JUST got a new one last week. I like blogging and I like some of the things computers can do, but for the most part, I hate computers and my life was probably better without one. But now that Martin has a NEW JOB (can you hear the angels singing?) he needed a computer. And so, we got one.

Life at Possum Cottage is going along nicely. Did I update when we had a baby LAST YEAR??? Ingie is almost one year old... in fact, her birthday is a week from tomorrow. I cannot believe it's been an entire year since she was born. It was a really nice year, too. I will now give a brief update of the happenings of the last year, since Ing's birth.

We have acquired two goats and a sheep to our little homestead. Zelda is an Alpine dairy goat we bought with the intention of using the milk for everything... but then I actually tasted the goat milk and I thought, "I think I'd rather have a cow." Still, we had this goat that we had kind of fallen in love with, and we got her in September, which meant winter was coming along quickly and she was all alone out there in the "barn" (which is really a garage that Martin is converting to a barn by building stalls into) so we thought we ought to get her a friend. We found a Nubian-Alpine goat nearby and we bought her and named her Rosemary. Now, here's where the story gets interesting. The goat came from a farm run by some older people who seemed to be getting out of homesteading altogether and were rehoming all their animals. Rosemary was the second-to-last animal to go, the last being a Dorset ewe, with home Rosemary shared a stall. When Martin led Rosemary out, the sheep tried to follow and the farmer said they had spent their whole life together. Well, when Martin came home with just the goat and told me this story the next day, I said, "WHY DIDN'T YOU GET THE SHEEP TOO?!?!?" a week later, he brought home this big fat sheep and we named her Lottie.

So now we have two goats and a sheep cozied up in our "barn" (it is SO not a barn, but I don't know what to call it because saying you keep farm animals in a garage sounds weird, and really, it's more than a garage now. They have a beautiful stall, hand built by Martin!)

We still have the rabbits. We've gone through a lot of chickens, thanks to that pesky dog, Ricky the Chicken Killer, who finally after many chances (chances that ended in the death of almost THIRTY chickens) finally had to find a home elsewhere. He was a good dog, but wrong for this place. So, we've replaced the hens we lost with an assortment of 8 Isa Browns, Black Orpingtons and Brahmas. But then my sister told me they were making a big chick order from a hatchery and we'd get free shipping if we bought 100 and some were free or something like this, and somehow through all that we have ended up with 50 Rhode Island Reds and 25 Barred Rock chicks. Well, they aren't really chicks anymore and a few of them died and my sister kept a couple and we took one of hers, so we have on Black Australorp and...... well, I don't know about the numbers for certain, but we have a lot of chickens. We're going to move them to the empty building in the pasture. This one:

It's springtime now. Or at least it's supposed to be. We had our woodstove installed over the winter. Then we had it inspected and reinstalled. But now it's working perfectly and keeping us toasty. And here is our beautiful, wonderful, dog, Brynja:

Other than animals, we have these four human girls running around. We're homeschooling this year and both Anja and Greta enjoy reading a lot and enjoy Math a lot less, but we love studying maps together and singing and drawing. I'm hoping to be getting our etsy shop back up and running soon and we've been doing a good job of making our house into our home over the past year and a half.

I wish I could spend more time writing out some good details, but hopefully this will be the post that gets me back into blogging regularly. Hopefully.