Back to "normal" (whatever THAT is!)

(Photos:  Lucy enjoying the sunset a few weeks ago, and Cayuga duck eggs in a nest) The good shepherd returns..... It was before 2 AM, and I kept having strange dreams about Friesian horses running wild in buildings, Friesian horses getting loose from paddocks, Friesian horsed getting really sick and lying flat out on the ground....  (Friesians are those big horses in war movies--really beautiful, muscular, with "feathers" on their feet and a gorgeous flowing gait.  They are also from the area of the Netherlands that Jeff's ancestors were from.  It is truly a "dream" to ever own one, but then, owning cows was only an idea for the longest time.) The horses in these dreams were enormous, even for big Friesian war-horses, bursting through fences, pulling past all restraint, very scary......  But the message to me was:  Check on your cows!  Strange, but that's what the half-asleep dreams materialized into being when I was wide awake.  It did occur to me that I didn't know which of the naughty cows had eaten the grain that was missing yesterday, and if it was LUCY and not Bessie, it could be a problem.  Bessie is used to grain in smaller amounts, but Lucy only gets the few grains that don't fall out of the bucket and into Bessie's trough for milking time. Lucy had seemed a bit subdued when I milked Bess the night before, and if (!) she had gotten the grain, she might be in trouble.  I had been worried about Bessie, who seemed fine last night. So, at 1:55 in the morning, (ugh!!!  I thought I was done with the midnight-feeding style stuff!)I put on the muck boots and pulled on a jacket, grabbed a flashlight and went out to the barn.  There were no cows in the barn-room that they usually sleep in, so my sleepy brain was feeling just a little panicky, until I remembered that they like to sleep outside when it's milder weather. Bessie was standing up in the cow-pen (better than sleeping with her udder in manure!), and Lucy was lying down around the side of the silo.  Both looked at me as if to say "And what are YOU doing out here in the middle of the night?!!!"  Seeing that their cow-attitude was firmly in place, I wasn't worried anymore about Lucy's health, and could sleep again.  Jeff's snoring was a problem, but that's a whole other story..... We discovered that Rocky has a fondness for children.  Two friends came over today to have lunch with us.  The one friend has 2 daughters and a 1 1/2 year old little boy.  In past visits, we haven't let Rocky get close enough to even sniff the little boy, because Rocky was acting so crazed at the end of the leash that we didn't know what he'd do.  Today, with both friends here for an extended visit, Rocky calmed down and became his usual endearing self.  He was very interested in licking the toddler's face when they were on eye-level with each other, and was very good and friendly with all of the children.  Once Michael had held him back on the leash for a while, and after he had been sprayed with the water bottle for making the unsettling husky whines and howls because he was being restrained, he calmed right down and was a respectable citizen.  The second friend's daughter is almost Jeremy's age, and Rocky truly showed a calm and trustworthy side while the girl walked him all over the yard on the leash.  She loved him, and was giving him directions and talking to him the whole time.  Rocky calmly trotted along, clearly loving the attention, didn't pull at all (that I could see), didn't jump up, didn't act crazy, didn't try to take off to dig a hole somewhere...  He has some promise of being a good dog, after all!  ;)  (We knew that, but sometimes it's easy to lose sight of it in middle of all the puppy-ness that he's still going through). We've been experimenting with recipes for body wash (liquid soap) and shampoo, using an all-natural bar of castile soap and dissolving it into distilled water, with a bit of essential oil to give it a nice scent.  So far we've added too little water, and now too much water.  If we hit on a good ratio, I'll post it to the blog.  There are too many recipes out there with conflicting instructions, so we're taking the best of each and seeing what we come up with.  Jeremy did one batch of lemon scent, Michael did another with grapefruit scent, and mine is peppermint with a hint of lemon for shampoo.  We'll add some more grated soap to all 3 batches if it doesn't gel a bit more within the next 12 hours or so. Next on the list:  homemade liquid laundry soap, using Borax, washing soda, castile bar soap (again grated and dissolved in water) and distilled water.  Seems like a good experiment for spring break.....  We're not to the point of needing to make soap to save money, but it makes sense to spend as little as possible as we go with the most natural and time-tested soaps and cleaners as we can.  Maybe that's inspired by the old farmhouse, too, like the successful bread-making is!  ;) Time to gather the eggs and let the cows out for their daily afternoon grazing of the back acre..... Laura.