Oh gosh. New Phone Who Dis?

Honestly, I forgot I had a webpage to maintain. Life has been so full that spending time on the computer has been near impossible. So what have we been up to here on "The Goad Life Farm"? Well, the kids are being homeschooled, we just find that it fits our lifestyle very much and with everything going on in the world we just feel more secure having them home with us, just recently there was a scam going around in a neighboring school district, parents were receiving phone calls from scammers saying that they had kidnapped their child from the school. Which thankfully was UNTRUE, but how absolutely terrifying! The amount of comfort I had knowing my children were in my home with me was unexplainable. My heart goes out to those who had to experience this terrifying moment. We have our daily chores to do as always, horses, chickens, goats and now one cow. Melvin our steer went for processing and we will be happy to get him back in about 2 weeks time. We now have another young holstein we call Juniper. She has quite the story that I should do a blog on. She is a load of fun and we plan on keeping her for our family milk cow to eventually replace the goats. Speaking of the goats, unfortunately we had to choose to put our "big mama" goat down this past spring (2024) She was aging on us and after birthing another BEAUTIFUL set of twins and raising them she was just showing us her age and how tired she was, so we chose to reunite her with the earth. Her kids grew wonderfully and have since been sold to a lovely young girl who plans on starting her own herd and using them as her 4-H projects. We still have Claira who was "big Mamas" daughter, she freshened last year in February and after the initial shock of what just happened to me wore off she took to those babies and produced wonderful milk and raised her twins just as her mama taught her. Our new goats also freshened last spring (2024) Coco gave us a set of twins as well and is a great protective mother, and Marsha threw a single baby who was big and strong. Marsha however unfortunately carried the split teat genes and we chose to not use her in breeding anymore. She did a great job raising her doeling.

I'll dive more into what goats we kept in another blog, and why. . . it will be fun I promise.

Hemi is doing great she had a bout of cellulitis in Feburary (24) and we almost lost her, that was the most excruciating week of my life, did I mention I had 3 goats freshen that week too? The only perk was I was already up monitoring Hemi's temp every 2 hours so I already was in the barn and not sleeping. Hemi is doing much better and with a great health routine we have discussed with our vet we should not see much of a long term affect from the cellulitis.

Merida is now 5! She is just something else, I feel quite guilty for purchasing her when we honestly didn't have the extra money to do so, but the amount of joy I get when I ride her wipes that away every single time. She is so intelligent it blows my mind. We do still have a breeding pair of rabbits, but we have slowed down on that since the meat market here is very small and I have sold more as pets than for meat, and our freezer is quite full with rabbit meat so we have scaled back quite a bit. Currently it is about 21 degrees out and it is snowing, the districts around us have all closed due to poor visibility and road conditions our highway department has been working their tailfeathers off this season! We have recently received 5ft of snow over the course of 3 days, and now it is snowing again. The original forecast predicted 6inches for our area, but that has already fallen this morning, so I am assuming their orginal map has now shifted south over us and we may now be in the 1-2ft range. Either way I have spent more time snowblowing this year with the tractor than I have spent in the last 2 years, and honestly I has been great to show the kids what real snowfall is! I hope you have a great day, its time to start the book work with the kiddos!