Before we went to New York, I took Jared up to milk the goat. I was going to go to Eastern Oregon, and I was going to have him milk the goat while I was gone.

Milking a goat is not a skill that you can just do. It takes a little bit of knowledge and a little bit of practice to be able to get it right. After trying a few times to milk my goat, my friend Julie gave up and decided that it was too hard to learn. I was sure that I was going to be laughing at Jared for not being able to do it after his first lesson.

However, he surprised me, a lot! He was actually able to get about a quart out of my first year freshener. She has pretty small teats, so I was providing him with a challenge.

Go Jared, who knew he had this kind of skill!

We rearranged our house a month or two ago (again), and we moved my sewing table out into the living room.

Daphne the climber realized that it had a chair in front of it, and she started climbing up there. Any time I wondered where the baby was, I had to look no further than my sewing table.

At the time, I was working on a really big project, and so I was putting in a lot of hours at the sewing machine. She decided that she wanted to mimick that, so she started sitting on my lap while I did some light sewing.

It turns out that was a dangerous proposition. She is somehow attracted only tot he needles of the machine, and it is all she can to to keep her fingers in the path of the needle.

I have started to leave the machines with the needles down, but she seems to have grown out of this sheer fascination (for now).

Before we left for New York, I was experimenting, as always with some food. I was having a craving for some baked beans, and I settled down to make a batch of them.

It turns out that the recipe that I had was not the best one, and both Jared and I agreed that the beans were terrible. We were eating them out of duty to not wasting food.

Somewhere along the line, Daphne got a taste of these awful beans, and she decided that she really liked them. For the next week, all she wanted was beans three times a day. She would walk Jared or I to the fridge and point to it indicating that she wanted another plate of those good ‘ol beans.

Eventually, the chickens got them, but it was nice to know that the recipe wasn’t a total bust!

This post is long overdue, but it is definitely worth posting.

While we were visiting in California, Scott’s last goat kidded. She had two beautiful does, one black one that looked just like her and one brown one that had nice little spots on her.

While we were gone, Scott told me that they were having a hard time nursing, and he had found them nearly dead, so he rescued them and started bottle feeding them. This has turned them into pure pets.

When you leave a goat on its mom, it will be curious about you and let you handle it, but it disregards you for the most part. When you bottle feed a goat, they see you as their mom, and all they want to do is jump all over you and see if you have a bottle. If you do not supply a bottle, they want fingers to suck on.

Daphne was fascinated with these friendly creatures. Before they got bigger, I would set Daphne on a hay bale with them, and they would play with her while I milked the goats.

Now, she just walks up to them, and while they try to suck on her fingers, she wraps her arms around their necks and gives them a big hug and a kiss.

Though it is annoying to me that they jump all over me, she loves to be jumped on and pushed around. She has someone her size to play with, what could be better!

When I was pregnant, my feet swelled up really big, and sometimes Jared would be really nice and rub my feet. That is when I discovered that I really like to have my toes popped. Every once in a while, Jared will pop my toes when I am sitting down, and we discovered recently that Daphne hates it.

Any time she sees her dad popping my toes she walks over to him and physically pulls him off while saying, “No”. I think that she thinks that he is hurting me, and she wants him to stop. We explained to her that that was not the case, but she still insists that I not get my toes popped in front of her!

Jared was feeding Daphne a potato that had just come out of the pan.

We tell her when something is hot, by saying, “Daphne, it is hot.” She understands, and she realizes that if something is hot that it needs to be blown on.

As Jared fed the potato to her, she informed him that it was too hot and she handed it back to him to blow on so that it would cool off. When returned to her, she inspected it and decided that it was still to hot, and she gave it back to Jared with a, “hot.” After several back-and-forths, de decided the potato was fit to eat, and she gobbled it up.

The moral of the story, never give a smart baby a hot potato.

Now that my husband is well, I have a lot of benefits that have been missing here and there over the past 6 years.

I got this email from him recently while I was on vacation. Isn’t he sweet. (Jared, don’t blush too much at me putting your sappy email up here…sorry)

Hi love,

If I could gussy this email up a bit, and make it fancier, I would, but this is what I have.

I just wanted you to know that I appreciate you and all that you have done for me. I wanted to thank you for sticking with me through all of the rough times and for giving me a beautiful daughter. And for caring for us both so well.

I used to have the viewpoint that I could make it on my own and that I could get by without anyone else if I had to. And while, I’m sure I wouldn’t die, I now realize what a big part of my life you’ve become. You are one hell of a lady…and mother and wife. You are definitely a major pillar in my life. And I thank you for making my life that much better and more pleasurable (sooo much more).

And I wanted to thank you for continuing to have goals and dreams (no matter how cookie or unrealistic they seemed at the time) through all of the rockiness. No matter what I said, it gave me something to shoot for to give to you. Something to keep going for. Just know that I will continue to try to provide whatever I can for you so that you can be happy and help me raise some wonderful kids.

I guess I’m being a little sappy here, and I’m probably watching too much sappy TV, but I do mean every word here. I love you, I love our daughter, I love being a dad and I love being your husband. Thank you very much.

I’ll see you when you get home. I hope you are having a great time and that all are doing well.

Love,
Jared

P.S. All of your animals are doing fine and your garden has been watered.

Carlton has a public pool. It is an outdoor pool, and it is not heated, so it is a very summery activity.

The weather around here has not been favorable for swimming in an unheated pool at all. It has been 70 and mild, just how I like it, but it is for sure too cold to swim.

Nonetheless, I got a family pass for the season so that Daphne and I can start going. We will go every day as long as it is not too cold. This is very exiting for me.

The first day of swimming yeasted ended with a shivering baby. We are going to try again tomorrow during the warm hours of the day (we went after dinner the first day).

I’ll keep y’all updated on how it goes!

Welcome to the OregonNaturalFoods.com. We are working to get this site up and running so that it can a resource for all like minded people looking for more natural foods in and around Oregon. My wife is the real force behind getting this site up and running. She’s taken our small city lot and figured out how to raise chickens so we can have home-grown eggs and meat, board a goat so we can get fresh goat’s milk every day and grow a serious herb and vegetable garden. All while finding out about more ways to do things naturally and connecting with more and more sources to find healthy things that we can’t produce ourselves.

We hope one day to have a small farm and be able to support ourselves and sell the excess, so one day this site might offer things we have to sell. But for now, it’s just a place to share what we (that’s the marital “we”, meaning my wife has done most of the research) have learned so that more and more people who are leaning towards living more healthfully and naturally are able to so more easily.

While we were at the Cloisters in New York, there was a garden that was put together with the plants the way they were used 1000 years ago.

I was particularly charmed by the methods that they used for their pear trees. They trained them up against the windows so that they acted as shade as well as decoration. I took a close up photo of the way the low branches were trained before my camera died.

When we move to our dream house, I will do this, I think it is SO cool!