I think….Spring is here to stay…Finally. We’ve been here for almost a month now and we can’t even explain how great it is to be living here finally after a 2+ year process from start to finish.

Thistle Dew is growing. I was hoping for some down time between moving in and developing it as a farm, but my husband had other plans. He’s lucky I love him.

When we started this journey, I was a Work from home mom with a 3 year old and an almost 1 year old. Our plan for the blog was to allow friends and family to watch the developement of our life long dream come to life. Well…life happened. And it happened hard and fast and I didn’t get to post as much as I wanted to. Especially in the last several months of progress. We had a newborn baby and newborn puppies to take care of. Matt was working here at the house to help it get finished for final inspection and i was keeping kids and puppies alive while packing up our rental by myself.

LIFE.JUST.HAPPENED.

We have all these plans for the future here and we are slowly getting settled enough to start working on them. Are we unpacked completely yet?! Hardly! That will be my plan for the next couple weeks though.

We still have a lot to finish that the builders didn’t complete before leaving the job. Let’s not talk about that though. It stresses us out. Lets just say…mama has learned how to work a lot of tools!

What NEXT?

My sister and mom were in town this weekend and this morning, before she left, she hung out with the kids so I could do the chores without having to take them out into the rain. As I was feeding McKenzie, our newest baby goat, I thought about this blog and where we should go next with it. The house is built, but Thistle Dew is just getting started.

I have so many things I want to try! I just need to find the TIME to do it.

Jethro, Ellie Mae and McKenzie Dawn are the newest additions. They are Nubian milking goats. McKenzie is Ellie’s first baby and because she was so young when she had McKenzie, she ended up rejecting her. What we didn’t know when we went to pick all 3 of them up was that the baby had been rejected by mama and that we would have to be bottle feeding her for a bit longer. And here I thought I was done bottle feeding baby animals when the puppies were finally on puppy food. Luckily, she’s just starting to ween so it shouldn’t be too much longer.

With dairy goats, comes goats milk. I’ve always always, did I mention ALWAYS(?) wanted to try my hand at making my own soap. Then I found a recipe for…

Wait for it….

Goat milk soap! Apparently, it is supposed to be super amazing for your skin and so I think…once Ellie is a litle more familiar with me and has another baby, I might try to milk her and attempt it. Look for a post on that in the future! 😉

Goat milk soap, among other things has brought me to where I think I want this blog to go. Not so much a HOW TO blog, but more a….”I’m gonna try this thing out and see where it goes! Sort of like the pinterest fail posts you see! Only, instead of posting a picture, I’ll post what I did and how and what works best…even if it’s a fail.

Hopefully this is something you all will be interested in following and something I will be interested in writing about. If there are things you’re interested in learning about or trying, but don’t have the time, let me know! If it’s something I can try, I will totally try it and let you know how it’s going. I have my first experiment already in the works and will hopefully be posting about it in the near future among other things that come with the Spring season on a farm.

Until then.

Just living is not enough….one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.
-Hans Christian Anderson