5 Weeks, Honey and the Farm Dream

Lane was 5 weeks old on Wednesday! At her 4 week doctor's appointment we learned she had gained a pound and an inch and a half - all looks good. Big milestones include finding her hands, major neck strength and smiling! The smiling happens most when she wakes up from her naps and in the mornings, but you can get lots and lots if she is in the right mood. Mommy is faring much better this week, and was even able to get to the park to walk with a friend and her not so little one yesterday (the babies are one week and about 2.5 pounds apart). Also had lots of visitors this week! Favorite spot and person is still Daddy. Baby can be crying and fussy and that Daddy shoulder calms her right away!

Another big milestone, our first successful honey harvest yielded 1.3 gallons of honey in one of our smaller nucs! We are currently working on our packaging and brand name, but rest assured honey jars will be mailed to those who are interested! If you're interested I loaded a video of Dave working on our hive frames - we're just a little excited about this. We are doing this the old fashioned way - cheesecloth, straining, etc. If we ever take this to the next level, we'll borrow an extractor!

Many of you may wonder where our back yard farming is going, so I'll let you in on our secret. We're practicing for our Farm Dream. See, if we can ever break out of the mold, we'd like to have a hobby farm at some point where we have bee hives for honey, chickens for eggs, veggies, alpacas, miniature dairy cows (have you seen them - they're adorable), goats, cut flowers, etc! I want to restore the old farm house on the property and run a bed and breakfast, providing our visitors with the full farm experience, an organic breakfast and all the learning experiences we can offer about living off the grid (of course we'll run everything off of solar, catch rain water in cisterns, and compost everything we can). The place will be located outside of a nice city, or near hiking trails so that our visitors have cool things to do during the day and we'll have an intern program which gives us some summer help. Of course this all relies on us making enough money to fund this, finding the right property, etc. - but it's our Farm Dream and we'll keep our sites set and see what happens. Keep plugging away at your bank job D! So all of our little experiments are helping us train and we have already learned some valuable lessons. For instance, chickens eat bugs. If you put your bee hive in with the chickens, you lesson your problem with hive beetles and other bugs! Who knew?

Anyways, poor Lane isn't old enough to feed the chickens or carry feed to goats yet, let alone realize that she has nut-jobs for parents - but if that neck and jaw strength is any indication, she's going to be one heck of a farm-hand - maybe we'll even get her a pony.

Hugs and Happy July!

Whoa! Mommy got close with that big black thing!

Daddy Chest Time

Still my favorite spot!

The Harvest!

Very cool!