A few things...

Gemma: Gemma is climbing... Gemma is saying "Avie." ... Put those two together and you get Gemma climbing halfway up the rail around our deck, looking over at Aveny while straining and calling to her, "Avie!" As in, "Hey, big sis, check me out! I can do what you can do!! This is awesome!" She's a hoot. :)

Kefir: Recently I have been researching incorporating more nutrients into our regular cooking. For a while there I thought the Fuhrman diet might be a good bent for our family, but the recipes just kept coming up short. We like–we NEED–meat in this household, so while I was encouraged to do more fruits and veggies and nuts (and we are!) I don't think that can be our sole diet. So I've been looking into whole foods cooking and lo and behold there is a method of food prep that is all about incorporating more nutrients into 'normal' food! It's called a two-stage method, where you use lots of whole grains but also soak them for 12-24 hours before cooking. More here. Anyway, this same web site mentions using kefir to soak the grains instead of buttermilk and making your own kefir from starter.

So, since you need milk to continue making kefir, I started thinking about the goats...

Goats: We are getting very close to being approved for demolition at 418, so once that gets settled we are going to borrow a couple of goats to eat away at the poison ivy and other itchy and persistent things growing back there. Since I was browsing this website: Kefir Lady and saw that she keeps Nigerian Dwarf Goats. She has photos of the kids and wrote about using their milk, etc, and I'm very curious about what it would look like to have a pair of goats to keep. In fact, our neighborhood is zoned so that each property can have four chickens and one goat... Two properties means we could have two goats!