Time Flies...

So somehow I haven't posted since November!! I'm not really sure how that happened exactly, but I can hardly believe it!

I suppose December was a little busy... Christmas came early around here, as my parents came for a lovely visit about 2 weeks before Christmas. So our fake tree went up early, but it also came down early, before New Years day, but now of course, I can't remember what day it was :)

Just before Christmas, on December 20th, we got another new addition to our little herd... a sheep! Now we have 3 goats and 1 sheep in the shed... they all fit in there just fine and have mostly worked out the herd dynamics. The sheep is now known as Gordon, though often gets referred to around here as "the sheep"... honestly, he doesn't seem to care one bit.

Ernie and Bert don't mind the sheep too much, though Ernie will boss him around if he's standing in the way of the hay or something... Bert is still a little freaked out by the sheep, but has gotten over it a bit and will now bite chunks of hair / wool off the sheep to make him move! Grover has an extreme dislike for the sheep and will boss him around at any and every opportunity.... just as Ernie and Bert, especially Bert, love to boss Grover around. Herd dynamics are certainly interesting, that's for sure.

Winter is pretty much in full "bloom" around here and has been for well over a month now. Blah. Right now its snowing and about -1 degree C... later tonight, it will be -28 C with the windchill, and later this week it'll be -34 C WITHOUT the windchill... so friggen cold!

Today I pushed all the decent bedding in the goat shed aside and scraped out the bottom layer of wet bedding and filled 2.5 muck buckets (not much). I then rebedded using the decent bedding as a bottom layer, then some old stalky hay out of the feeder that they weren't interested in eating was spread over and then I added another half bale of straw so they would have lots of bedding to burrow into and snuggle down when the temperature drops tonight.

A couple weekends ago we rebuilt the hay feeder to accommodate the extra animals so there would be room for everyone at the feeder. Its on the same wall, but is now a 6 ft long hay feeder. We also changed the design slightly... its somewhere between the first feeder that Bert hated and the 2nd feeder that allowed them to waste too much hay. This one is working out pretty well so far and the waste has been dramatically reduced! Wish we'd come up with it sooner, but live and learn.

Oliver is about 9 months old now and still growing. I'd say he's as tall as Buddy now... I just weighed him today and he's 62.2 lbs! And after holding him in my arms on the scale, I now remember why I get Shawn to weigh him usually!!! :)

Thankfully, there's not much new around here these days... same old, same old. I figured I should update the blog though, just to prove we're still around :)