I’ve always said that I like all the seasons. Yes, winter too. I like skiing, the snow, pot roast, watching Father Brown in the evening with Rachel and some hot tea… I like just about all of it.

That said, lately I’m reminded about how much I also like it NOT being winter any more. Our little homestead is out of dormancy: we have more eggs than we know what to do with, and the goats are making enough milk that I was able to make homemade mozzarella cheese. Plus, our cream separator has arrived from the Ukraine, which means that hopefully soon we will have not just milk and cheese, but butter and maybe even ice cream.

The apple trees (erm, saplings) have blossomed, giving me hope that maybe this will be the year they bear fruit. The blueberry bushes are going at it too, though of all the strawberry plants we put in last year only TWO are still working it. For some reason I remember them being far more hardy than that when I was growing up. But, the garlic on the other side of the garden is doing very well. I’d pretty much forgotten that we’d planted garlic in the fall. It was a nice surprise to come across.

There’s a little barn swallow who has taken up occupancy in the barn. I catch her flying about in the barn in the mornings, twittering at me in annoyance that I don’t open the barn as early as she would like. Mrs. Barn Swallow has a little nest perched on one of the light fixtures. I’ve seen her sitting on it, and I captured a picture of her on it. You’ll have to look closely to see her little round head and tail sticking out, as she wouldn’t allow for me to get any closer than that before flying off. I’ll be thirty this year, and I’ve never realized how quintessentially Spring it feels to have a wild bird build her nest in your barn.

The goat kids are growing at a rapid clip. I think that we’ve solidly decided that between Lily and Black-Eyed Susan we’d rather keep Black-Eyed Susan. Her mother is superior when it comes to milk production, which means that she has the competitive edge. We’ll keep both Lily and Black-Eyed Susan until they’re bred in the fall, and then sell Lily at that point. She’ll be far more valuable as a bred doeling rather than a recently weaned one in mid summer.

The goat kids are far more playful than I remember last year’s being. They run, jump, twist, hop and twirl around all the time. They’re also far more vocal than last year’s kids, which could be due to the fact that they have a Nubian sire. Nubians are notoriously chatty, and one of the reasons we originally didn’t want Nubians on our homestead. I’ll take the playing and jumping, I just hope the bleating will mellow out with age.

We’re enjoying Spring around here, can you tell? We’ve not done much for new things like we might have wanted; for the most part we’ve just been enjoying what we already have. I’ve been trying to remember the whole ‘stop and smell the roses’ bit. After all, what with all the effort that we put into it all…. what good would it be if we didn’t take the time to step back and just enjoy?