Update July - September

Catchy title, right?  I know... I do what I can. So I haven't actually posted anything but five-minute Friday posts since July (!) so there is a lot of ground to cover!  So a summary will have to suffice.
July: Everyone in the big house was gone for Canadian Jamboree (big Scout to-do out West) and David and I ran the farm.  We dealt with a pneumonia outbreak among the crias and lived to tell about it!  Though the learning curve was steep for both of us.

This was one of our sick crias - he's healthy and rambunctious now!

August: David and I built a changing table for Bean. We also celebrated our first wedding anniversary and David left to return to school in Iowa for the year.

The unpainted finished change table

Celebrating our anniversary at the Lego store

Waving good-bye at the train station as David left to go back to school

September: Mom and I went to an alpaca seminar in Ohio and learned how to assist alpacas in difficult births.  Later in the month we went to a wedding in Iowa and got to visit David and other friends!

Alpaca course - learning to deliver difficult crias

Wedding in Iowa

David-Monkey waking up David-Human 

Sad good-byes (notice the growing belly!)

Visiting Summer

Visiting Chelsea Bell

Paying a surprise visit to Kathy

Visiting with Talia

And that's all for this post.  Hopefully I'll get October's update up soon...No promises though.   Facebook, of course, has more pictures!

Five Minute Friday: Tree

This blog has fallen on the wayside...far too long without a post.  I'll try and get a post up in the next few days and let you all (if anyone actually reads this) know what's been going on.  However, it is Friday, and I'm sitting at the computer, so I'm going to participate in Five-Minute Friday.  You can join the party here. This week's prompt is "Tree"

Start:
When I hear the word tree I think of two things - first I think of the plant that grows in abundance around our house... tall, straight, pointing to the sky, fallen down, dead, chopped for firewood, covered in leaves, bare, sticky with pine sap...  And then I think of the other kind of tree.  The family tree.  Family trees have always been important to my family, on both sides.  Family trees tell us where we came from, who we came from, what our history is, and how we are connected in this world.  But what they don't tell us is our future.  A family tree only looks back - it cannot look forward.
However a plant-tree can look both forward and backward.  If it were sentient, it could look back and remember what it was like to be a sapling, a slender shoot coming up from the ground.  And it could look forward to what it will be - big and strong, growing both in height and diameter and weather, space and time allow.  For a tree, there is only one path it can take, and that is the path of all trees.  It will continue to grow, grow, and grow some more.
Our family trees are different.  We can look back but not forward.  We have the whole world in front of us and can grow to be whatever it is that we want to be.  There is no set path for us.  We can be astronauts or doctors or mothers....

Stop.