I can’t wait for my new half-gallon canning jars to arrive. My milk shelf is full of little quart jars. Very inefficient. Half-gallon jars are not recommended for canning anything which is probably why nobody carries them, but I found them at several online retailers. Because the shipping was so prohibitively high on those heavy, fragile jars, I hadn’t bought any, until I discovered that ACE Hardware ships for free to any ACE store, and wouldn’t you know my favorite variety store in town is an ACE store?! My new jars should be there this week. I only hope that they know what to do with them! It’s highly probably that nobody around here has ever used the online ship-to-store feature. 
We’ve been here for a little over a year now and I love that we get to plan things. Our whole next year on the farm is taking shape very nicely. We’re looking at raising a few animals for meat, especially a pair of calves and a pig, and getting a second milk cow as soon as I think I can handle milking two cows. We’re going to raise a larger breed of chicken, hopefully establishing them as a breeding flock as well so that the meat will just keep coming with no further inputs from us, and we’re hoping for the same with some turkeys. Davey doesn’t like duck, but I do, both in the pond and on the table, so we’re going to raise up a few of those, too. We like the fowl, we do. We’re also planning for a smaller but much better garden this year. And a highly recommended variety of blackberries.
Thomas still won’t sit up. He stands, he cruises, he crawls and is in every other way a normal baby. I think. He doesn’t make too many intelligible sounds, either, but I think that’s normal enough. He won’t sit, though, no way, no how. He stiffens up that little back of his whenever I set him on his bottom and flops right over, or he flips immediately onto his knees.
I might be able to get my camera fixed, and for free, too! That purple bar, that terrible, horrible, no good, very bad purple bar that is really putting a damper on my photograghic designs is probably a defect in the camera which has been known almost since I bought the camera. I can’t wait to call Canon tomorrow morning!
We’ll be moving our little classroom this week – out to the garage. Strange? I think we all need the separation from the house, actually. I’ll need to organize and plan a little better, but we should be much more productive out there, away from the distractions of chores and bedrooms full of toys and such. I can’t wait to get it all set up!
I have to go wake up David and see about milking my favorite cow. We love Maybelle Milk around here, we do. It’s starting to hurt to pay those low grocery store prices for food. It is so much work, making food. Milk? I’d never charge less than $5.00 a gallon for mine. I know, when I pay $2.39 at the store, that the farmer who worked for that milk didn’t make enough off it to even feed his own family. So many farm families sell out because they can’t make a living off their land, or they work jobs in town to pay the bills and farm on the side with what time they have left. It’s a powerful loss, and cheap food is not all it’s cracked up to be.
And that’s all I have time for today. Happy Sunday, friends!
Lydia wouldn’t sit until she was nearly a year old. She rolled, crawled, and would kneel, but she would NOT sit on her behind.
And would you say she turned out okay?
Laney never crawled. She wore out all the bottoms on our baby girl clothes scooting around on her tush. Convenient, I guess. She could hold a cookie in one hand and her cup in the other and scoot around the house. 
I’d kill for $5 a gallon milk, as would most people I know! We pay $3.50 a half gallon for organic milk at the commissary, so that’s $7 a gallon, and we go through a lot of it since our boy just got onto whole milk after he turned 1 year old on Christmas Day.
What you said about the state of many farm families is true. Our farm never made enough to support our family 100%, so my mom went to grad school and became a professor, and my dad started a farmers’ market in the city. We still farmed lots, but the other stuff is what paid most of the bills. We were just up in Minnesota visiting my husband’s family over the holidays, and they have always farmed, too. Most of them now work at other jobs in addition to farming. His best friend is the only person we know anymore who farms exclusively. He raises grass-fed beef, corn, and alfalfa, and somehow he makes it work. It’s hopeful to see that, and you know I’d pay ANYTHING he asked for a side of beef raised right. Cheap food is overrated.
It can work if you can find a niche market. It looks like it’s hard to make a go of it, the traditional acres-and-acres-of-corn way, but small farms like us who are able to produce what consumers want and sell directly to them should be able to make a decent living from the land. That means living near a population that can support your farm, though, too.
I would pay $5 a gallon happily for your milk! I pay almost $4 for a half gallon now of organic milk that is not homogonized. Plus, a $2 bottle deposit!
I wonder if Thomas would benefit from a chiropractic adjustment? Maybe something in his spine hurts when he sits? I don’t know – just came to mind!
Our camera is starting to do weird things and we are thinking about a new one with our Christmas gift money – for sure before baby Lincoln is born. Let me know if you get a new camera and what you think! I know you do good research!
He sits in his chair comfortably, so I don’t think it’s a pain issue. As for the camera, I’m still trying to get it fixed. Canon customer support is not quite all it should be.