Baby Goats

Life has been going well here at the ranch.

Just this past week our goat, Madonna, gave birth to twins. One boy and one girl. I spent the morning/early afternoon today hanging out with them. I held one while my friend held another and we introduced them to the horses. The horses were very curious and smelled them. The ears of the babies were about the size of the horses' nostrils:) The fur on baby goats is very soft as well. The girl, Gretchen, actually fell asleep in my arms while I was holding here. I won't lie, when I'm done with this post I will probably go back out there to cuddle with them some more.

We also had the chance to teach electives this week. That means that we had nearly four hours of time with a group of students who chose our class to teach them about something. I developed an Animal Tracking class. I used some things that I taught last year in an Animal Signs class, some that I used this year in an Animal Ecology class, and some that I developed on my own. I created a to-scale animal tracking handout for each kid so they could figure out what the tracks were that we found. At the end of the class I had them track me down! I went down the trail and hid in some bushes, leaving some noticeable tracks and making sounds (so they learned tracking isn't just about tracks).

The weather has been beautiful here all week--in the 70s each day. Last week was a different story, however. We got over a foot of snow in one night. By the next evening it was almost all melted away--leaving slush everywhere. I spent four hours of that morning shoveling slushy snow. It made me miss the light fluffy snow of Northern Minnesota. The picture above is just outside my front door.

I made home made cinnamon rolls with one of my coworkers that turned out so good I'll never buy store-bought ones again. Just to give you an idea--it made three cake pans full and called for 2qts whole milk, a box and a half of butter, and over four cups of sugar.

Tomorrow I think I might go out and gather a bunch of Yerba Santa for tea and White Sage for gifts. It is really interesting living in this desert ecosystem! More later--feel free to write me letters here.

Love,
AZ