Working on final touches to the kitchen

Curtains!

I am a thrifty, sentimental ol' gal.

I enjoy surrounding myself with memories of loved ones. 

To calve or not to calve?

That is the question!  

We are on pins and needles to find out the answer.

Buttercup certainly looks very round.  We are hopeful she took when we had her artificially inseminated back in June.  We have not observed any signs of heat since then, which is very encouraging.  We were planning on drawing some blood and sending it off to the lab for testing to confirm if she took or not, but we were very daunted by the idea of drawing blood from the underside of her tail and just kept dragging our feet about getting around to actually poking her.

Then we found out about a lab that does testing on milk samples.  Oh, happy day!  We are saved from trying to draw blood from such a sensitive spot.  (I am sure she would be relieved as well if she knew!)  We are sending out a sample of her milk to the lab tomorrow and should hear back in a few days.

Humor me and let's do a little comparison.  

Just for fun...

This is a view of her from the front the day we brought her home.

And this is today from the front.

This is from behind on her first day here...

...and this is today from behind.  

Sure looks pregnant to me!  :)

But I can so easily get all caught up in wishful thinking.  Maybe it is just worms.

If she is pregnant she wouldn't calve until March but just to know there is a wee little calfie in there would sure make us happy.  If not, we really blew it and messed up on waiting too long to get her bred back for a spring baby.  I know you're supposed to get them bred back between 90-120 days after calving and we have past that range and I'm not sure how bad that it.  It isn't ideal but I don't know if it would be truly bad or not.  I guess we'll cross that bridge if we come to it.  

We can always hope for the best!

Floriani Red Flint Corn

Success!

Now serving grilled venison!

Steve has never hunted before.  He is anticipating learning sometime in the future.  However, this was not exactly the way we had envisioned him taking down his first deer.

Life Outside of the Kitchen

Even though it feels like we are spending all of our time indoors fixing the kitchen, we do still get to other areas of life.  Here are some snapshots from the last month that have taken place outside of the kitchen! :)