And the babies keep coming....

Our alpaca Gritona gave birth to a tiny light fawn female this morning.

Our first cria of the year!

Celtie, my favorite alapa, gave birth to a handsome medium brown boy this morning.

Look what I found this morning....

A little black calf.

It looks like our Dexter cow, Cherry Blossom, gave birth to a this little heifer while we were in Las Vegas.  We got back from the airport really late last night and I didn't go down to the barn.  I was a bit surprised to find the calf this morning as I wasn't expecting Cherry Blossom to calve for another 4-6 weeks.  She looks healthy and is nursing fine but I really wouldn't expect any different as Cherry Blossom loves being a mom and takes great care of her calves.

We're headed to Vegas!

We are leaving in a bit for a quick trip to Las Vegas!

Chinese Dragon Boat Festival

The Dragon Boat Festival is a traditional Chinese festival held on the fifth day of the fifth month of the Chinese lunar calendar (varying from late May to June on the modern Gregorian calendar). Commonly known as “Duan Wu” in Chinese, this unique occasion is grandly celebrated everywhere in China and also observed in various other parts of East Asia as "Double Fifth Day". In the West, it is popularly known as “Dragon Boat Festival” and is typically celebrated during the summer months with dragon boat races and competitions being the focus of the activities.  Dragon Boats are painted traditionally green, red, yellow, white, and black. Dragons are powerful of full of good luck, so the Dragon boat races spread good luck.

Here is a great coloring page of a Dragon Boat (here).
Crayola shows how to make Dragon Boat Puppets (here).
I printed out two Dragon Boat cut outs for the kids to color, assemble and race (find it here).

Children on that day wear bracelets of five different colors to protect against Evil, they are called the Five Poison or Wu Du charms.  It is the favorite decoration of this festival. According to Chinese custom, the "double fifth" is the hottest day of the month, when all the poisonous vapors are in the air, so every attempt is made to harmonize yin and yang so that danger and disease can be avoided. The Five Poison Charm is made up of a snake, centipede, scorpion, lizard, toad and sometimes spider. It was thought that the strength of the 4 poisons would counteract the poison of one. It is embroidered on clothing, stamped on cakes, engraved on charms, and used for decorations.  You can read more about the Five Poisons here and print a a Five Posions coloring sheet here.

Another Experiment in Dehydrating

I still had a couple of pounds of zucchini that I got from Heather last week that I really needed to do something with before it went bad.... and I hate to waste food by letting it go bad.  I did an Internet search on my options and I discovered a few new things to try!

I normally shred and freeze extra zucchini for making zucchini bread but our freezer is still full of beef so freezing was not the best option.  Canning pickles was an option as well but I still have Bread & Butter pickles from last year to use up (I am the only one that eats pickles in the family).  I did find a recipe for Zucchini Relish which I might whip up with the next batch of zucchini I get.

What I did find that was interesting was dehydrating it!  My research found that shredded zucchini can be rehydrated and made into bread with great results.  It can also be added to spaghetti sauces, casseroles, fritters, etc.  So here is a tray of freshly shredded zucchini ready to be dried.

(photo to come)

I also found that the zucchini could be thinly sliced (about 1/8 of an inch), lightly salted and dried into chips!  I was so ready to try that as I love salty crispy things.  Here are my zucchini slices ready to become chips.

(photo to come)

Celebrating Flag Day

Today is Flag Day in the USA.

The kids and I worked on a 4-H project to help them learn about Flag Day.  I read them a short story about Betsy Ross and how it came about that she sewed the first flag.  McKayla colored a picture of Betsy Ross holding a flag (find it here).  In the story it talked about how a sheet of paper was folded and cut with only a single cut to create a five point star.  I found the directions on how to do this and the kids and I made stars.  They thought that was really cool.  Both Evan and McKayla colored pictures depicting the original 13 colonies flag sewed by Betsy Ross.

I also read the story of the Star Spangled Banner song to them.  We talked about what the flag means to our country and the feelings it invokes in people when they see it.  Finally, we made kazoos from recycled toilet paper rolls and played the Star Spangled Banner on them.

We recorded it all in our 4-H project book as part of our Civil Education portion of this year.