Fast Forward Six Months

 Realizing our blog is sorely lagging, because of Verizon crazy data usage, I am going to quickly get six months into one post.  Also I feel guilty because when Dancer was the age that Spark is now I was blogging daily.  Being a second child myself, who has almost no pictures of my childhood, I feel we should have at the least bi-annual posts.  So here we go:

We took llamas to the county fair.  This is Dancer and Honey Bear in the costume class.  Honey Bear is a bath tub, complete with a scrubby, shower cap, hair curlers and a towel.  They won a champion ribbon.

Spark showed a goat, Kyumba.  They were in the blue ribbon auction and he was rewarded with $250 for his ribbon. Kyumba is now living in the barn learning to stand up to the older goats who remind him of his place in the pecking order every chance they get.

Dancer took Honey Bear to the state fair. They won a first place ribbon and a spot in the top ten line up. Our county also won 3rd place in herdsmanship, a huge honor.

Dancer had her first ever day of "school." She quickly realized that she is not a classroom student and looked forward to getting back to her online classes. 

She earned her first paycheck as a CNA at a nursing home. She likes her job, especially on pay day!

I sewed her quite a few scrub tops so she could be festive.

We did some fishing.

We added a male llama, Sirocco, to our herd.  He is a year and a half and this was the first time he had a halter on so we will see if he works out for a 4-H llama.  Our other hope was that he would get friendly with our girls, but so far they have been acting like ice princesses.

Spark started selling eggs and has a hard time keeping up with orders.  To help ease the back log of orders he was given some chicks and they should be laying by March.

For the first time in our homeschooling adventure we manage to get the butterfly to emerge from the chrysalis. It only took us until our 14th year.

Spark celebrated his 15th birthday.

Work schedules dictated that we celebrate Thanksgiving a couple days late. We made so much food, not sure who we thought was going to eat it all since there were only four of us.  Leftovers were on the menu for several days. Same thing happened with Christmas.

Took our annual co-op Christmas trip to the Mall of America.

Spark joined a speech club and is giving two speeches.  One is O. Henry's After Twenty Years and an informative one about llamas in 4-H. 

Our dear Skips took ill with something our vet couldn't figure out and he died in Dancer's arms this fall. It still hasn't fully sunk in yet and I often expect to see him around the house.

We have spent a lot of time with Grandma and Grandpa.  The circumstances may not be the best but we have seen them more in the last year than we probably did in the last twenty years.