Happy New Year all my jewish friends

This week was great one for schooling with an introduction to sculpting clay for the kids and a great field trip to the Austin Nature Center and then onto Zilker Park in Austin for some cooling down in Barton Springs.
Here at the farm, we have officially begun looking for a buck (we're talking goats here)to purchase in order to breed our nigerian dwarf goat Skyla. We also have a Toggenburg doe named Cat, but have decided that we are going to stick to the nigerian breed for our milk purposes. Originally, we got Cat because her breed in known for producing large quantities of milk in the 2% milk fat range while the nigerian dwarf breed has more like 4% milk fat- better for cheese making. BUT...the kids (the human kind) don't like Cat's milk because of the strong flavour and prefer the milk that we got from the neighbor's nigerian. Skyla has not been bred in over 4 years, so she we have no idea what her milk production will be like but we are going to find out. Wish us luck!
Mid-week, my internet connection was finally repaired as well, so hopefully I will not be losing my connection constantly anymore. Blogging has been a frustrating adventure lately due to losing great quantities of writing before the post disappears into the great ether void.
If you want to see pictures of the trip to the Nature Center and Park, log onto lakesareahomeschooladventureclub.blogger.com and look at the slideshow on Picasa.
Still no conclusive news about health care coverage for Elder's eye but it sure has been interesting listening to the political debating about health care reforms - mostly seems like more sticky manure to me.
Hang tuff everyone.
Robin

Bug Adventure Club

Well, at long last, we had our first big class here at the IAMI Learning Center classroom. 27 kids and their adults came around for a hot morning of bug research, discovery and hunting. I think it went really well judging by the feedback that I have gotten from some of the kids that attended. A bit of fine tuning is definitely in order so that things can run a slight bit more smoothly but all in all, I am happy with the outcome. Next month is a class on reptiles featuring our favorite zoologist person, Stephanie - another awsome homeschooling mom from the San Antonio area who is bringing along several animal friends from Asia, Africa, South America and other places. Stephanie has come to share spiders and tortoises with us in the past and always has a lot of great info. to pass along.

The other great event of the week was finding out that Elder's eye surgery will cost over $11,000 (out-patient) and the fact that there is no way that we can cover that. So...we have applied for insurance to find out if we can get some help with the cost. I really hope this works out. We need to deal with this before he reaches the age of seven. Apparently there is less hope for things to work permanently after that age.

Tony is finally up and around after being the last member of the family to get the flu. 5 days of not working because it hit so hard. I can attest to this particular strain being a real butt whipper. And no, I do not know if it was the swine flu because we didn't go to a doctor but it is in the immediate area, so I suppose it was possible. Hopefully, we are all over it and can get on with the insurmountable work load and all of the exciting school adventures. This week we will be visiting the Austin Nature Center.

OK - time to get in bed. Here are a couple of shots from our bug hunt.