South and East

This is the first year in a while that we have no baby goats on the way.  It's probably good to have the break, but I miss the process a little.  It's always a little nerve wracking -- are the goats going to have babies when we're away?  Are they going to have trouble and need help?  Do they look so uncomfortable for a (problematic) reason?  But then... the babies are so cute when they arrive... and it's fun to see them grow... and it's cool that all of a sudden there are babies where there were none before.  And then you have 13 goats because you held on too long watching them grow rather than selling them when they're still cute and little enough for people to want to buy them.  I guess it's all kind of like human babies, but furrier (well ideally except for the selling them part).

Meanwhile, spring has arrived, the rain is here, the hills are getting green, and today we even have the windows open at home.  Eytan seems to like the outdoors, and really likes trees and tree trunks (I swear I'm not putting him up to it).  He also is a big fan of being swung through the air (he has even been known to giggle on particularly rough airplane landings -- he might be a bit of a roller coaster baby).  And most recently, is doing all sorts of rolling around on his own.  Like this.







No crawling yet, but people have started showing him the moves...





Despite these videos, actually, no one is really in any sort of rush for crawling... rolling is plenty fun for now.

As you can see, my mom was here visiting for a week, and got lots of Eytan time in.  She also did some yard work (fancy!).

  

We all flew back together from New York, where we went for Passover seders (and we saw Mike's mom in the Minneapolis airport on a layover to boot).  So it has been visits galore...

Before the trip to NY, we were in California for a long weekend to the wedding of my old NY-ian roommate.  The wedding was in southern CA but we flew into northern CA and drove from there so we could see the many friends who have recently (and some not so recently) moved to the state. 

It also so happened that Eytan got to hang with several kiddos his age.  Momin and Dania are 16 days older.

 

And Daniel is 11 days older.

And here is California in general...

and Margaret and Jimmy's front-yard garden (with a banana tree in the backyard to boot)

Meanwhile, back at home we're starting to think about tilling and raking up winter hay and setting up irrigation, all sorts of spring things.  Indoors, Eytan is eating some solid-ish food -- which he's not super thrilled with (although we had a breakthrough in California when we tried the canned stuff instead of homemade and increased our success tenfold). Below we've got avocado + banana + tahini, also popular these days (popular means he eats a couple spoonfuls without spitting it out, but still, not bad).

So, that's about it -- a picture-y, video-y, baby-y, travel-y update.  Luckily we should be staying firmly put at home for the next month, so perhaps a homefront update next time.