Two Weekends Worth of Pictures

An absence from posts does not mean a lack of activities; in fact, it has been quite the contrary.  Last Saturday we spent the afternoon in Indy with Gran and Beep Beep.  Kari and Beep Beep enjoyed playing outside in the fresh snow, filling the bird feeders and having a rather one-sided snowball fight.

This morning we headed north to Fair Oaks Farms for a family outing on our day off.  Kari and I had been there with Amy and Nolan about two years ago and really enjoyed our visit.  It is absolutely amazing and, at times, hard to wrap your head around the numbers, gallons and statistics this mega dairy produces:
9 families, 10 farms, 24-hour milking operation, 3,000 cows, each cow will be milked three times a day on a 72-cow carousel in 8 minutes and producing an average of 5 gallons per milking.  They produce all of their own power by converting the manure to methane gas.  It truly is amazing.  We even braved the birthing barn just in time to see twins born.  This ended up being Kari's favorite part and was lucky enough to see a second set of twins born after we ate lunch before heading home.

 

                                                        Twins!                                                        The milking carousel

Bryce is also doing well.  Thursday afternoon he came down with a low-grade fever and recovered less than 24 hours later by sleeping most of it off.  Saturday evening and all day yesterday he was covered in rash- likely something I ate, but otherwise feeling well.  I'll refrain from holding The Union accountable for the foreign food that entered my body on Saturday.