The 2nd day of Christmas

It is nights like these when homesteading is a bit of a struggle. It is cold outside and not just cold but bitter cold.  It is 8* but feels like -2* and someone needs to go out and feed the animals.  This morning to get to the animals we had to clear our paths.  It snowed all night  and the wind howled around the house just to make sure we knew it was going on.  Even though it is cold, once we get out to the barn we tend to stay a while with the animals and not just throw feed to them.  We let them know we are their for them, talk to them and make sure it is clean and warm in the barn.

Today it was work for me (someone wanted  off for the holiday to be with their family. I took their work day for St Stephen's Day - to help someone else. I know I would want someone to help me some day) while Dude went to family celebrations (he represents well).

The crockpot was set with Bean and Ham soup from a Taste of Home  recipe found  here  .

Being on the homestead we want to make sure we are using homegrown ingredients.

• Ham from a locally grown pig.
• Beans from a farm in northern Colorado and canned here in quart jars.
• Carrots, onions and garlic from our garden.
• Chicken broth from our hens, process and frozen.
• Spiked the whole thing from chilies we canned.

We came home to the house smelling wonderful and dinner ready to be eaten.

These cold days and nights we generally read or craft.  Our goal is to try and save money but homesteads require quite a bit of money to keep them running... buy a pig here, need more canning jars here and the big one this year will be putting up a barn and new flooring in the house. We are constantly remodeling.  

Tonight thank you notes needed to be written so I sat down and made them.  I saved pages from my day to day calendar most of the year, I also had  cutouts I did long ago, along with feathers I found or embellishments from here and there. A couple of friends were cleaning out their scrapbooking shelves this year and gave me things they may have thrown out.  Here are a few I came up with:

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas.  I want to say thank you for starting this journey with us and hope you enjoy our posts.