.....And the winner is:

After writing out the names of those of you who entered my giveaway, and then putting them in a hat, and after Andrew thoroughly mixed all the names, I reached in and drew the name, "Robert" (and no, my dad did not enter my drawing. :) ) So now, Robert, you can just let me know which of the prizes you'd like and where I should send it to and I'll get "It" in the mail soon... If you'd rather not have me publish your address, that's fine, just let me know. Thank you to all that participated! It was really fun to see that there are some new people reading my blog now, and also to see that my "Old" friends still read about our life here in ND. I took a few pictures today and thought I'd share them here. This is a box that holds the tomato and pepper seeds I started. I have a couple other boxes that I started seeds in too and now have cabbage, cauliflower and onions coming up. :) The toothpicks in the box below mark off the separate "Plots" I've planted (there are many different varieties of peppers and tomatoes in there that should be peeking out any day now.) This is how I've filled up those shelves I was telling you about a while back: It's nice to have extra room on my dresser and piano now for books and boxes of seeds and....

Speaking of books, this is the kind I've been digging into recently. I'm SO glad it's finally Spring!

We had to pull our first calf (of this year) this afternoon, as it was upside down and backwards, meaning the mother would not have been able to push it out, no matter what. My dad managed to get the calf turned (inside the cow) so it's feet were down and then we pulled it out backwards, quickly. The baby is doing fine, so we and the mama are happy!

I counted tonight and, with the 8 calves today, we now have a total of 53 calves (we've had 2 dead ones so far). One of the cows who calved today (Suzie) was Sally's (our milk cows') calf from 2 years ago. Andrew's thinking he might try and milk her in a couple weeks, when he's done with grain cleaning and is around to train her. He thinks she'll be easy to teach, as she was a bottle calf and he's kept her fairly tame all along. She even let him squeeze some milk out tonight to make sure there was some there for the calf. Oh, the calf is a beautiful heifer, by the way, whom he's decided to call "Sweet Pea".

Those were the highlights of this day. I guess I could tell you about how Dad and Jacob were really with it while playing Foosball today, but that wasn't really a highlight for me! :) Or, I could write about how Mom and I tried playing out of our new piano duet book, but that didn't sound the best (yet), so that wasn't a great highlight either! It was, for the most part, a peaceful day and we're now ready for a new week. How about you?