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Meet Jade
Jade is the baby of the family, but doesn’t let that stop her. She is very feisty and holds her own amongst all her siblings. Get to know Jade better and what she does at Goat Milk Stuff by watching...
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Happy Birthday, Jade!
Jade is our Fourth of July birthday girl! We start our birthday celebrations at breakfast with breakfast birthday cake. Normally everybody has a special birthday placemat, but they have not been...
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Working Hard and Having Fun
The Jonases are all about working hard. If you look at all that we do, that’s fairly obvious. But we also like to play hard when the work is done. But working hard and playing hard don’t have to be...
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Homeschool Creativity – Bandana Dresses
One of my main goals when it comes to our homeschool is to give the children lots of opportunities to be creative. I believe that strengthening their creativity skills will pay dividends when they are...
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Computer Fun
All of the children have their own computers. They use them both for their Goat Milk Stuff work and for their school work. Jade is limited as to what she can do on her computer because she is still...
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Visiting the Nursing Home
Remember when we brought baby goats to our local nursing home in the spring? The same facility contacted me to see if I could come speak to them. Unfortunately, I had a conflict, but Jim and some of...
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How to Recycle Paper
Because we have a business, we’re very careful with our paperwork. We don’t store customer credit card information or share it with anyone. If we don’t need to keep paperwork for our records, Jade is...
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Rainbow
Many of you know that we have been through a difficult time dealing with the trauma from being on the scene of a fatal accident. I may write about it later, but right now I just wanted to share with...
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Family Photo Shoot
I’ve wanted to get an updated family photo for many months. But as you can imagine, getting everyone ready is quite an endeavor. We were supposed to do the photo last week, but with the accident,...
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Hiking at Charlestown State Park
Hiking has always been one of our favorite family activities. Our local park was Charlestown State Park, but since we’ve moved, it’s over half an hour away. We decided to go back one last time for a...
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How to Cook Artichokes
In my experience, most people have never eaten real artichokes. Sure, they’ve had artichoke hearts or artichoke dip. But the whole artichoke? Nope! In fact, most people are very surprised to learn...
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Picking out a Christmas Tree
This is the first year in our new house and the children had their heart set on a HUGE tree. So we went to a local tree farm where we first found a huge pile of geodes. We took a hay wagon ride to the...
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Kids Cooking – Breakfast Birthday Cake
We generally don’t make a big fuss about birthdays around here, but we do have several traditions that are important to us. One of our birthday traditions is to start the day with Breakfast Birthday...
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How to Teach Your Children to Work
Busy Mom’s Survival Guide Podcast Episode 054.During the previous two episodes I discussed work ethic with Eric Chester, author of the book Reviving Work Ethic. Those episodes sparked some good...
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How To Get Children to Stop Sucking Their Thumbs or Fingers
Getting our children to stop sucking their thumbs has always been a chore for me. Brett was easy and decided to stop on her own. Colter and Emery used pacifiers, which I took away from them when they...
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Blooper Reel
All of the videos we have been recording lately have provided lots of material for bloopers. I didn’t even realize they had some of this stuff on tape, but it’s pretty funny. Which is your favorite...
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Kids Cooking – French Toast
If your children are like mine, they’re always wanting to tackle new challenges. Jade has been very excited lately to learn how to cook. One of the first full meals she is able to make all by herself...
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How To Use Goat Milk Stuff Laundry Soap
All the Jonas children are very hard workers and have a lot of responsibilities. Indigo (7) and Jade (6) have been doing their own laundry (with our laundry soap) for several years. In this adorable...
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Ice Hockey
Since it’s been so cold for the past couple of weeks, our creek is frozen solid. (Yes, completely solid.) So the kids decided that they wanted to have a little fun. What started as tossing an empty...
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Getting Eggs The Fun Way
Here on the Goat Milk Stuff farm, we got a lot of snow this winter. A couple of months ago, it was particularly nasty. There were 3-4 inches of snow that had frozen completely solid, a sheet of ice on...
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Snuggly Sisters and a Famous Forehead
One morning the two little girls climbed into bed with Dad, wanting some snuggle time before they had to get ready for the day. At some point, they started talking about how Jade has bangs and Indigo...
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Picking Clover
We are a very frugal family and love to save money wherever possible. That often means making use of the resources that are available to us. And one of those happens to be – clover! Jade is often...
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Happy Birthday, Jim!
Jim and I met at The University of Virginia, so Thomas Jefferson is very important to us. Here is an interesting fact – Thomas Jefferson was born on Jim’s birthday (April 13) and died on Jade’s...
View ArticleFootprints
Since we did our handprints in the concrete at the soaproom, Mom wanted us to put our footprints on the barn’s porch. (Mom also suggested we do butt prints on the porch of the house, but Dad said no....
View ArticleHappy Birthday Jade!
How did my baby turn 7 already? You always hear it said that the older you get, the faster time goes by. It is so true! Jade is growing up into such a wonderful person and we’re all so proud of...
View ArticleColorful Bedrooms
When they painted our bedrooms, we were that much closer to living in our bedrooms. We still needed carpet, lights, switches, trim, doors, and a whole lot more, but the rooms were very colorful. Which...
View ArticleAsk A Jonas – Jade’s Favorite Goat
We get asked lots of questions when we’re doing farm tours, selling soap at craft fairs, or simply running errands. Since most of those answers are heard only by the person who asked, we decided to...
View ArticleDry Ice
The other day, we had a delivery (Graeter’s ice cream, yumm!!) that included some dry ice. After making sure the kids understood that they couldn’t touch the dry ice, they were allowed to do what they...
View ArticleIndigo and Jade
If you’ve been around our blog a while, you’ve probably discovered our Youngest Person Rule. I was looking through the camera* the other day and found these pictures of the Youngest Person Rule in...
View ArticleWashing the Beast
We’ve had the Beast for a while now, and it was getting really dirty. Because of the wrap (the pictures) we can’t take it to a car wash – not that it would fit in there anyway. So Dad told the kids one...
View ArticleGoat Collars
We mentioned the new goat collars in the post about our goat photoshoot, but we didn’t explain why the collars all look different, and why that’s important. When we were talking about getting collars...
View ArticleAsk A Jonas – Does Jade Like Goats Or Bunnies Better?
We get asked lots of questions when we’re doing farm tours, selling soap at craft fairs, or simply running errands. Since most of those answers are heard only by the person who asked, we decided to...
View ArticleAsk A Jonas – Do The Kids Like Their Unique Names?
We get asked lots of questions when we’re doing farm tours, selling soap at craft fairs, or simply running errands. Since most of those answers are heard only by the person who asked, we decided to...
View ArticleGinger and Jade
Our house cat, Ginger, is a Daddy’s girl. But Jade thinks that Ginger is hers, and will spend hours with her. Ginger has always been good with Jade, despite hours of too much snuggle time. Bonus points...
View ArticleKids Sledding
A few weeks ago, we had our first snow for this winter. The kids kept disappearing. A few hours later, they would be back. With frozen hands. And bright red cheeks. “We were sleddding!” “And it was...
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Jade and the Umbrella
A couple of weeks ago, we bought some big red and white striped umbrellas to keep in the soaproom, so that we could let people on tours use them if it was raining. Well, we haven’t had a tour use them...
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Ask a Jonas — Jade’s Thoughts on Learning to Read
We get asked lots of questions when we’re doing farm tours, selling soap at craft fairs, or simply running errands. Since most of those answers are heard only by the person who asked, we decided to...
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Kids Decorating the Christmas Tree
This year, when we went to get our family Christmas Tree, Mom had the brilliant idea of getting a tree for the front porch of the soaproom. The only problem was that we didn’t have any ornaments for...
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Ask a Jonas – Jade & signing her name
We get asked lots of questions when we’re doing farm tours, selling soap at craft fairs, or simply running errands. Since most of those answers are heard only by the person who asked, we decided to...
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Taping Boxes and Making Forts
Here at Goat Milk Stuff, we go through lots of mailing boxes. Normally, when we run out of prepared boxes, we’ll get everyone together and have a big box taping party. But the other day, some of the...
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Healthy Field, Healthy Goats!
I’m not a big fan of chemicals. They have their place and are useful in certain applications. But in general, I think that as a society we rely too heavily on them. We work hard on the farm to avoid...
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What Do We Do In Our Spare Time?
We get asked all the time, “What do you do in your spare time?” And without fail, everyone’s answer to that question is, “I read”. We read outside, on the couch, (in any position we find comfortable,)...
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Ask a Jonas – Jade’s Thoughts on Working
We get asked lots of questions when we’re doing farm tours, selling soap at craft fairs, or simply running errands. Since most of those answers are heard only by the person who asked, we decided to...
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Newsies
Everyone in our family absolutely LOVES musicals. While we were visiting New York City, we had the opportunity to see three broadway musicals, including Newsies. My siblings and I absolutely love the...
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Knitting For Playmobil
All my kids have enjoyed playmobil at some point during their childhood. But as they have gotten older, some of them have “outgrown” it. Fletcher, Hewitt, Indigo, and Jade however all still very much...
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Baby Goats Visiting the Nursing Home
Remember when we brought some baby goats to the nursing home? We did it again! Emery, Fletcher, Greyden, Hewitt, Indigo, Jade, and Dad brought two or three of our youngest babies to visit. The...
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5K Color Run
Exercise is something important to our family so we can stay healthy. All of the boys run cross country and track. Last Saturday we all participated in a 5K Color Run, to help raise money to fight...
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Happy 8th Birthday Jade!
I can’t believe my little fire cracker is 8! Since Jade’s birthday is the 4th of July we had lots of family visiting, which meant lots of breakfast birthday cake! Looking back at the last few years,...
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Do You Take Advantage of Opportunities?
I love the fact that because of Goat Milk Stuff, we’ve been able to take the family on many adventures to many cities. We’ve been on television in St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans, Los...
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Processing Jewelweed
Last week I talked about how we harvested jewelweed to be used in our jewelweed soap and jewelweed salve. Once Greyden and Emery collect all of the jewelweed, it’s time to process it. Jade does...
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