It’s been a while since I have written to our many followers. I wasn’t sure what to say after some major life changes have altered our farm’s plans.

The last Friday in June we took our son in for a MRI for his scoliosis which had suddenly gotten a LOT worse. He had been living with this for years but it had never needed treatment. After the MRI they kept us waiting a long time and wouldn’t tell us why. Eventually the doctor took me out of the room to say our son has a large tumor inside his spinal canal. They said the tumor had actually made the scoliosis worse.

This shocked us. As I’m sure it would any parent. Knowing there would be many trips to Boston Children’s Hospital for surgery and treatments, I immediately found foster homes for our goats. After that I began selling off about 50 of our mature chickens.

We currently only have 10 chickens left. I just couldn’t part with all of the White-Laced Buff Polish. Even though I sold our Marans, I still kept 15 of their chicks. Other than that all we have for chickens are roosters leftover from spring chick sales that will be butchered in a week or so.

We are fortunate to have reliable farm sitters for the pigs and what’s left of the chickens while we are gone. And the goats are all in experienced hands until September when we will know more about what the next year will have in store for our family.

We may even sell what we have left for animals depending on how things go. I tend to get overwhelmed easily and don’t want to set myself up to have a meltdown.

We plan to butcher the pigs this fall still. Other than sorting produce they aren’t much to care for. I’ll have our farm sitters just feed grain so it’s easy for them.