Holy cow is it COLD!

 

I've done cold a LOT. My husband went to medical school in Rochester, Minnesota. It was freezing like all the time.

But taking care of animals in that freezing cold weather? NOT FUN AT ALL!

We just don't get negative temps here in East TN much at all. It dropped as low as four degrees today. The weird thing is, the HIGH was at about 9am. It just kept getting colder! With the windchill, we were easily into the negative twenties.

We started preparing for the biggest cold snap of our eight years in TN on Thursday afternoon. It was in the 60's as we got ready! What would we do without the weather forecasts?! We would have never seen this coming. But, because we did, we had two major jobs:

1. Prepare the puppies to be "outside" in -20. 

2. Prepare the sheep to be "outside" in -20.

Out sheep are actually Katahdin Hair Sheep. They were bread in Maine and we have rarely (if ever!) taken any winter precautions on their behalf. But, we were forecasted to have a lot of rain/snow before the temperature dropped, and not only do we have three little baby lambs already born, we have about a dozen Mamas READY TO POP with more babies.

So we came up with a good plan, and it worked beautifully.

In the evening, we prepared for the winter storm by going into town to see the legendary Barry Bales play in his "annual" (after COVID postponements) Christmas Extravaganza! Here are a couple of quick videos I took of this: overall and overall2 and fiddle amazing!

We woke up this morning to less rain/wetness than was forecasted but absolutely BRUTAL coldness. (And I've lived in Minnesota!)

Isaac was not feeling well (he got what John and Abigail are recovering from and what I am also coming down with). Sidge the amazing, willingly got himself layered up and braced the cold with me. This guy was such a rockstar that when one of our the locks on our gates was frozen shut, he just climbed it to get to his chickens. We had to do chickens, ducks, sheep, and then head over to our friend Anni's farm to tend to her goats and dogs. (I nearly did a happy dance when her well water ran! Oh man I did NOT want to try to figure out how to bucket water to Anni's farm!)

After we were done with the animals, Sidge and I did a quick Yoder's run to get some "supplies" for hunkering down: bread, milk, and "stuff" to make biscuits and cookies and soup!

I also let Sidge pick out a drink to say THANK YOU for how amazing he is on the farm. This kid seriously is amazing with labor jobs: carpentry, fish, creating ... just awesome.

We (everyone but John as he works today and tomorrow) spent the rest of the day with my brother and his family. We also spent a little time with John's sister Elizabeth and her husband and boys. Her boys got to spend some real quality time with the puppies which was a ton of fun! 

Here's a video of that!

Aunt AD babysat while we were at the concert. I have a TON of fun pictures/videos to share of that ... another day!