Chloe turns 5!!

Happy Birthday Chloe: Chloe has been super excited for her birthday for the last 2 weeks and she lived it up her birthday weekend with a fairy tea party, sleep over at Aunt Molly's, birthday party with family, and lots of presents and cake on her actual birthday.

 Birthday Dinner of "noodles" aka ramen per Chloe's request. We also had cream of wheat and toast again this year as it is still her favorite and gets requested about 5 times per week

 

Opening presents: she got lots of nice new clothes, play doh, art supplies, a hula hoop and Frozen sheets for her new big girl bunk bed. The bunk beds are both full size beds and take up most of their room but they are loving their new big beds.

 Chloe getting ready to make her cake

 She chose a rainbow cake with green ice cream for her birthday

 Cutting the cake - she did a REALLY good job cutting up that cake into LOTS of pieces

 Posing with some of her new art supplies from aunt Wendy

 Starting some seeds: I am a little behind this year but we started the seeds on the 10th. we started the Amish Paste tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, tomatillos, sweet peppers, and broccoli. I thought I had more seeds from last year (cauliflower, broccoi, jalapenos) but couldn't find them when we went to plant. I only planted broccoli seeds, I guess we will focus on other plants this year :)

 Blain helping to water the seeds

Yogurt from farm fresh milk: I made yogurt yesterday and after anxiously waiting all day for it to incubate and then all night for it to set in the fridge, I now have edible yogurt from our very own milk cow!! It is a lot thicker than the first batch I made but still a tad runny. I followed directions from a different blog and tried it on the stovetop and incubated it in a hot bath in a cooler in the bathtub.

I kept the milk between 160* and 170* for 10 minutes, which was herder to do than I thought. I then cooled it too much in a sink of cold water so I had to bring it back up to 120. I added 1/2 cup of sugar to 3 quarts of milk plus about 2 T of vanilla. The incubation water started out at 125* and 6 hours later was at 105*. Next time I will add more hot water 1/2 way through rather than 6 hours into it to keep the temp up better. I let it sit for about 9 hours.

 Avenlea likes it!

 Yogurt, bananas and cereal for breakfast

 Overall I am very pleased with the yogurt. We went through about 3/4 of a jar for breakfast this morning so we'll see how long those 3 quarts last us :)