Staying Warm Thru Winter's Cold

I am pretty sure that if given the choice,

most of our animals would prefer winter over summer.

Winter definitely has the sheep vote.

Hope seems to prefer being outside even on the coldest of days.

I suppose we would all be toasty warm if we wore a wool coat that was 2 inches thick!

Even the equines don't seem to mind the cold.

With plenty of available hay to use as fuel for their internal heaters...

they eat their way through winter.

You might remember a couple weeks ago how muddy all of the horses were.

It's par for the course on a warmer day after wet weather.

Horses seem to love to roll in the mud.

And though I called them the dirtiest horses in the world,

by the end of the day they were once again spotless.

That mud gets brushed off religiously.

(Dr. Becky's Sid)

Horses need their coats to be fluffy during cold weather.

That thick, fluffy loft provides insulation around their bodies.

(Mud doesn't allow for the hair to act as an insulator.)

Right now, the ground is frozen solid...

so everyone is behaving themselves and not causing us extra work!

I worried how the runner ducks would fare in the winter weather.

They seem to be doing just fine...

still spending their days patrolling the farm.

Yesterday, they followed the guinea fowl the whole way down to the old log cabin.

I had never seen them that far away in that direction before.

Leave it to the guineas to lead them astray!

There's no worrying when it comes to the pigs.

They prefer to spend the colder days eating hay beneath their heat lamp.

No matter the weather, though, they come running...

if there's even a remote chance for treats.

The dogs love to be outside playing.

The colder weather energizes even Sammie.

When the play is over, however, they get comfy in front of the fire.

The oven kept me warm yesterday while the dogs slept by the fire.

I spent the entire day baking cookies...

I tried a new technique with royal icing... using stencils.

There was a bit of a learning curve with this technique.

I tried these buffalo plaid cookies first and found that the black icing ran beneath the stencil,
making a few of them kind of messy looking.

When I moved on to the snowflake, I made my blue icing much thicker and 

had a little more success.
The stenciled cookies are the ones with the letters.
The rest are another technique.

Not one to quit before achieving success...
I baked another batch last evening and tried again.