Good fences make me broke.

Since Maia has refused nursing and I hate the whole idea of formula (Maia too...the brilliant girl won't hold it down) and because some very wise women I am blessed to know gave me the heads up, we are now bottle feeding her goat milk. It's closer to human milk than cow milk, and very easily digestible. It also costs an arm and a hoof to buy it at Lifesource, the only local grocer that carries it. In fact, it was costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 a day to keep the babe in milk, until last week when we visited Bryarose Farm and the lovely people who run it. They have agreed to sell us extremely fresh milk at about a third of the price we were paying before *and* they are going to sell us some dairy goats in the spring and help us get set up milking. So I was feeling decidedly rural yesterday, pricing stock fencing and barn roofing and such things at the Home Depot, though I don't really know how official we can be, since we are renting.

I've been thinking about the whole ownership thing alot lately. Traditional wisdom says that it is always better to buy. After all, we are 'throwing away' our rent money each month. But on the other hand, we're really happy here, and we aren't likely to be able to afford to buy a place with property any time soon. So no goats, rabbits, chickens, treehouses, big gardens, room to roam...no Adam swaggering in all covered in sweat and sawdust after hours spent cutting wood, no oohing and ahhing over the buck muching windfall apples out the front window. But what we would have would be *ours* in a way this never will be...and buying is the responsible thing to do. So, hapiness versus responsibility. Why does so much in life come down to choosing one or the other of those? Adam doesn't have this struggle. He chose happiness the day we moved in here and hasn't looked back. He gets tired of my constant doubt over our situation. And he's right, we aren't hurting anyone by renting. Our landlord is an absolute gem and the neighboors just couldn't get any better (pausing to wave to Maria, two doors down for the time being).

You know what this is all about? Fencing. I have wanted to fence this place ever since we moved in, but I have always had this "I'm not paying to fence someone else's property" attitude. I swear I have said that exact thing no less than a hundred times over the last two years. I just have a problem paying to make major improvements to a place that isn't mine and likely never will be mine. Adam argues that it's fine to improve something just for the sake of imrpovement. Making the world a better place and all that, not to mention getting what we want in the meantime. I'm still stuck on the mine aspect, which tells you something about our relative maturity levels. The fence is a really loaded issue for me. No fence = probably moving, buying in the near future, much to the satisfaction of our parents and other responsible types in our life. Building a fence = staying, much to our own satisfaction. But, Maia requires milk, milk requires goats, and goats require fences. So fencing it is, though it still doesn't sit quite right with me. I guess you could say it really gets my goat, which might be a good thing.