Glad things will slow for a moment.

Well after an event full spring with shows, new animals, new pens and so on I'm glad to be settling into the summer months. We have lots to consider and still want one more boy for our upcoming fall show season. We are very hopeful one of our boys we've been looking at will take off now that he's been split from mom.

We have had a fair show season and ended up with several ribbons at the IAI and the nationals show. If I have it right in my mind, we had one 1st and two seconds at IAI and one 1st, one 2nd and a 5th at nationals. All of which would not have been possible without my daughters hard work and time spent. They really do well with this and enjoy and deserve the occasional success. The best is hopefully yet to come.

Wow are the deals on alpacas just becoming crazy! We have seen great prices and unique plans and financing come up over the past few months. My opinion is that anyone interested should be looking now to get in. Especially if you are in a position to purchase females. I suppose prices could continue to fall but unless there is a total collapse I don't know how they could come down much more. I'm sure some unique financing and additional perks could still be tossed in but IMHO, it's a great time to be adding to or building a herd.

Other than adding 1 more boy we don't have a lot of plans for our farm at the moment. We'd love to add some females but we do not have the buildings to support such a venture and tossing in boarding costs with payments is not in the budget ATM. We have seen some very nice animals too that we'd love to pick up. We might put up another pen, but it would have no building or power so it will be a temporary, nice weather only option for now. It's a nice acre area that has lots of great growth perfect for some hungry boys!

Nationals Time!

Well, this is going to be our farms first nationals and we have high expectations. Considering our latest additions and positioning we are hopeful to have at least a couple placements. For a new farm with a low budget at this big of show, we'll be happy with that.

A huge thanks to my wife who almost did an entire show fleece top to bottom, front to back by herself part of Saturday, to get it ready for this upcoming weekend.

A big thanks to Kevin and Lisa Crick who sheared some of our boys a couple weeks ago. They look great and seem much happier than when they were giant bundles of fleece.

Also, my thanks to 4k who is still helping us learn how to prepare and show our first suri. We are a bit lost on the whats and hows still.

Lastly I wanted to post what a great help the kids have been in keeping the animals areas clean, food and water filled and working with the animals on occassion to prepare them for the upcoming show. There is always more than could be done and more time needed but we all only have so much time in a day.

So, this will be our last post for sure until after nationals. I would like to wish anyone reading this going, best of luck. Wish a little too as we are likely to need it.

Look us up on Thursday helping at fleece check in and possibly doing other things once we've settled our boys in.

So it's decision time!

Well we had a great weekend though it was lots of travel. Now the real work is about to begin. After several hundred miles of travel and looking at about 20 different boys we have decided on one boy but need to finalize 2 others.

I would like to thank all the farms we visited and worked with this past weekend. Every person/farm was very helpful and a great resource that we will use either this time around or I'm sure at some point in the future. My thanks again to Santa Claus Alpacas, Windswept Farms, Raging River Alpaca Farm, Once Upon A Farm Alpacas, Michel Century Farm and R'AlpacaLand LLC.

We have set our goals to purchase our boys with a much more hands on approach. We bought our first boys sight unseen and we are very happy with them as our first purchases but have learned a ton since then.

With that said I'd like to announce the addition of our 4th alpacas, Raging River Jupiter. He is a super ball of fleece already and we are happy to have added him to our farm for showing over the next couple years.

We will be making 2 more purchases this winter to add to our program. we just can't wait to have all our new boys picked out and moved to our home later this spring.

New Years Mush!

Well no matter the weather you have to keep up on heard health as we found out yesterday. We had to walk, dig and clean up around lots of very soft ground as part of our 6 week herd health weekend.

All turned out well though as we managed to get all the boys weight, wormed and a short walk around with the girls. Wow are they good for the girls!

I think I'm going to work with my brother in law on creating a top for on top of my scale though. The one that came with mine is a bit small for our largest boy. The smooth surface is horrible too.

Anyway, all well except the muddy/dirty legs of our alpacas!

The great alpacas search!

Well, for us it's a great search with many rules and things to follow. There are lots of questions to ask when doing this probably for every person at every farm. for us as non-breeders and male only it may be a little simpler but it does not appear to be much.

So our questions we are mulling through include do we venture into any suri alpacas? How much room do we have and how will it limit any future purchases? What are we willing to pay? Should we venture into colors since we have all white now? How do we make sure we have companions and the right group sizes to put the boys in? How much will the additions add to our costs for food and medications? How far are we willing to travel to get our new boys?

Well that seems like enough for us to mull over for now. We are debating the addtion of 2 or 3. We have 1 likely candidate and then 4 others we are reviewing closely. We'll keep you posted as we progress through the process.

My husband rocks!!

If you haven't checked us out, you must go and see what my husband has done. He's made our website and he has done a FABULOUS job! Our address is www.shadysidealpacas.com and it just amazes me the things he can do with a computer.

He has all the pages put in and something on every page, now I realize that this seems like how a website should be, but that is what you pay a company to do, not what you do yourself at home! There are pictures of our girls with our alpacas and our mission statement as well as a farm history even! I love it and I can't wait til we get more visitors so that they can leave us messages to let us know what they think.

Alpacas are truly changing our lives. And only for the better.

It's alive! ...kind of...

We have finally got a domain name for our farm. However, the one we had hoped for is taken. We were able to get www.shadysidealpacas.com however and it's a very fitting name. We both now have email addresses with shadysidealpacas.com on them so we are ready to roll.

The "kind of" is the part that is still needing some work. The domain is ours, but now I have to get the web site up and running. I'm hopefull I'll have something up simple tonight.

Please feel free to stop over there and check it out as we get things going. We have some items we already want to get in a store.

I haven't poked myself yet!

As my husband had mentioned previously, we purchased some materials to begin the felting process when we visited a larger farm during National Alpaca Days. Beverly (the lady who was spinning and felting at that farm) was nice enough to show me how the process works and what to expect...she also told me that I would, indeed, poke myself at least once with that sharp little needle.

I haven't done it yet...yea! And the kitten seems to think I know what I'm doing already.

I must be doing something right, because I've intrigued my 11 year old daughter enough for her to say, "That's cool! I want to learn how to do that!"

Hopefully, I can keep going with my felting without poking myself, but then again, maybe it would just be better to get it out of the way so I can stop thinking about it when I'm working. We'll see...

After this, I'm going to have to try my hand at wet felting.

A quick note on the past weekend!

Hopefully anyone that reads this spent a little time visiting alpaca farms over the past weekend. This is the largest event put on by AOBA that I know of and the best chance people can really have to learn about the alpaca lifestyle.

We did make if over to one larger farm in our area and learned a little about spinning and needle felting. We have been wanting to do some felting and purchased a needle felting kit from someone at the farm doing the demonstrations.

If you did not get out to other farms and are still looking to learn about alpacas do not give up. Most of the farms are more than willing to meet with you and talk with you. There is also a large online community. One of those gathering places is Alpaca Nation where there is lots of information, especially in the forum area. There are many other places to get information though so if you need more information or can't find what you are looking for do a little hunting and you should find what you wanted to know.

Before and after...

Well, looking at an alpaca can be intersting for sure. What I find that is so funny about them is they are usually looking right back at you and I'm almost sure we are both trying to figure the other one out. One thing that most people will notice about an alpaca is the fleece and how "puffy" the animals look. This is the part of the animal that everyone ends up most intersted in for sure. However, when you look at an alpaca even a couple months after it is sheared it looks much bigger than it is. This something only some pictures can help with.

The next 3 pictures are my girls each with thier alpaca on a cold shearing day. Ashley/Alexander, Alli/Odyssey and Haleigh/Coronado then all 3 after shearing.








As you can see, they are much smaller than they first appear. All of our boys were just under 1 year old in these pictures. Like people they will have various hieghts and weights but the normal male will be about 5'6" at the head and weigh about 165-190lbs. Our largest male was about 95lbs.

I hope you enjoy the pictures and are learning something along with us.

What a community...

I wanted to thank all the people in the Alpaca community that have helped us so far in determining many many things. They range from who we bought from, boarded with, shearing and advice on fencing, scales, meds, flies, care, skirting and more.

A big thanks to Windswept Farms Alpacas for a good couple Saturdays where we got our hands on several animals, learned/practiced herd health, got advice and learned a lot about skirting and processing our fleece.

I also want to send my thanks out Willow Ridge for the continued help with supplies and information as we try to get up to speed.