Hold them as much as possible, when putting out food, go in and pet them, if they squirm away your not holding them enough. Sit in their pen as much as you can stand it at this age. When they get older you won't need to do this since they will already be used to you. This is the critical age where they figure out if they are part of your heard or you are just an outsider who feeds them and goes away. This is especially serious when your child want to touch them and they feel the little one is an outsider and they need to 'protect' themselves. The first time they try to even playfully butt you, be very very stern and say NO point with your finger and maybe even touch their nose saying NO. Horns and human children are the worst thing ever. Its too late to disbud them but you need to be careful to train your child as much as these goats. I have all horned goats, my pygmy is the worst to use them on outsiders, dogs, or even a little bush he finds annoying. His horns are his way of communicating. Not with me or hubby but with strangers, family members, outside dogs etc. Please educate yourself on the dangers of horns and buy Carolyn Eddy's Practical Goatpacking book. I know you won't be goatpacking but you can learn so much of how to train your goat, how many words they can learn and the discipline it takes to create a well loved pet. You can train goats to do much more then they will show you lol

The reason this subject is so mysterious is that distilling essential oil is probably one of the most frustrating, fruitless activities a person can pursue. I have been distilling oil in my home for a while now and luckily I am not relying on the oil I make to help me make a living. Yo truly need to actually grow fields/ trees/ huge bushes of the plant you're trying to distill in order to get a reasonable amount of oil. That said, if you are passionate (and/ or obsessed)with essential oils and aromatherapy, it will be totally worth the frustration. I tried for years to be craftly and cheap and to make a still myself, using all the old moonshiner methods. Nothing worked. I was being foiled at very turn! So, I stopped being such a scrooge and I saved up the money and bought me a real essential oil still which has proven to be much better quality than the ones I was making myself. Who knew? So let's say you have a still- either bought or of your own devising-and you have found a source for loads upon loads of plant material to make this oil distilling thing worth your while, there is another problem that you have- your oil doesn't smell like the oil you bought from the store. Why is this? My lavender oil just smells like burnt, wet plant matter! What's the deal? I think part of it is that the oil needs to sit uncovered for a while, just to air it out. That seems to help quite a bit. Also, I was fortunate enough to have a chance to make essential oil of lemon rind in an actual chemistry lab. For those who don't know,citrus zest probably produces the most oil of anything on the planet. It's the most rewarding distillation I've ever had. So int this lab we distilled the zest just like I would have done at home and came away with the same amount of oil. But then we did this extra step where they stuck the oil flask on this weird looking science fiction-y machine that spun the flask around for a couple of minutes very fast. I was told that it would evaporate all the extra water out of the oil, making it pure. WHAT??? I thought it WAS pure after the distillation- that's what distilation is supposed to do, right? Well not quite. So I got my oil back and low and behold, there was about 1/2 as much oil in there as there had been before the spinning. It smelled like lemons. Wow. I wish I had a weirdo-science spinner of my own. I don't have a spinner. So, I think all we simple people can do is, a few times a day for several days, put a lid on the oil, give it a good shake and then leave it opened to the air. This will give the little remaining water a chance to come to the surface and possibly evaporate. ANYWAYS, back to something most people will care about- heartmagic.com/essentialdistiller is where to go to find the still I bought. I have the glass one which is the cheapest ($400)but there are also copper ones and I think they even have a pelican for over a grand. Someday... Thanks for reading!

As a child growing up in a small rural town located on sandy loam soils about 30 miles west of the Mississippi river and just north of Missouri's southeastren boothill country, my mother and I used to pick a few persimmons from a single scrubby looking speciman tree growing wild along the edge of a farmer's field. After the first freeze of the fall, the tree had some persimmons that appeared orange and well formed. The feel of those were hard, and they were not sweet enough to eat. The ones we picked off the tree had taken on a puckered and more dark-skinned appearance. The darker and more puckered the fruit the better the persimmon tasted. From a child's point of view, I could not understand why the fruit we ate could taste so good, when it almost appeared spoiled on the outside, and the tree's pretty fruit that had not puckered enough yet remained too sour to eat. There must have been a male persimmon tree fairly close by, but I never noticed it, due to my experience with encountering such a scrubby formed female tree. Instead, it was only the female tree's amazing fruit which caught all my attention.

I just noted that I wrote I wasnt putting a essential oil recipe in there for cleaning wooden floors, but there is one in there. Note though, that I havent ever used that recipe as I dont have wood floors, so I cant 100% say it wont take the shine off. If you want to try it, just do a test spot in a hidden area. Also, I dont know if I can give people my e-mail address if they want a printable version of this? Or my environmental group on myspace? Can I? Will someone please tell me so that I can put this info down if someone wants me to send them out a printable copy? Oh, and sorry it took me so long to get this up online sylviatexas! Thanks, sammie