Dairy Month Celebration at Sassy Cow

Did you know that June is National Dairy Month?  Sassy Cow Creamery in Columbus hosted a Dairy Month Celebration yesterday, complete with bratwurst, cheese curds, ice cream and cows.  I love Wisconsin!

They had a very small calf that kids could pet, but neither one of my girls wanted anything to do with it.  The calf was laying on the ground looking very sleepy, and I thought Megan at least would be interested in petting it, but she screamed to get away and then said she was scared.  However, the girls loved feeding the baby goat!  We pulled up some dandelion leaves, which the baby goat loved, and Megan just laughed and laughed and laughed.

We ate bratwurst, cheese curds and ice cream, which were all delicious.  They fried the cheese curds in front of us, and boy howdy, fresh fried cheese curds are fantastic.  Ben and I shared a cherry chocolate and a dark chocolate orange ice cream (the orange was especially yummy!) and the girls shared a raspberry lemonade ice cream.

Ben and Amelia played bean bags, isn't the cheese shaped board cute?  Amelia and Megan really like playing beanbags.

Then we took a tour of the creamery, which was so small and cute.  They have a tiny little ice cream freezer that can make 25 quarts of ice cream at a time, and each batch takes about 20 minutes to make.  They primarily pasteurize, separate and fill plain milk, but they also make chocolate milk and string cheese.  Here's their 3400 lb cheese vat: 

Next we waited in line to take a school bus to the farm to see the cows.  We were lucky that they had just started milking when we were there, so we got to peek in at the milking parlor in operation.  There were a lot of cows waiting in the barn to be milked; Amelia liked the black and white cows the best, but this brown cow kept staring at us:

Amelia thought the number on her ear tag indicated how old she is.  :)  When the cows approached the fence, the girls got pretty freaked out.  We explained that cows are friendly, but that didn't help when they saw how big the cows are in person.  Megan didn't even want to look at the cows when she got scared:

These cows approached the fence while we were waiting for the bus back, and Amelia was having fun imitating them.  The cow in front kept shaking her head to scare flies away, and Amelia would shake her head, too:

The girls also got to climb up in a giant tractor.  It was really high off the ground, and they had a great time pretending to drive: