Dress Shopping & A Driver's License
We started the week with an epic shopping adventure with six freshman girls and three moms :) We drove down to Jannie and Grampery’s house and it was such a blast! Maisie organized the whole weekend and loved having her sweet friends at her grandparents’ house.
We got down there by dinner time and kicked it off with a pizza party in the backyard, champagne pops, and a surprise visit from a great family friend and rodeo pal, Mariella Passalacqua (you might recognize that name from our M5 wine collabs!) Maisie couldn’t have been more shocked or happier.
We shopped til we dropped the next day… after two malls and eight hours, everyone found a dress they loved and stocked up on Sephora makeup and had a blast in a ‘big city.’ They all deduced trick-or-treating would be much easier down here in neighborhoods than where we live - ha! Thanks for hosting us, Mom and Dad!
After the drive back from San Francisco, I spent the morning up at our mobile harvest barn. It’s always humbling and somber to be up there for this part of our process. At the same time, we’re very proud of the work that we put in to be able to harvest on the ranch and in the best manner possible for our animals and our customers.
We have a father-son harvest team, Luke and Crawford. They are quite possibly the only people we would trust to do this job right. Luke has been doing it his whole life either on his own ranch or for other facilities. Crawford is learning so much from him while also managing all of the USDA paperwork that is involved.
It hasn’t been easy to get here and be able to harvest on the ranch and butcher with our own team to the best standards possible. The regulatory challenges to build and operate make it hard, which is why more ranchers don’t do this, but we are hopeful that maybe someday that will change.
Read all out our harvest program HERE.
We had a big milestone on the ranch this week too!!! How did our little baby ‘Sansie’ (as she used to call herself) grow up to be such a beautiful, responsible, smart, young lady with her DRIVER’S LICENSE?! She turned 16 a month ago and just finished her drivers training hours with an instructor, so she had her appointment shortly afterwards at the DMV… and she PASSED!
Lots of ranch kids actually don’t pass on the fist go because ranch driving is so different than rules on the road. She got dinged for swinging too wide on her turns because that’s what she’s used to doing when she’s pulling a trailer. But, she passed and is now a licensed driver.
Watching her pull out of the driveway yesterday to go to a volleyball game at the high school felt like such a milestone in parenting. I am so happy for her and proud of her, but I also miss that sweet little baby face!
