Love is in the air

With spring slowly approaching, it's the time of the year when flowers are starting to bloom and for animals, well they reproduce.  It's no exception for our goats and donkeys.  But one observation that I have is that animals and human have something in common....while the male is always, with any chance they get, try to "reproduce" the female most of the time, like to either play hard to get or they just don't feel like it.  I mean, let's be honest, sometimes as women (I'm not talking about newly weds or any other exceptions, but I'm talking about the "seasoned" wife-those of us who have been married for awhile and with a couple of kids) we are either just too tired or we simply are just not in the mood.  Our world doesn't just revolve around "Reproducing", most of the time it's about what are we making for dinner tonight?  Which kid has what homework due tomorrow?  Or sometimes just  simply running a household full of kids is enough to make you very tired and all you want to do is just sleep.  Last thing on your mind is to "reproduce".

Can you feel the love tonight?

Speaking on the topic of love...we just discovered something devastating yesterday.  You know the 3 pigs that we have?  Originally we thought we got 2 sows and a boar so we could butcher one of the sows for meat and keep the other sow and the boar so they can reproduce and we can get some little piglets.  But oddly enough we haven't seen the pigs being too passionately romantic with each other yet...so we were thinking maybe the boar was incompetent or something.  But yesterday we thought we saw a "curly" coming out of one of the sows (and that can't be because sows don't have "curly" only boars have that) and after looking closer at the pigs and doing some research we realized all 3 of our pigs are actually boars.  It's just that two of the pigs we thought were females are just castrated males.  That's why we don't see their...ahem...balls.  And that's why this whole time we thought they were females.  The weird thing with pigs is that both male and female have nipples.  So if you are going by nipples you probably can't tell if a pig is a male or female.  Male pigs have balls unless they are castrated.  But one of the ways you can tell a castrated male from a female is that a male will always have his "curly" sticking out, especially when they are aroused.  So now that I have imparted this useless knowledge with you I'm going to tell you that our new plan right now is to butcher both of the castrated male pigs, keep the non-castrated one and go get another sow so they can actually reproduce and give us some little piglets.

So on a side note the black "sow" escaped again yesterday!  When we were trying to catch her (now we know it's actually a "him") we came up with this bright idea!  We decided to trap and put him in the cattle chute so there's no way for "her" to escape and also so we can separate "her" from the other pigs so we can fatten "her" up then take "her" in to get butcher in a week or two.

Time out corner

That will teach you not to escape again!

Happy president's day...maybe

For most people President's day is a holiday and people usually just relax and not do too much, right?!  That was my plan too...until this morning when we were out feeding the animals the donkeys escaped the front pasture!  Why can't animals just ever stay where they are supposed to and not try to escape?!  Why do they always try to escape not once but twice in a day?!  And trust me, we don't purposely let the animals escape just for fun, nor is it a publicity stunt!

So after the donkeys escaped the first time we lured them back to the front pasture with food and before we had the fence fixed they escaped the second time!  Jenny was actually very cooperative both times.  But Jack man, he was being such a DONKEY!  He was not as cooperative as Jenny was for sure!  So we finally got them back to the front pasture and spent the rest of the day, instead of relaxing, fixing the fence! (I guess partially it was our fault we knew that small section of the fence kind of needed to be fixed but we neglected to fix it right away.  We just didn't think these donkeys would escape...but we were wrong)

While our president's day might not be the most fun, I hope everyone else had a good day!

My plan was to relax today like these pigs but that didn't happen.

This is the hole the donkeys got out of

They might look oh so innocent!  But don't let that fool you they are our escapees of the day!

Putting our tractor and post hole digger to work and get some fences repaired

The newest thing

The suspense is over!  You can stop guessing what we were "gearing up" for!  Ok so this is what we picked up this morning.  Two donkeys!  These two donkeys are actually quite calm and mellow.  They let us pet them and everything.  The people that we bought the donkeys from said they ride on the donkeys quite often.  I can't wait for the kids to come home from school and see or maybe even ride on them!

We got the donkeys for several purposes:

1. To eat down (and to keep it down) the grass in our pastures.

2. That's one of the main reasons for having the donkeys.  To keep the coyotes out.  Believe it or not donkeys look so mellow but they are very territorial and protective of the herd they will actually fight and chase any predators, like coyotes away.  One of our dogs already got kicked in the face and run off the pasture as soon as the donkeys got out of the trailer.

3. This is an added bonus.  For the kids to ride around on.

The girl already came with a name, her name is Jenny.  

Hubby didn't want to bother spending time coming up 

with a name so he's just calling the boy Jack (so original)

Oh wait, there's part 2!  I'll update later today.