To set the mood for this blog, I must share this picture that I couldn’t resist taking this morning…

Now that we are all feeling friendly, I will share some of the highlights from our unbelievably educational and fun farm trip today:

We held chickens.  For the past few trips, Annie and Jane have been unsure about how close they wanted to get to the chickens.  Today they both held one!  Their bravery and confidence also inspired our younger girls, Arleigh and Alma to have a turn holding them too.

 

 

The children mixed the grain and fed the chickens.  Owen was able to manage the smaller bucket alone, but it took Ada, Macy and Owen with some help at the back to get the big bucket of corn into the feeding dish.

Next we fed the goats.  Alma was very uncertain about letting the goat eat grain off of her hand.  First we held her hand over our hand, and she allowed them to eat.  Very soon though, she gained confidence and shouted, “I fed the goat all by myself!”  Her expression below says it all!

Kai noticed that one of the goats did not come over to eat.  This young goat was laying over by the fence, which is not typical behavior for a goat when food of any kind is near.  We shared this information with Charlotte and our farm trip took a whole new path.  The kids were able to share in the diagnosis, care and treatment of this goat. We also went out into the field and caught all of the other goats so they all could have a preventative dose of medicine. 

Feeding Luna, the young cow, was the next thing we did.  Luna wasn’t sure what she thought about us.  She can be a bit shy.  However, Ada, since her first farm trip weeks ago has been determined to “hold a cow”.  She talked soothingly to Luna and offered her grain.  Luna quickly learned that the WF group had lots of love and yummy food and she blessed us with lots of her time. 

We took a short walk to finish our trip.  In this short walk, we found a small frog and took turns examining him (his body was sparkly!) and holding him (he was feisty).  I laughed so hard I had tears when the little bitty frog jumped from Owen’s hand onto his shirt.  His expression was priceless!  But, after a moment to recover, you can see below that he was happy to have the frog there.

 

Finally, we did some milk week explorations.  Milkweed is the favorite food of Monarch butterflys and caterpillars.  We looked at the milk drip from the plant and looked at some of the dried milkweed seeds.  We also examined the milk weed beetles.

Have a great afternoon!

Tami