Animal Farm

Fall will be here soon. It's my favorite season. In the fall I get all excited about going to new outdoor places and soaking up every possible moment of the beautiful weather, before Winter hits us like a slap in the face...

Yesterday we checked out a local animal farm, where they have all sorts of cool animals to look at and feed. When I paid our admission, we were given three bags of bread and told we could feed any of the animals we wanted, but just to "watch our fingers." Miss got right to feeding some goats.

We had seen two beautiful peacocks walking around free right after we drove onto the property. As we went further, we saw there were lots of animals roaming around out in the open. I noticed one of the peacocks near where we were standing and tried to get a great photo of it. I was not successful. See that goat behind the peacock?

Shortly after I took this photo, that guy and one of his pals accosted us, trying to steal my bread and completely freaking Lass and Miss out. Lass was in her stroller, doing a great job, and Miss had been feeding the smaller caged goats. These two insane goats practically stood on top of the stroller, trying to get at the stack of bread I had pulled out of the bag and the pieces that had fallen on the ground. There was a cat trying to climb into Lass's lap too. Needless to say, I forgot all about the peacock as I was frantically trying to strap on my Ergo while Miss was working on climbing up my leg saying, "Hold me Mommy! Hold me Mommy!" and Lass was screaming bloody murder. One of the women working there came over and started trying to pull the goats away just as I was getting Lass into the Ergo, her favorite spot.

I ended up pushing an empty stroller for the rest of our visit. It was a good spot to hold the bread I guess.

Fortunately, Miss quickly forgot about the goat attack and was right back into feeding them.

This guy kind of made her nervous though.

I thought he was really fun to feed. His tongue was super long and funny.

Miss kept getting freaked out though and dropping her bread each time he'd stick his tongue out to grab it. By the way, if you can't tell from the photos, this guy is a buffalo. I think. They had Bison there too, but they were separate, and I'm pretty sure this guy was a buffalo. There were water buffalo too, which Miss thought was pretty fun, since we recently got the book, "Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What Do You See?" in which there is a water buffalo.

This is the guy who freaked me out a little bit. Just for a second. With each of the animals we fed, I gave them a piece of bread before letting Miss do it, just to make sure it wasn't going to take her little arm off or anything. When I held out a piece of bread to this ostrich, he stretched his neck out and grabbed at it so quickly, he startled me so much I jumped back, let out a screech, and dropped my bread.

After a second try though, he really was pretty friendly. Miss had no trouble feeding him.

She love seeing the ostrich eggs and kept asking if she could go get one and were they going to hatch. I thought it odd that they were just lying all around on the ground like that.

There were a few other odd things about the place. Like the fact that a stretch of our tour led us through this area that was full of trash,

and these. There were a bunch of them just in a pile in the trash area. Notice several of them still have fur on them? One was even a bit more fresh, but I didn't take a photo of that one. Weird.

And many of the animals clearly needed a bit of grooming.

But, Miss didn't even notice all that stuff. I just looked past it, after taking some photos of course, and we really did have a lot of fun.

There were so many different types of animals to see and being able to feed them was great.

Camels.

Horses. Miss loved the horses. And I loved seeing her run right up near them and then stop and stare, up, up, up at these big guys.

Lass enjoyed the horses too.

I was trying to get a photo showing how she was interested in them. What I got instead was a horse nipping my shoulder. I snapped this photo right as the big black and white one was taking a nibble. It didn't hurt, but scared the heck out of me for a second.

I thought this pig was so funny, but was bummed that he didn't want anything to do with us. We had to just drop our piece of bread for him, and he didn't even sniff at it until we had walked on by.

Miss did get to feed some other pigs later though.

I loved this fawn. It ate out of our hands, and made this funny little squeaking sound asking for more.

The bison.

Eyeore.
This guy was a miniature dwarf pony. He was one of my favorites.

Birds.

Turtles.

I think these were porcupines.

There were a lot more animals too. When I asked Miss what her favorite was though, she said, "The cats."

She loved this little bunny too.

And so did Lass.

It was a fun day. I'm glad we have something like this place nearby. I still have to take the girls to the bigger zoo soon though. Miss keeps asking to see giraffes, hippos, and rhinoceroses. So we'll make that trip soon.