Every morning, the sun rises and we head out to greet our critters.
Every morning, hearing the garage door opening, the donkeys loudly bray for their breakfast.
As we drive the gator down the lane towards the barn, we are greeted at the treat box by our pig, Ginger, and her sheepish friend, Faith.
We stop the gator and Jack gives these two morning beggars a graham cracker treat. I walk on to the barn, picking up chestnuts that have dropped to the ground overnight. They are one of Ginger's most favorite treats.
As I reach the dry lot, Moonbeam greets me with a nicker - telling me he's ready to got out to pasture for breakfast.
I open a stall gate and enter the dry lot, heading to open the gate to the front pasture so that all of the equines can go out to graze. Like clockwork, Ginger races up from her yard to the pasture gate.
Looking for her breakfast, she follows me to the barn,
where she not-so-patiently waits for me to get her breakfast bowl ready.
As I am adding all of the extra treats to her chow, she's banging against the stall door - a not-so-gentle reminder to me to hurry, please!
I take her bowl into the dry lot and she leads me back out to the pasture...
knowing that this is where I place her bowl each and every morning.
The rest of the morning barn time is spent filling water troughs, cleaning up manure, feeding cats, and cleaning and feeding ducks and chickens. Morning chores are like clockwork - the same each and every morning. The predictability of our animals' behavior is something that brings me peace. It's a blessing to be able to start each day knowing that all is well with our critters. Their predictable behavior tells us that everyone is healthy and happy and staying out of trouble.
When these normal behaviors are absent, it's usually because something is amiss. For example, the other morning, the garage door opened and the donkeys did not bray. Hmmm... most unusual. As I reached the barn, I knew exactly why they had been silent.
The donkeys were on the wrong side of the fence. (Someone (me) had forgotten to lock the gate to their dry lot the previous night.). The funny thing about these girls is the fact that even though they escape, they don't really like to be where they're not supposed to be.
As soon as they saw me approaching, they turned and ran around to the back of the barn and back into their yard.... two very good, naughty girls!
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