When we visited Cowboy Bert and Mrs. Cowboy Bert, the animals were all vying for my attention.

Remember this little Baby Cakes?

Look at her now:

Here: look at her where you can get a better sense of scale:

Still a bottle baby, along with the white one who is a bit younger and smaller.

There is also a short horse and a couple of tall dogs. Gets a person a bit confused about proportion and perspective. (short horse = pony?)

They wouldn’t pose for me so that I can show you the 2 over/undersized critters together.

New Hampshire Reds are beautiful chickens. This is a hen, not a rooster.

When the sheep all talk, they sound like people imitating sheep. There are bass, tenor, alto and soprano, and they make really funny sounds.

Scooter is my favorite of all 4 cats. Cats are my favorite of all the animals. The kind of farm I grew up on had trees, a dog or two, and always cats. No sheep talking like people, no short horses, and certainly no hens imitating roosters. Makes me feel like a city girl! I’ve often thought that growing up on the kind of farm I did only meant that everything was inconvenient, I got used to wide spaces without buildings, I learned to plan ahead for shopping trips (oh how I hated going to town unless it included a stop at the library), we were not dependent on neighbor kids for fun, we learned to drive young (ever driven a spray rig that has only a clutch and a brake, no accelerator?) and we ate as many oranges, olives, plums and walnuts as we wanted.  Hmmm, maybe there was a pig on that farm who looked a lot like me.

 P.S. I wrote this blog with my sweet kitty Perkins by my side. We weren’t allowed to have animals in the house growing up. Guess I’ve kicked over the traces of my raising in that aspect, but I still eat as many oranges as I want.