Good Bye Animals

If you’re familiar with our story you know that our farm animals are either being sold or going into exile as it were. (Not unlike our family which is being exiled from our home in the backwoods to a temporary home in the GTA while our daughter awaits a heart transplant.)

Yesterday was Bella, our milk cow’s turn to leave the farm. Bella is our nice young Jersey cow that just joined our farm last summer. To our great delight she gave birth last fall to twin calves, Betty and Omer. The morning they were born Brandon was doing the chores and he comes to the shop and says “the cow had a calf”. I ran to the barn to check it out and what do you know, the cow had two calves! (Brandon got a hard time for not noticing) I ran to the house as fast as I could with the exiting news and in no time most of the children were running out to the barn to see the twin calves! Bella is staying at my brother Duane’s farm at Foresters Falls until we get back from Toronto. The calves will go to Bancroft, to go to Glenn Burkholder’s place to be put out on pasture for the summer.

Our two pigs left the farm last week but they ended up going straight to the butcher shop and we picked up the pork this week as well. Our laying hens all left last week and most of Patrica’s heritage breed chickens left already the week before. The barn is starting to look empty, however so far all the goats are still here waiting to be taken to Patricia’s cousin before we move.

Patricia went went along for the ride when I took the cow yesterday, after which we had a number of stops and appointments in Cobden and Pembroke. Our tractor was at her brother Reuben’s place ( Snyder’s Equipment) for repairs near Pembroke and Brandon hitched a ride with us in order to drive the tractor home. He managed to make the 110 km drive with the tractor and beat us home!

Our last stop was was Value Village, a store we frequent a lot in the process of keeping our family of seven children in clothes. We often do all sorts of errands when we go on the road so it’s not uncommon to see our truck and a trailer in store parking lots. Thanks Edward O’Brien for letting us use your stock trailer.

I don’t plan to nessesarily do a blog post every week, but hopefully I can send some photos and an update of our time in Toronto next week. Thanks for reading and continue to remember us in your prayers.