More fencing

Our first job, when we moved in here, was going to be to re-do the entrance to the driveway. Up until now it is has been a dilapidated mess of old fence, rusty cattle barriers and a thriving blackberry bush. Obviously priorities soon became evident elsewhere but today the old rusty stuff came down with very excited children and James and I looking pretty happy too. As you can see the right hand paddock is ready for the wire as all the poles are finally in place.

They are here...

So much for calculating the pregnancy carefully - I trundled off happily to our week in Sydney thinking that the babies were due the week after, only to realise the night before we came home that they were in fact due that day. Coco kept her legs crossed and waddled to the gate to greet me and after a week we couldn't believe that she wasn't carrying a watermelon. She kept to her bed for the next 24 hours but still waddled up behind the quad bike to do the pigs morning and night. By Saturday she came out with me to do the chickens and as I came out of the chicken shed I noticed that she was looking at me with eyes like saucers and standing in a very odd way. We hurried her back inside by which time Lizzie was already pretty much out (bum first). The kids, Coco and I were all a bit surprised so Lizzie was lucky that James jumped in and took off the membrane to get her breathing. What followed was a long night - mostly for James as I gave up at 3am and went to bed. Coco was very confused about the whole thing - on the one hand she cleaned them all up very thoroughly and was happy for them to feed, but when they started screaming and moving all over the place she found it very overwhelming.... I empthasied totally. After she went to snap at them a few times we decided that she was the devil and I sat in the whelping box with her when I took over the shift from James at 5am. Thankfully the mothering hormones kicked in pretty well, by the afternoon she had started looking all doe eyed at them and I have had a hard time getting her away from them ever since. They are of course utterly adorable and we have gone with a Royal Family theme so we have; Lizzie, Annie, Fergie, Camilla (my favourite), Beatrice, Charlie (also known as Fat Charlie or possibly Henry the 8th as he is vastly bigger than the others and never stops feeding), Harry, Billy and Eugenie.

Puppies and Ponderings

Contrary to the fact that the only photos I have on the blog of late have been of the ballooning dog, in fact Coco's pregnancy is progressing without much fanfare. She still jumps all the fences (albeit whilst doing her nipple an injury that i can't type about without squirming in discomfort), she runs about madly and was just sighted chasing off a fox with Woody in hot pursuit. She steals every piece of food going and I truly thought she was going mad when the other night I found Emi's shoes, jacket, half a dozen toys and some sticky tape chewed up in the playroom. Nesting behaviour perhaps? In fact James finally admitted that that Woody had got out of his crate and had a party before falling asleep on the couch the night before. In short she is progressing through with a breezy attitude that makes me slightly envious although at 7 weeks now with 2 to go she is starting to snore, lie about and generally look like things are getting a bit uncomfortable.

At night she stretches out beside me belly up and I annoy James by telling him every time I feel one of the puppies kicking about. He is very glad that we are going away to Sydney this week and hoping desperately that Coco will have the puppies whilst we are there as well.

Farm wise; Alan was sent to Protea Farm in disgrace after he won the award for Most Useless Farm Animal on our property (which is really really saying something). He pined away lying at the fence and not showing the slightest interest in our sheep till I gave up and sent him over to give Marley some companionship. He is of course now perfectly happy and enjoying his retirement being spoilt rotten. The pigs are doing their thing, we just added two new gilts to the herd which is now up to 24. Our first lot of smallgoods, kransky, chorizo and ham & bacon were launched last month at the Mudgee Farmers market and were an absolute hit. We are concentrating on expanding the range for the shop...which we signed the lease on yesterday. I am now up to my ears in brochures for chairs/tables/kitchen equipment and trying to get my head around the new e-commerce site which we are having designed so that we can send out 'Mudgee Meat Boxes'.

Today is the last day of school term for Emi and Felix and tomorrow we head off to Sydney for a week with Grandma and Grandpa. I am dipping my toe back into the waters of Animal Behaviour by going to the Equine Behaviour Conference at Sydney Uni. Much last minute reading of books to remind myself of all the things I used to know has been underway. Emi and Felix have been making lists of all the movies that they want to see and are pretty excited about the McDonalds they will inevitably get on the car journey there - lucky they are so easily pleased.

Lastly - we have had a run of good publicity this month and I am attempting to load the latest on to the blog so you can see for yourselves the farm and how the camera adds 10 pounds...