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...