When I was approximately ten years old, we moved from grandma's farm to our own farm. Grandma sold her farm. Daddy did not have much of a choice but to look for his own farm if he wanted to continue being a farmer.
The farm we moved to had many buildings. Daddy was more of a vegetable farmer so we did not have the usual farm animals. By that time, the horses, cow, chickens, and ducks were no longer a part of our life.
All of a sudden, friends and relatives got wind that we had our own farm and we became the farm of left over critters. Someone gave their child a baby duck for Easter. Unfortunately the duck did not stay a baby very long. That is when Donald the duck came to live with us.
The house came with a collie dog and a farm cat. Neither one of them were fixed, so when Spring came we found that we had nine little puppies and multiple kittens.
Homer the bunny also came to live with us. It seemed that we spend most of our days just feeding animals and trying to take care of them.
Finally, my father put his foot down and told the friends and relatives that we were not the humane society and if they had animals that needed tending, we were not the place to bring them to. It was great fun for us kids, though, while it lasted. We would put the duck in our kiddie pool on hot days. Homer the rabbit would be let out of his cage so that he could get some exercise. It was a lot of fun trying to catch him to put him back in the cage. The fat collie/German shepherd puppies always liked to fall out of their dog house at night and yelp up a storm. We would sneak quietly out the door to school so that we didn't wake the puppies and have them follow us to the bus stop. The kittens had to be put in a deep box, because they would get lost in the garage and we wanted to make sure they were all okay when night time came.
We had bags of food everywhere. Mama thought the lady that gave us the dog was really generous when she left us a very large bag of dog food. It was not until the dog had puppies and they all jumped into the dog dish at eating time, that mama found out that big bag of dog food was not going to go very far.
All in all it was a great life on the farm. Every morning brought new opportunities to love and care for the animals we had. We always had some kind of challenge, whether it was looking for a missing puppy or feeding the duck crickets. We loved our critters.
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