Well, my daughter Hannah Belle as you may know used to be quite a troublemaker. In fact, she was certainly the top troublemaker at the farm for quite a while, and was voted Most Likely to Give the Farmer a Stroke with her incorrigible escape artistry. But Hannah Belle turned over a new leaf when her triplets were born in June.
Feeding and cleaning and nudging and coddling them, that's all she did. One, Goatzilla, is such a mama's boy as a result that he practically bursts into tears if he can't see her. If you left the gate open to her stall, she wouldn't leave, that's how bad it was for a while. Personally I thought it was a little smarmy. Luckily the baby, Peanut, was raised on the bottle so he is strong-minded and independent.
Well, one day last week Hannah Belle shook the cobwebs from her head and got the old sparkle back in her eye.
After three months in the milker stall without even so much as an attempted escape, she looked up and said to herself, hey, wait a minute, this wall is only five feet high!
Over she went in a blink and off to ransack the barn looking for grain, leaving cosseted little Zilla bawling in distress.
Then out to the pasture to scarf up the fallen apples. Then on to the porch to investigate a bucket that looked suspiciously capable of containing cob.
And before you know it, she was apprehended and frogmarched to the horse trailer for a punishment timeout, her first in over a year. I heard the angry yelling echoing eerily off the trailer's metal walls - it went on for hours - and my heart swelled with pride.
THAT'S MY GIRL!
