Building pig pens – not my first choice on a summer’s day!

Today I took the kids up to a farm in the valleys where my friend Jo is going to be homing her pigs when she moves to South Wales. Before she moves she needs to make sure that her porcine friends have a home from home with all the necessary luxuries of shelter and a soft floor so that they agree to the move! The above picture is of a part completed pig ark, at about the point I had to leave and bring the kids home. They were not (as we initially thought) easy things to build, and it took us most of the afternoon to get this far. However, you should bear in mind that the cordless drills (notice the ’s’ – we went through 3) only worked for about half of the ark. After that we (and I use that word loosely – I mainly watched and offered helpful advice and common sense!) had to use screwdrivers to force the screws into the un-pre-drilled wood.

The kids had an amazing time. They got to play in a huge (and really very muddy) field for the whole afternoon, were able to pretend, due to the height of the weeds, that they were in a jungle, and made a couple of friends.

This gorgeous girl was one of the friends they made. her name is Snipe and she is my friend Jo’s dog. She is a labrador, even though she does look more like a golden retriever, and is about a year and a half old. They also made friends with a dog called Fab who you can see standing next to the pig ark in one of the other pictures. They had great fun throwing sticks for the dogs to chase. Jo has already agreed that we can borrow Snipe from time to time to take her for walks. So, we get the best parts of having a dog without the boring bits – much like people who babysit my children and then get to give them back when they’ve had enough and when my children get cross and tired!

Jo (who you can see wading through weeds in one of the pictures) was my best friend in high school, so I’m thrilled that she’s moving back to Cardiff. Hopefully, there will be pictures of piglets before much longer that I can share with you.