May 19th was one of the best days of my life. No exaggeration. It was a day full of puppies, kittens and piglets, spent with some of my best friends and my sister on her in-laws beautiful farm in Meaford, ON. This post is primarily photos for obvious reasons….
As you may guess, the beautiful photographer is Laura!
The day started out with an amazing lunch at The Bruce Wine Bar in Thornbury, ON. It was delicious. The town is very story-book like and has multiple high end restaurants. A lot of it is also farm-to-table so you are eating fresh local food along with it being gourmet! I highly recommend to anyone who is heading out that way. The restaurant also has live music on certain nights of the week – could it get any better??
We got back to the farm and RuthAnne outfitted us all in official farm wear – baggy old sweater with old skater shoes – reminded me of my high school’s leading fashion trend back in circa 2003. RuthAnne told us that the puppies tend to chew on everything and if we were wearing nice things we would fall into the trap of not caring in the moment because the puppies are so wonderful so we would just let them chew, but then later we would have ruined an expensive pair of shoes/pants/sweater. Puppies can do that to you – thankfully their cuteness makes up for it. But you can see the trap that I’m talking about here....
So there we are walking through the gate to 12 excited puppies all running at us. It was EVERYTHING. We could not hold back our excitement. We were all ready to burst.
There were enough puppies for us to each be playing with 3 at a time. They were crawling all over us, chewing on us, and making the cutest little noises. We basically all wanted to cry of happiness. We didn't - but that would have been quite the scene - 5 girls sitting in a puppy pen all with tears down our faces, trying to figure out what is happening to our emotions.
The puppies were bred with a dad who is a purebred Scottish collie and the mom is a mutt made up of I think German Shepherd, Lab, Collie, and possibly some others breeds. While the mom is a mutt, she is probably the most beautiful dogs I have ever seen! So you can understand how these puppies are very, very high on the cute scale! (if not the highest).
I think one of my favourite photos of the whole day was when Laura was trying to take a photo of one of the puppies, but then it started to pull on her sweater. While she was taking her photo, I managed to take a photo of the overwhelming cuteness. So these are the two photos: the one I took and the one she took at the same moment.
Kittens!
SO THEN we got to see baby kittens. I know right?! There were 7 of them and they were so tiny! 7 constant baby meows the whole time. At this point we were in over our heads. We were concerned that one of us would for sure go home with a baby animal that day.
We were smitten with the kittens.
Piglets!!
I mean really - could this get any better?! Turns out the pigs had piglets days prior so they were FRESH babies. I have to admit, piglets are prettyyyyy cute. They don't grow up to resemble anything close to cute, but I can understand the hype around people wanting pigs because piglets do fall into the category of cute baby animals.
Overall it was the best day of our lives. We were literally exhausted at the end of it all because we had SO much emotion through the entire thing. Too many moments of bursting with excitement and cuteness. How frequently can you say you burst with excitement where it literally feels like your chest might explode! well we had that 100 times that day, so you can imagine how that might tucker you out!
We also had very much convinced ourselves that the country life was destined for each of us and that probably in that moment of bursting with cuteness over the puppies we likely would have agreed to quit our jobs and buy a farm out there. For this reason, It's a good thing that no one asked us this or offered us this as an option that day.
Laura is in love
Alex is in love
Jess is in love
RuthAnne is in love
I'm in love.
To conclude, everyone needs and deserves a baby animal day!! It is the BEST medicine. The day we went was day 4 for me post my most recent chemo. I've found that regardless how shitty I feel, if I can just be distracted, I find that helps A LOT. Distracted doesn't necessarily mean go find a farm and play with puppies, piglets and kittens (I just got very lucky!), but it does mean just having a friend to hang out with, or something to keep me busy. While I was feeling discomfort all over my body from both the chemo and the Neulasta shot, I can honestly say that I hardly felt it all day. I certainly crashed later that night, but it was totally worth it!! We had permanent smiles on our faces all day to the point that our mouths hurt.
I find that if I don't have distraction on my bad days, I tend to stay in bed all day and not do anything. Especially since the chemo brain is strong on those days, I can't even read a book and have very minimal interest or attention span to watch a TV show/movie. My friends and sister have been AMAZING and have offered to come visit me on the bad days, which I am forever thankful for. They make all of this so much more manageable and often even enjoyable as I absolutely love hanging out with all of them.
So there you have it - the baby animal blog post!! I hope you enjoyed the photos! here is a couple more for you in case you didn't have enough yet ;)
CUTENESS OVERLOAD. I rest my case.
Comments