Yesterday we went to the petting farm near our house. Charlie was super excited to see the ponies and immediately said she wanted to ride one. And I thought to myself, this is fantastic, I’ll snap a cool picture for the blog. So they put her on a nice black pony named Becky. Charlie was diggin’ it, holding on to the saddle and looking at the nice pony. Then the pony did a horrible thing. It walked. Slowly. Tears start flowing, Charlie looks around asking where I am, I run in to walk along side her and hold her hand and she cries even more. She’s hysterical at that point, her face was so sad. She says, “out the pony!” So they stopped for her and I took her off. We went straight away to see the less scary goats. I did not get the picture I was hoping for.

We got some goat food in an ice cream cone and Charlie happily fed the goats, one pellet at a time. Which was great for me because while the other kids were feeding them handfuls and spilling everywhere, Charlie was able to stay at that fence a really long time on one cone of pellets. When we ran out of pellets, I told her she could feed the cone to the goat. She seemed excited doing it, but then she said, “don’t yike the goat.” The goat ate half her cone. Either she thought the cone was a cup and not goat food, or she wanted it for herself. Hard to say.

After the lengthy goat feeding, we went to look at the ponies again and the man working there asked her if she’d like to ride again. She said no, so he asked her if she’d like to pet one. She nodded and we went into the riding area and pet the tiniest, nicest pony they had. He was very soft. Charlie pet him for a little while and then wanted to leave. The man was very encouraging and told us not to give up on the ponies. He gave us a free ticket for a future pony ride, which I thought was very nice. It was also nice to have a place like that so close to us (it is also an equestrian center). I remember growing up in San Jose there was a tiny farm right next to our neighborhood, which was weird. But my friends and I used to go there all the time and look at the pigs. I think they had other animals, but for some reason I remember being fascinated by the pigs. So maybe Charlie will grow up having fond memories of extremely hungry (acting) goats and vicious walking ponies.

Petting farm photos are here.

The farm was at the Lakewood Equestrian Center’s Pony Adventures Petting Farm.