Alessandra is reading…

What are your morning rituals? What does the first hour of your day look like?

Mornings around here have changed drastically in the last few months. They generally vary as well, there’s really no morning that goes the same around here.

And this is for either me or both my husband and I, depending if I get up first or we get up around fhe same time. On the mornings he gets up first, only he knows what his mornings are like.

We start off by bringing the indoor dogs out to pee and poop. Sometimes we meet a cat that the dogs chase. Sometimes they smell a wild animal that they bark at and race down the front lawn to see if they can catch anything, much to my chagrin and I yell for them to go to the bathroom. Afterwards, hoping that the neighbors a hundred feet away don’t hear us. Good mornings have nothing of this and the dogs have the easiest time pooping and peeing in a calm state. Good mornings happen about 10% of the time (and that’s me probably being generous to the number of good mornings).

I leave the dogs inside. I go out to let our livestock guardian dog out. She will race down the hill and start barking, making me wonder, again, if our neighbors can hear us and how much they hate us.

I head over to feed the goats, who have probably been yelling for quite a few minutes that they’re hungry. I try to quickly get the hay into the feeder as I race the goats into the pen. The older goats bully the younger girls and I’ll yell at them, while doing my best to soothe Audrey and Little Brown. If I’m up to it and there’s some time, I feel Audrey and Little Brown hay from my hands to bond more with them.

Checking and refilling the goats’ water, I head down to the pigs. As I dump their food in the piles that they love to jump onto, I normally think of the people who told us that they couldn’t enter their meat pigs’ pens after however many months. And how sad it must be to not appreciate the animals who you are raisinf to provide your sustenance.

After the pigs are fed and watered, I close them in and head down further to our newest pen. I open our rabbit hutches and give our new breeding pair extra care and attention as they’re out newest additions and in need of more love and bonding time. Before heading out, I look at the chicken coop excitedly as I can’t wait to leave this pen with fresh eggs in the next couple of weeks.

I head up to the house, where I prep and feed all of our dogs and cats, who all wait patiently and unpatiently (depending on which animal we’re talking about) for their breakfast.

And after a morning of chaotic fun or anxiety (if any livestock has managed to escape), it is finally time to relax and enjoy my own breakfast and read if I can.