ANIMALS & CHILDREN - THE PERFECT PHOTO PAIRING

 


My son with a burro at a children’s petting zoo in 1972.

He had fun teasing them.

Too bad this cute story wasn’t published until last year.  It would have been the perfect story to read to my son after our adventurous trip to the petting zoo.

Still at the petting zoo, he tried to feed the baby piglets.

And this young seal (I think?) had him pretty excited.  That’s my younger sister holding him.

One of my younger sisters seated on a pony when she was around 2 1/2 or 3 years old.  The pony belonged to a photographer who was roaming the neighborhood offering to take pictures of children sitting on it.

My eldest daughter riding with a friend on Santa Catalina Island in 1995.  All three of our children had horseback riding lessons when they were younger.

Pets in our household were limited to goldfish, tiny turtles, a hamster, a white rat, dogs, cats, & birds.  Our son grew up with and was best buddies with my husband’s beautiful Irish Setter, Schoen, for 6 years before she passed away.  In this picture Shoen gets a taste of birthday cake.

After Shoen passed we had Ace, a cute little German shorthair black lab puppy.  But Ace, when he had grown, had a habit of slipping out of his collar and scampering off to romp around with other dogs in the middle of the night getting into trouble, so we finally had to give him away through the humane society to a rancher where we hoped he could romp to his heart’s content.  After that we had cats beginning accidentally one evening when we were out for a stroll and one followed us home and refused to leave.  That was Tigger.

Tigger resting comfortably on our son’s back in 1984.

Tigger was followed by Emily, seen here as a kitten, with our youngest daughter.

And then came Molly snuggling up here with ‘the girls’.  Molly was small, never growing to what I’d consider a full-sized mature cat, but she was a sweetheart with spirit & gumption and lived to be 20 years old only showing her elderly age during her last year.

Now here’s a study of two different reactions to a mother duck and her ducklings waddling up toward two of my granddaughters.  The ducks aren’t visible in this picture but they’re headed straight toward the eldest of the two girls sitting here with a friend.  She’s looking rather wary and a little unsettled about those ducks coming toward her and soon after this picture was taken she got up and backed away.

Her younger sister, on the other hand, had to be restrained from barreling after the birds with unbridled enthusiasm! J 

Speaking of birds, I was 13 when I had my first parakeet but though I have pictures of her alone, I have none of me with her back then.  In fact, I have pictures of most of the 9 parakeets & budgies I’ve had over my lifetime so far, but don't have any with my children pictured with them, yet they loved playing with and talking to them.  Oh well.

:-> 

La Nightingail

Comments

  1. Barbara RogersAugust 8, 2025 at 6:03 AM

    Pets definitely give an enrichment to a family, and are companions of one sort or another. Farm animals are a bit different, and as I'm an urban gal, my kids only interacted with them at petting zoos.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Coloring Outside the LinesAugust 12, 2025 at 5:54 AM

    Oh what a boring life it would be without our animals! We had cats, dogs, horses and pigs for our children to play with and to show at county fairs. I only had a couple of dogs growing up because we were in the air force and moved quite frequently.

    ReplyDelete

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