Our tails of three

We have a theme of three going on at our house this spring that is both amusing and scary. Well, scary to me, not my children. They are quite pleased with our cubes.

Our original trio has been around for several years - our cats. I used to think they were a lot of work. Now they're a piece of cake in comparison to our other threesomes.

Two of our three cats.

Over the winter L. made a decision to take on two new lambs and we agreed with her reasoning behind it. This was in addition to keeping Minnie, L.'s lamb from last year that she will show at the fairs this year as a yearling.

We have three sheep grazing in the yard now.

Minnie, the biggest ewe, with Pearl and Onyx.

Then through a series of happenings that involved helping a 4-H friend, we acquired three piglets last week. Two of the pigs are for L. The third is for G., which was a surprise because up until the day we mentioned helping our friend I had no idea G. wanted to raise her own pig.

L's piglets are named Falco (spotted one named after a Roman mystery book), Yuki (it means 'snow' in Japanese and a character from an anime series) and G.'s piglet's name is Justina (black with white band also named after Roman mystery book). After-the-fact I thought the girls should have named a piglet Hen Wen. This is a reference to Lloyd Alexander's "Book of Three" character Taran, who is an assistant pig-farmer with a pig named Hen Wen (that book was the first in the Prydain series, it's sequel was "The Black Cauldron"). Ah well, a naming opportunity lost...

But wait, I'm not done with the tail counting.

G. has also just completed her 4-H paperwork for showing beef cows at the fair this year. She works at a local beef farm (no cows in our backyard!) and worked it out with the farm on which cows she'd like to show this year. She decided on Serena (a calf born this winter to her old show cow Sparkles). She is also showing the cow she showed last year, Bailey. And because Bailey is due to calf this summer, G's decided to show her calf as well.

You counted correctly. Three.

If that wasn't enough, this is the third year we've had livestock in the backyard (L. started with pigs). We've had chickens much longer but they are not nearly the work - nor the investment risk - of larger livestock animals.

Honest to Pete I never ever planned to have three of everything going on this year. I'm trying to figure out what happened to our former Noah's Ark theme we had going on. I was just getting the hang of that.

But no, it is the Tails of Three this year.

The kids are taking it all in stride and telling me to relax.

Three times' a charm right?