Lighthouse Farm Sanctuary

This post is being written by the husband.

My sister and I took sunshine to a farm today. But not to play.

We went to Lighthouse Farm Sanctuary

It's a farm that takes in abused, abandoned, etc animals and let's them live out their remaining years in a virtual paradise with people who love them.

What we ended up doing was taking pitchforks and scraping out all the old hay out of a barn.

I can't tell you how dirty this was. You had some dry hay on top, but underneath was what they called "The Carpet."

They change the hay every two weeks, and the last two weeks, the horses and goats have pretty much just been inside.

It's probably worse then what you're imagining right now.

But we pitchforked it all out, they took it away via a tractor and spread it in a field as fertilizer to grow more hay.

Then we took fresh hay and spread it all over. This is where Sunshine loved to help. She got to knock the bales over and kick it around to spread it out.

They had a bunch of animals. 4 horses, a bull, a cow, 3 pigs (one was SUPER friendly) 3 donkeys, 1 mule, some llamas, a ton of goats, a ton of sheep, miniature goats, chickens, roosters, geese, a peacock, doves, and more misc. animals here and there.

It was fantastic.

After working for 3 hours we took a bag of apples and a bag of carrots and set out to give the animals some treats.

This was the favorite time for us, and for the animals as well.

The goats where trying to climb up into our arms in order to get at the carrots. They were so happy.

The pigs loved it, the donkeys loved it....

and oh yes.. the one horse that we fed loved it.

He loved it so much, that as we were leaving down this sort of fenced in 'alley,' he actually walked faster then us, got in front of us, and turned sideways.

Blocking our escape.

We got him turned around, I got sunshine out of there while my sister kept him distracted.

Then we darted out and shut the gate before he could get out.

He was just too happy and loved the food and attention too much.

Next time we'll bring more food.

The only bad thing was that it was really cold (it was supposed to snow, and we had hail at one point).

Sunshine didn't have gloves, so her hands got cold real quick. That was my fault, I didn't think about it.

So we wrapped her up in my sisters vest and coat as you can see in the pictures.

Sunshine also decided to collect some hay, so we stuck it in the coat she was wearing.

This place is great, and they're doing a wonderful thing.

If you want to help out, go to their website and look up the next volunteers day (May 3rd) and show up.

oh, and BRING BOOTS!!!

I can't stress this enough.