Playtime With Ryan

Things have been pretty quiet around here lately. Maryanne hurt her knee and then her shoulder and the doctor told her to take a vacation. She's bad at vacations and gets kind of crabby. But TODAY was so much fun. Some friends of hers came to ride the horses and since she's not allowed on a horse, she asked if their little boy Ryan wanted to play with me while his mom, dad, and sister went riding. Ryan is four and we had a really good time.





His sister Alex let us get on the horse with her for a picture before they went riding. Alex held me really tight so I wouldn't fall off. Horses are tall. Then we went for a walk around the farm. We stopped by a little palm tree and Ryan asked Maryanne what the red things were on the yellow branch. She told us that they were dates and that they were almost ready to eat. Ryan asked to try one so Maryanne picked one and we tried it. Hmmm.





I don't think they were ready, or maybe little boys and moose are not too crazy about fresh dates. They had a funny taste. Sort of sweet. Hard and crunchy. But also kind of like a green banana.



Ryan didn't want to throw it away, and he wanted the seed inside to plant in his garden so he could have a tree. We thought maybe the dogs might like the date, but they were busy eating a carrot. Funny dogs here. I didn't know that dogs liked carrots.



Maryanne said that the horses like dates so she took it and fed it to a big brown horse called Gamila. Gamila ate it and asked us if we had any more while we were playing by her paddock. Ryan was showing me how to build mountains from the sand.



We built a few mountains but the dogs aren't smart about mountains and they kept stepping on them. We decided to check out the donkey cart. Maryanne says that this is used to carry all sorts of things for the farm and the donkeys pull it. But we had fun just climbing on it. Ryan is really smart and he found a big piece of corn in the wagon. We tried to eat a piece but it was really dry. Not so good. Maryanne said the donkeys would like to eat it.




So we took it over to where the donkeys live and the grey donkey, Margarita, came over and took it from my hand. She really liked it. But her baby Daisy also wanted some and kept trying to get some from her mom.



The donkeys are cute and not as big as horses so I really like them. We see them everywhere and they work so hard pulling their carts and letting people ride them. That's the good thing about being a moose. Nobody rides a moose.

Da Moose Comes To Egypt

You might ask how a moose came to Egypt. Of course you will because I'm probably the only moose in Cairo. Well, my friend Paddi decided to run away from the snow in Alberta, Canada, and she asked me to come along. I like the sun as much as anyone else, so I said yes. We went to the airport where a bunch of people took suitcases from us and sent us to sit in a little room until the airplane was ready. Finally, someone called out on a radio to say that we could get on the plane. Paddi and I found our seat and we started our trip. Flying on airplanes is very boring and I fell asleep.

After a long time, I woke up to find myself in a much warmer place than Alberta. The sun was shining and Paddi told me that I was at a farm. The lady who owns the farm was giving horseback riding lessons in a big ring with a bunch of nice horses. I watched them for a while and then looked around to see who else was there. There were goats, sheep, something that looked like a cow but they were calling it a ga-moose. Do they have moose here? A lot of dogs. It's winter here and people were saying it's cold, but it was much warmer than Canada.

There were some smaller horses with fuzzy hair..they said that they were donkeys...in the paddock with the goats and the funny cow. Donkeys are very friendly but they don't seem to understand that pulling a moose off a fence by the ear isn't nice. But they were just being funny and wanted to play. I told them I could come and play another day.

There was one very small horse that kept coming up to visit me. The people said that her name is Shams which means sunshine. Usually very small horses are with their mothers, but Shams' mom had been sick so the people took care of her and fed her milk from a very big bottle and she follows people everywhere. They asked if I wanted to try riding a very small horse and I said sure. One of the guys there put me on her back to try riding but this riding is pretty tough. It's hard to keep your balance and I was getting pretty tired by this time. I am just a young moose after all. I wasn't so unhappy when Paddi said that it was time for bed. I fussed a bit just to make sure that no one thought I'd be happy to go to bed and miss all the rest of the fun, but really that pillow felt so nice. There would be plenty of time for more exploring the next day.