Slice of Life Challenge - Day 11 - Nibbles the Goat

  

 

In case this is your first time reading my slices, here is my focus for the challenge: my fifth graders and I are participating in the Slice of Life Challenge this month, and they're writing memoirs.  I thought I'd do the same kind of writing - memory writing - throughout the challenge.  My new writing idea/goal is to write a younger intermediate book (this changed since I realized I didn't have an early chapter reader "voice") based around a character very much like me, so remembering my childhood stories is very important for that project.  I'm going to be writing around photographs and memorabilia.

 

 

     One of the funniest animals we had on our little farm was this goat.  You can read about how we got him from this April 1979 Western Star newspaper clipping.  He looks adorable, but he was ornery!  We named him Nibbles because he ate and chewed on EVERYTHING!  He would get out of his fenced-in area, and we would find him eating from the hedge that ran between our neighbors' house and ours, and it was full of thorns.  It wouldn't bother him a bit.  He'd nibble on your hair, your fingers, your shoelaces - everything!  We entered him in the fair that July, and he won Champion Pet Goat.  We hung his blue ribbon on his stall door.  The next morning, I was sad to see the ribbon had disappeared.  I figured it had fallen off and gotten swept up in the trash or something.  I loved my fair ribbons, so I was really down about it until I spotted a wet, wadded up blue bundle of cloth in the corner of Nibbles' stall.  I started to giggle when I realized what it was.  He had jumped up on the door, snatched that ribbon off, and chewed it up!  Fortunately, he spit it back out so I could still keep it as a keepsake!  Here it is after all these years, still in my treasure box:

 

 

There's the intact ribbon on the left, and the chewed up one on the right.

 

Nibbles like to play on this cart.  He turned it into a teeter-totter.