Donkey Kong

Our children have been begging us to get a horse.
Skye is horse mad and rides the lodge horses whenever she gets a chance.
Nerve wrackingly enough, at nine years old, and no experience, she often leads the two hour out-rides that the lodge offers as an activity.
I block things out mentally when I hear adults asking her advice on the tightness of their girth, or which horse to ride, or general riding advice.
Firstly, she only knows vaguely how to keep her balance, and it only seems like yesterday that she was learning to tie her shoe laces.
And secondly, and more importantly, it doesn’t matter.
Not only do the horses speak Xhosa, they don’t even listen to that. Ever.
Having determined that her old man wasn’t going to come good on a horse, she started negotiations to buy a donkey out of her own savings.
I think she has her mothers sharp sense of business.
She has negotiated the use of two donkeys “until she gets one of her own” – which will now be never.
The donkeys are not stupid.
We do not need to keep them tied up or fenced in.
They figured out pretty quickly that our house was the only one in the district where they would get anything to eat that wasn’t grass.
When I asked Skye how she planned to feed the donkeys and enquired if she knew how much this would cost, she told me not to worry, “its free dad, we are just feeding them carrots and apples and things from our fridge”
The other novelty is grooming.
This the donkeys like.
Mila and Skye both spend hours brushing them and scratching their itches.
They don't have grooming brushes so they use our hand help dust pan and brush, and some odd shaped sticks.
The girls get so excited, this morning in the dark, I had a torch light dancing around their room in the dark as they got their gumboots on over their pajamas so that they could go and find their donkeys.
I am happy to report that both Zig-Zag and Criss-Cross are also enjoying the royal treatment, and think nothing of spending half their day on our veranda.
The kids love it and disappear off through the long grass, each on a donkey.
Saddles and riding equipment are frowned upon by the way.
You basically grab a bit of mane and then use your bum, heels, and hands slapping their necks to steer and get some forward motion going.
It is pretty fun to watch them all enjoying themselves so much.
Mila, five, can’t quite reach high enough to jump onto hers, so she runs around with this little, green sand castle building kids bucket, which she inverts, and then uses to step on to get her the little extra height she needs.
Of course, the donkey takes two steps forward as soon as she has everything positioned right.
I don’t know who is having more fun.
I have a rough idea who the more stubborn is.
And it isn’t the donkeys.