Even your littlest ones will enjoy hands-on learning from farmyard friends and our closest companions at Crooked Creek Estate!
Last week we visited a special place in Shenandoah County’s town of Strasburg. This fun, local outdoor kids attraction is called Crooked Creek Estate. They keep all kinds of animals (pigs🐖, sheep🐑, goats🐐, ponies🐎, ducks🦆, chickens🐓, and turkeys🦃) that my Wild Child adored getting to play with . . . especially these 3 week old puppies🐕!
The estate is owned by a family with four children and many animals who their keeper, Emiley, often rescues and raises on their 8 acres.
According to a 2023 article from The Northern Virginia Daily, she started acquiring animals in 2020 and it quickly became an “addiction.” In fact, when we were there, she was actually talking about upgrading to even more land so they could accommodate more animals, including cows!
Anyway, back to those precious puppies. They need their mamas’ milk for several more weeks, then these pups are getting adopted! They were so small they had only opened their eyes a week earlier and kept falling asleep in our arms. We watched as the mama dog, Maggie, played hard to get and her little ones whined & writhed for her milk.
She certainly was not making it easy for these two to get ahold of her nipples for a quick drink. The puppies whined the whole time she was near, and it wasn’t long before she left to go adventuring.
Can we really blame her for being tired taking care of a litter of TEN though?! Two under Two didn’t seem so bad that day 😅 And it was really nice for our 2 year old son, Zeke, to see how other animals drink their mommy’s milk, just like him and his baby sister!
This was actually our second time back to Crooked Creek. We were excited to return (even despite the storm that was brewing!) after an earlier visit in the Spring with our local playgroup. That was an awesome experience too, because not only were we able to witness a sow nursing her piglets . . . we were also able to hold them AND bottle feed the newborn goats! 🥹
We absolutely love hands-on learning about the wonders of mammals in the animal kingdom, and Crooked Creek is a fantastic and affordable place to do just that! It’s definitely worth a visit this year if you haven’t been already.
By the way, the lovely folks at Crooked Creek Estate will travel. Hopefully we can have some of these cuddly creatures out at an upcoming Wild Child event! In the meantime, be sure to follow them on Facebook to find out when their next Open House will be: https://www.facebook.com/BoggsCrookedCreek