"So Are You Two Brothers or...?"

Sharing our conversation with the delivery guy yesterday and the three words we say to people every single time they ask this question.

“Are those all of your goats on the hill, too?”

As the man who was delivering a 400 lb refrigerator to our little farm house asked us this question yesterday, after first noticing all of our chickens and pigs and geese and guineas, all I could think of was, “They’re not goats, they’re sheep.”

It’s an honest mistake. Most people who see our farm call them goats because, well, they do kind of look like goats. But they’re not; they are, in fact, very much sheep.

But we did not correct him. PJ simply replied, “Yeah, those are ours, too” and that was that.

Only, it wasn’t just that. The nice delivery man (who actually was very kind, by the way!) then said he heard but didn’t see our kids running around and thought the chickens were making those laughing noises. I reassured him we don’t have demon chickens running around our farm making human noises, and that those were our kids.

After a few minutes of small talk while unloading the fridge, I think he started to put things together (the two of us, the farm, the kids, all of the “ours” and '“we’s” we were throwing around), so finally he asked the inevitable question that comes with being a same-sex couple in certain parts of the world, the question that is unescapable, unavoidable, and the one we’ve heard so many times we can almost smell it coming a mile away:

“So are you two brothers, or…?”

If only we had a dollar for every time we’ve been asked this over the last 14 years. I would donate a huge lump sum to a charity or buy my mom a new car or put it to good use somehow.

Now that I’m thinking about it, he sure did have a lot of questions.

To be honest, most people do when they see us with all our kids and animals and renovations going on, so I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. We received strange looks this morning while buying animal feed at Tractor Supply from the two guys in the car parked in front of us in the parking lot, probably doing the best math they could to figure out what’s going on with the two guys and the three kids. So we’re used to it for the most part, and always have kind of a blasé attitude about it.

We do, however, always make a point to say the same three words every single time someone asks us: