Turning 40: My friends filled my virtual farmyard

I like virtual gifts. For a small sum of money a person who needs a sheep or a chicken or blankets gets what they need and I get a nice card saying what's been given.

As I have just turned 40 and I wanted to throw a party I wanted to avoid ending up with a ton of presents that I don't really need. I have more than enough stuff.

So I decided to ask people coming to the party that if they really, really wanted to, they could help me fill a wall with home-produced art or fill a farmyard with virtual animals and things.

Some people combined both - my niece Joy drew me a sign for my farmyard.

Every farm needs a sign

And people were incredibly generous. Most people turned up with some little envelope, or my inbox pinged with an email the day before, to say that donations had been made and virtual chickens, sheep, goats, bees (lots of bees!) and even donkeys had been 'bought' on my behalf for people who really needed them.

I was able to display all these by clipping up the cards and by the end of the party my virtual farmyard looked like this:

A full farmyard

For people who like knowing this sort of detail, here's the run down of what ended up on the farm.

• A queen bee and four other lots of bees
• At least 4 chickens (2 single chickens and a further gift of chickens plural)
• 2 donkeys
• Ducks (at least 2)
• 4 goats - one of them a nanny goat
• 3 sets of piglets (so a minimum of 6 little piggies)
• 5 sheep
• 3 vegetable gardens
• One lot of drought resistant crops
• 2 clumps of useful worms (good for the soil)
• A pile of poo (useful fertiliser)
• An adopted manatee (to go in the pond with the ducks)

I was also given a $25 microfinance loan to be loaned out to the person of my choice in the developing world. I'm going to sort that out and blog about it later but it sounds like a brilliant idea.

In a future post I'm going to blog about the art wall that got filled. But I wanted to show off my farmyard first. I'm very grateful to all the people who came to the party and who have helped so many people who are living in challenging situations around the world.