This is Keebler. With a cute, sleepy elf face. He was a gift from a couple crazy sheep ladies - see, I am not the only one ;-).
Keebler spent his day going to church this morning for a blessing of the animals, getting really good on the bottle, playing with Weaslie and Iris outside in the sunshine and taking some really good naps.
One of my favorite things about my friend Stella is I can call her up and say "Hey, Stella, want to get into something?" and she'll always say "Yes!" and then ask "So, what are we getting into?" Last year we both read Knitting Rules by The Yarn Harlot and Stella decided she wanted to get into knitting a pair of socks. I'm not such a good friend. I told her she was on her own on that one! (Just kidding ;-).
I knew what colors she liked and found a really pretty skein of Claudia Hand Painted yarn at Magpie Yarn in Lexington, Kentucky. She did a couple swatches and adjusted needles and stitch counts to make sure the size was right and she was off and running. Her niece Freida - who's been knitting since she was three - was in town when she was ready to turn her first heel and wrote out the adjusted stitch counts and...
There are no happy sheep at Equinox Farm right now. We had fans running Sunday while the shearer was here. Today we have heaters. I had hoped the weather - WHICH I HAVE NO CONTROL OVER, ELIZABETH!!! - wouldn't turn as cold as it did, but it did.
As the temperature dropped during the day yesterday and the number of shivering sheep grew, I finally decided to hang some heat lamps in their big stall. Just being out of the wind, munching on plenty of hay was not going to cut it. I checked on them a couple times to make sure the barn wasn't getting ready to go up in smoke and here is a bedtime shot. That's Elizabeth standing in the back staring a hole right through us.
They did all venture out this morning for a little while, and in between snow showers I decided to have a little fun with Woolliam.
He's almost as cute as Shaun ;-). (click the link if you don't know "Shorn")
"Ewen, I swear to God if you don't shut up about the stupid sweater I'm going to punch you right in the mouth as soon as she leaves!"
And as the snow starts to fly again, they all head back inside.
I want to first off thank everyone for your kind comments and emails. I started this blog as just a fun way to keep a photo diary of happenings on our farm, mostly for our own enjoyment. We now have over 2000 readers. Wow! And I have had a lot of fun with the blog most of the time, but with that, I feel, comes the responsibility to share the bad as well as all the good.
In many ways it would have been much easier for me to not have ever had the Sunshine story out there because then I wouldn't have had to post the sad ending. And even though we all knew from the beginning the possibility of that ending was great, it might have been much easier to have never shared. However, at the end of the day, when most of the tears have dried - because I don't think I read a single comment without crying anew - I was comforted to hear how many lives she touched. And to know that I was not alone in my sadness.
But, as I said, life must go on - thankfully - and fences need to be built, pastures re-seeded, rocks to be hauled and sheep to be shorn.
I've been shearing our sheep myself for the past few years, but saw an ad for a new shearer in the Sheep Connection magazine this spring and decided to give him a try. Martin Bayer, from New Albany, Indiana, came down yesterday and did a fabulous job shearing our sheep. Even though I enjoy getting to spend some "quality time" with each of my sheep - as I spend 30 minutes shearing each one - with as busy as this spring has been, it was a huge relief to leave the barn last night with 24 bags of wool stacked neatly in the corner and know the job was done.
I had fabulous help - as always - thank you Pat (helped "wrangle" sheep with me), Jane (fleece pick up) and Stella (fleece pick up and record keeping). Several friends and neighbors stopped by and Wyatt barely got away without being shorn himself.
Here was one of our favorite shears. Yes, that would be Boudreaux the Biter. He's really not fat, that's all wool ;-).
Okay, well, maybe it wasn't all wool.
Spooky Tooth looks a little concerned over there, doesn't she? And no super long blog post would be complete without a video of our little buddy Woolliam getting 'a little off the top'.
I lost a very special bottle lamb (they're all special) a few years ago and a good friend wrote me,
"Think of all the people he made happy on his goodwill lamb tour-he brought a lot of joy to everyone he met. I believe God sends some of us extra special animals who don't have a lot of time on this earth and we give them all that extra love they need before they go."
Another very loved lamb has left the goodwill lamb tour.
