Saturday we went to the Sheep Shearing festival at Kelsey Creek Farm, which is a farm about 20 minutes from here. It's in what used to be a real dairy farm and is now a park with trails and a playground. The farm is fun to visit at any time, since it has all kinds of great farm animals that you can go look at, but for Sheep Shearing, it's especially awesome.
This was our first visit to Sheep Shearing, and it was the two girls and me, since Michael was doing tons of chores at the old house. The girls are getting very bored of tons of chores at the old house, since that's something I've been doing with them at least once a week -- sometimes far more -- lately. So we chose something a bit more fun.
We spent most of our time there watching the sheep herding demonstrations. They were done by Border Collies and their owners. It was fascinating for all of us, especially since there was a roped-off, but not fenced-off area for the sheep. Most of the time they stayed inside the ropes, but a couple of times they ventured out into the watching crowd. One time, they came out quite near where we were and stood in front of us, waiting to decide what to do. We had gotten up and I had picked up Naomi, and she said, "I want to pet the sheep." Umm, not great timing. The sheep did eventually go back into the roped-off area and get gathered up appropriately.
Hannah was completely impressed with the herding demonstrations. She also really liked watching a sheep get sheared. (I have to admit, I was impressed by the sheep. The guy shearing it was holding it on its back on the ground, rotating it around, etc, to get the wool off, and it didn't struggle at all. Shoot, I have more trouble washing my kids' hair in the tub than he had with that sheep!) As we were departing the sheep shearing, Hannah disclosed her new life's ambition: "Mom, when I'm grown up, I'm going to marry a farmer so that we can have sheep and sheep herding dogs."