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dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2PM005v
So today we went to the NYS Sheep & Wool Festival, like we did last year– my mom, and the two sisters who live locally. Last year it was just the four of us and we had a blast. This year, though, there’s so much going on we absolutely had to bring Farmkid with us. She’s nearly five, and getting increasingly sensible, so we thought we’d see how it went, because with her dad busy, we were literally the next four levels of her backup caretakers, so. The options were pretty slim, beyond us.
So we crammed into a single car and went, and it was fine. This time we did not discover any abandoned sheep fleeces by the side of the road. (What, you say? Oh, I wrote about it last year. Spoiler alert: I have spun exactly 0 of those fleeces. I have also not felted any. I washed half of one and carded about two rolags, but the people who promised to teach me to spin Never Did, and that’s as far as I got.)
I had much less ability to make demographic observations like I did last year. I devoted a lot of attention to monitoring Small Person. She was good, and was probably more worried about getting lost in the crowd than we were– and for good reason, she’s only like maybe three feet tall, she can’t see for shit in a crowd and it’s gotta be pretty terrifying for her. She kept grabbing my hand and then realizing I wasn’t her Grandma and abandoning me for the desired protector, and then sometimes she’d fuss and worry that we’d lost Middle-Little only to discover that said aunt was standing directly behind her, and so on. I am terrible at finding people in a crowd but at least I’m adult height. Poor Farmkid has 0 chance and knows it.
I wanted to buy myself a beautiful shawl, and there was one just like Farmsister’s, but I decided as I stared at it that, no… It was lovely handwoven fabric, but cotton, and the soft colors were lovely but really… I don’t need a handwoven cotton shawl. I know I couldn’t afford wool; cotton was only $120, but. No… No. I’ll sew myself something.
There have been some jokes made that Farmkid is going to get sheep as a 4-H project. (If you’re not an American from a rural area you might not know what 4-H is but it was an enormous thing in my community growing up, and I think I’m the only one of my sisters who never was involved. All the farm kids were in it up to the eyeballs…) So I asked her if she was going to shop for sheep while we were there, and she nodded emphatically. I said, a little more seriously, that we’d have to do a lot of projects and homework before we could get a sheep, and they’d probably need a barn and fences. Since there’s a barn being built just now, Farmkid knows about barn construction, so this is less abstract than it might be to a different almost-5-year-old. She agreed with this, and asked her mother how old she would have to be before she got sheep, and her mother said there wasn’t a number that would be the answer, it’d be that she had shown she could be responsible, and it honestly became kind of a productive conversation.
Anyway, we petted some sheep, and Farmkid liked that and was very serious about it. We also shopped for yarn and did that sort of stuff, which was great. Then it was time for lunch. It was cold as shit this year, so instead of sitting at a picnic table, we waited until the livestock show arena was empty, and then went up and sat in the seats there, staked ourselves out a little spot, and started to eat our picnic. (It was great, BTW– a stick of pepperoni, a few apples, a croissant apiece, and a bunch of those great cheese curds that Argyle Cheese has as the Troy Farmer’s Market.)
As we were sitting, a lady came in and set up the PA and lo, they started up a sheep show. It wasn’t a proper show, though, like with judges– it was just, like, a sampler show, where they had representative animals from all the sheep breeds that were present at the festival. This was fantastic; it was just a little parade of all the different kinds of sheep. So, for our reference, there were just a great little sampler of sheep. Most of them, the announcer talked up their characteristics as dual-purpose sheep, and had a nice little sidebar where she pointed out that for the preservation of heritage breeds, it was important to eat the animals; not every animal produced will be suitable for breeding, and the way to make those animals cost-effective was to eat them, so.
(The breeds I remember were: Wensleydale, Cotswold (my favorite), Corriedale, Cormo, Finn, Leicester Longwool (notably, my sister has raised precisely one pair of them, before), Gotland, Romney, Jacob, Icelandic, and of course the much-hyped Valais Blacknose, who showed up to the show with little felt top hats affixed to their heads.)
So, that was lovely. It is years, yet, I think, before any small person will be ready for 4-H Sheeping, but it’s fun to consider.
I have a brutal headache from reading to Farmkid in the car and in the evening (she grew unreasonable around dinner time, and the reading was a good tool to leverage decent behavior out of her, which was fine and got us through but then I had to read to her). I need to replace my broken Kindle. I’m reading her The Cloud Roads, and it’s been astonishingly easy to censor the violence and sex to a level she can manage. (I figured that a child so accustomed to death of animals as she is would not be unduly upset by the level of violence in this book, and if i’ve softened the descriptions I haven’t really avoided the truth of it. But there’s precisely one sex scene in this entire series and I managed to elide it into “and now they’re very good friends!” pretty seamlessly. I’m proud of myself.)
Anyway my head hurts so I’m done writing for now, good night y’all, maybe I’ll have more to say tomorrow but probably not.
(Your picture was not posted)
So today we went to the NYS Sheep & Wool Festival, like we did last year– my mom, and the two sisters who live locally. Last year it was just the four of us and we had a blast. This year, though, there’s so much going on we absolutely had to bring Farmkid with us. She’s nearly five, and getting increasingly sensible, so we thought we’d see how it went, because with her dad busy, we were literally the next four levels of her backup caretakers, so. The options were pretty slim, beyond us.
So we crammed into a single car and went, and it was fine. This time we did not discover any abandoned sheep fleeces by the side of the road. (What, you say? Oh, I wrote about it last year. Spoiler alert: I have spun exactly 0 of those fleeces. I have also not felted any. I washed half of one and carded about two rolags, but the people who promised to teach me to spin Never Did, and that’s as far as I got.)
I had much less ability to make demographic observations like I did last year. I devoted a lot of attention to monitoring Small Person. She was good, and was probably more worried about getting lost in the crowd than we were– and for good reason, she’s only like maybe three feet tall, she can’t see for shit in a crowd and it’s gotta be pretty terrifying for her. She kept grabbing my hand and then realizing I wasn’t her Grandma and abandoning me for the desired protector, and then sometimes she’d fuss and worry that we’d lost Middle-Little only to discover that said aunt was standing directly behind her, and so on. I am terrible at finding people in a crowd but at least I’m adult height. Poor Farmkid has 0 chance and knows it.
I wanted to buy myself a beautiful shawl, and there was one just like Farmsister’s, but I decided as I stared at it that, no… It was lovely handwoven fabric, but cotton, and the soft colors were lovely but really… I don’t need a handwoven cotton shawl. I know I couldn’t afford wool; cotton was only $120, but. No… No. I’ll sew myself something.
There have been some jokes made that Farmkid is going to get sheep as a 4-H project. (If you’re not an American from a rural area you might not know what 4-H is but it was an enormous thing in my community growing up, and I think I’m the only one of my sisters who never was involved. All the farm kids were in it up to the eyeballs…) So I asked her if she was going to shop for sheep while we were there, and she nodded emphatically. I said, a little more seriously, that we’d have to do a lot of projects and homework before we could get a sheep, and they’d probably need a barn and fences. Since there’s a barn being built just now, Farmkid knows about barn construction, so this is less abstract than it might be to a different almost-5-year-old. She agreed with this, and asked her mother how old she would have to be before she got sheep, and her mother said there wasn’t a number that would be the answer, it’d be that she had shown she could be responsible, and it honestly became kind of a productive conversation.
Anyway, we petted some sheep, and Farmkid liked that and was very serious about it. We also shopped for yarn and did that sort of stuff, which was great. Then it was time for lunch. It was cold as shit this year, so instead of sitting at a picnic table, we waited until the livestock show arena was empty, and then went up and sat in the seats there, staked ourselves out a little spot, and started to eat our picnic. (It was great, BTW– a stick of pepperoni, a few apples, a croissant apiece, and a bunch of those great cheese curds that Argyle Cheese has as the Troy Farmer’s Market.)
As we were sitting, a lady came in and set up the PA and lo, they started up a sheep show. It wasn’t a proper show, though, like with judges– it was just, like, a sampler show, where they had representative animals from all the sheep breeds that were present at the festival. This was fantastic; it was just a little parade of all the different kinds of sheep. So, for our reference, there were just a great little sampler of sheep. Most of them, the announcer talked up their characteristics as dual-purpose sheep, and had a nice little sidebar where she pointed out that for the preservation of heritage breeds, it was important to eat the animals; not every animal produced will be suitable for breeding, and the way to make those animals cost-effective was to eat them, so.
(The breeds I remember were: Wensleydale, Cotswold (my favorite), Corriedale, Cormo, Finn, Leicester Longwool (notably, my sister has raised precisely one pair of them, before), Gotland, Romney, Jacob, Icelandic, and of course the much-hyped Valais Blacknose, who showed up to the show with little felt top hats affixed to their heads.)
So, that was lovely. It is years, yet, I think, before any small person will be ready for 4-H Sheeping, but it’s fun to consider.
I have a brutal headache from reading to Farmkid in the car and in the evening (she grew unreasonable around dinner time, and the reading was a good tool to leverage decent behavior out of her, which was fine and got us through but then I had to read to her). I need to replace my broken Kindle. I’m reading her The Cloud Roads, and it’s been astonishingly easy to censor the violence and sex to a level she can manage. (I figured that a child so accustomed to death of animals as she is would not be unduly upset by the level of violence in this book, and if i’ve softened the descriptions I haven’t really avoided the truth of it. But there’s precisely one sex scene in this entire series and I managed to elide it into “and now they’re very good friends!” pretty seamlessly. I’m proud of myself.)
Anyway my head hurts so I’m done writing for now, good night y’all, maybe I’ll have more to say tomorrow but probably not.
(Your picture was not posted)
