Happy Spring to Ewe!

Nothing says springtime quite like baby animals. Earlier this week, we had a chance to visit my grandparent’s neighbors, Marilyn & Terry, who live on an adorable little farmette in the town of Merton. My kids love coming here. Have I mentioned before we are big animal lovers? I do believe my kids would choose to live here and do chores for free if it meant they could see farm animals every day. It’s definitely a big dream of ours to have a little farmette of our own someday – farming runs in both sides of our family – but for now, these frequent visits will have to do. Owning a farm is a lot of hard work and dedication to proper care of animals, maintenance of buildings and equipment is not something to be taken lightly. When our kids are older, we will definitely be in more of an appropriate season to sustain such an undertaking.

Even though we like to visit Marilyn and Terry often, especially since they are right next door to our grandma & grandpa, our specific purpose for our visit this week was to see the newest members of the farm – 4 baby lambs that were born last week, 2 sets of twins! Marilyn had told the kids that they could name the babies once they were born, and so of course, they were eager to see the lambs and choose suitable names.

Of the two sets of twins, one pair were boys, all black wool. My kids chose “Jackson” and “Bob” as names for these two cuties. My son loves the minion character “Bob” from the movie Despicable Me and my daughter thought that “Jackson” was a good name for a country sheep.

Then the other set of lambs were white and black mixed wool, one boy and one girl. They named these guys “Mary” and “Cow” –  “Mary” is from “Mary had a Little Lamb” and “Cow” looks exactly like a miniature cow with his little white face and black body. I think he’s my favorite!

These little sweeties were so fun to watch frolic and play with their mommas out in the pasture. They are definitely quick on their feet for 1 week olds!

Sometimes the momma sheep let us know when we were a little too close for comfort – after all, they are still protecting their newborns.

This is the other part of the farm that is fun – visiting with Gwen the “sheep dog.” She is such a sweet dog. She’s pretty hilarious to watch as she eyes up those chickens!

My kids also got an opportunity to do their FAVORITE activity of all on the farm – tend to the chickens. They are quite obsessed with these feathered friends and like to feed them dried bread crumbs and grass.

They also had fun searching for eggs in the hen-coop and each found one to take home with them!

It’s good they are getting all this practice because after months of contemplating and making sure our town and county ordinances would allow it, we will soon be getting some feathered friends of our own. A small brood of Cinnamon Queens will be joining our family soon as we enter the wonderful world of backyard chickens!

We are looking forward to getting the chicks in a few weeks and “setting up nursery” for them in the garage under a heat lamp until they grow big enough to move into an outdoor coop, hopefully by the start of summer. Don’t worry, I’ll be taking you along for the ride on this adventure!

A big thank you to Marilyn & Terry again for letting us come check out these sweet little lambs this week. It was sure sweet of ewe to let us visit! (Gosh, sorry, I really just could’t resist!)