Over the weekend, we visited a nearby museum.  It’s actually a working historical farm where you can go and learn about how farms worked in the 1800′s.  On Saturday, they did a whole day about sheep, demonstrating everything from sheering to spinning and even dying wool.  Yeah, it was basically a homeschooler’s dream field trip :)

  We got to see a sheep being led out to a sheering station, “baa-ing” loudly with every step.  Then a man basically made it sit on its bottom and sheered it.  It was crazy to see it just sit there, a full grown sheep, just letting this man shave its coat off.  And the coat was huge; it covered two full sized tables!

The boys each got to take a little handful of wool home.  It’s funny, this picture kind of looks like he’s holding a mustache :)

A few ladies sat with spinning wheels, demonstrating how wool gets washed and then spun into yarn.

At another station, ladies showed how to dye the yarn.  They had several large steaming pots, all with different colors of hot water and bundles of wool soaking.

In one of the fields, a lady whistled commands as her border collie herded a group of sheep.  We heard her talk later about how all dogs can chase, but teaching a dog to herd is about controlling movement.  Pretty amazing how you can teach an animal to follow whistle commands from across a field!

Here’s the big kahuna, posing for a picture!

We got to see some turkeys.  Big birds kind of freak me out a little bit :/

On the way out, we stopped to hang out with this guy, a friendly mule who stood obligingly by the fence as we reached out our hands to pet him.  Maybe it’s because of Winnie the Poo, but donkeys always look so sad to me :(

I thought I’d change the perspective a bit :)

This one’s my favorite!

So, a visit to the farm, a picnic lunch at a nearby park, then we headed home for nap time – it was a good day :)