(9/11/16) Rewinding to July!

September 11th, 2016

It is time to do some backtracking and let you all know what's happened over the summer months! I hope that wherever you are, you've had a wonderful summer (or winter for our southern hemisphere friends)! Personally, I am SO ready for autumn...but for now, I have to tell you all about the crazy 13 days of July 22nd-August 3rd!

Back when we first got to know Lee and her sheep, we all kind of fell in love with Daisy - a ginormous, goofy, Hampshire/Suffolk cross ewe who loves bread more than her own offspring...I kid you not (we learned this when first visiting Daisy and her lambs this year...what a hoot!)! In all seriousness, she is an amazing mom - she gave Lee 4 beautiful lambs (2 in 2015 and 2 in 2016), and proved herself to be a phenomenal breeding ewe. Well, after we got our Trio, we started talking about Daisy - the kids  absolutely fell in love with her (and yes, so did I!!), so at some point I asked Lee if she would consider letting us have her. Because Lee's focus is her Icelandics, I figured it might be possible - and indeed, it was! Lee was happy to let us buy Daisy from her, so once her March lambs were weaned and off to the kids who adopted them to show in one of the local fairs (the Palouse Empire Fair), we brought Daisy home on July 22nd!

We decided to put Black Velvet in the pasture with Daisy, while keeping Mikey and Panda Bear separate - the idea was that Black Velvet was more mellow than the other two, so would be a good buddy for Daisy...

Well, introducing a new sheep, regardless of the mellow nature of the resident sheep, is going to yield unexpected results, and sure enough, Black Velvet decided to not be mellow and to pick fights with Daisy. It was PAINFUL to watch - first of all, Daisy didn't want to fight back. That sheep is a lover, not a fighter. And when she got smacked by her roommate, she would skip away, making the saddest sounding sheep-noise I've ever heard - imagine a foghorn saying, "Moe!!!" and that's what she sounds like!!

This went on for a few days, but eventually Black Velvet got over her initial unhappiness over Daisy, and they settled into a pretty good relationship. So we tried to put all four together - Disaster with a capital D! Panda Bear and Mikey both attacked Daisy, and Black Velvet intervened and started fighting with her siblings!! This totally shocked me - Black Velvet was fighting against Mikey and Panda Bear, getting in between them and Daisy! What was terrifying, though, was how violent Mikey was toward Daisy - he chased her down and rammed her from behind a couple of times, and the second time, he knocked her to her front knees, causing her to hit her face on the ground. At this point, my husband hollered "MIKEY!" from across the yard, then went running to climb the fence and stop him from hurting her. He helped us get Mikey into time-out in the other pasture - David figured that with Panda Bear being the odd-sheep out (and significantly smaller than the other two), she couldn't cause as much trouble, and hopefully once the three girls got used to each other, they would be a force for Mikey to reckon with.

The very next day, we saw something wonderful - the three girls were suddenly fine with one another! They grazed together, they ate their hay from the feeder together, they lumped in the shade together...it was like nothing awful happened the day before! So I started to think there was hope...Mikey was not pleased with being all by his lonesome, but the hope was that he would settle down and accept that it's either get along with Daisy or live by himself. He could still see the girls through the fence sometimes, but if they were down the hill away from the fence, then he couldn't, and I know that was really upsetting him. So a couple of days later we let him be yard sheep so he could see them better, and he spent much of the day lumping near the fence, keeping an eye on everybody. That night a huge windstorm blew up, so we got Mikey back into his pasture, made sure everything was secure, and went to bed.

The morning of August 3rd, I got up and looked out the dining room window - and I saw 4 sheep in the same pasture.

In total shock, I called to my daughter, who stared out the window and said, "It's a Christmas miracle!" We laughed so hard, but there was this sense of unease - how on EARTH did that sheep manage to get into their pasture? I figured the wind had blown open the gate that separated them, so we went out to check - nope. Gate was still closed. Fences all up. And no way could Mikey have jumped the fences without hurting himself or taking some of the fence with him. So we stood there, looking at each other and at the fence, trying to figure out how he did this, when Black Velvet walked up and started pulling at the gate with her hoof - then we could see that the bottom board of the gate was REALLY loose, causing a big gap…not a big enough gap that I could picture Mikey fitting through it, but apparently, he was a very determined sheep that night!

And that is how the Trio became known as the Fab Four - and how Daisy truly became part of the BFF Flock!

My next blog post will get you all caught up on the current excitement - today we're bringing home Daisy's lamb, Cupcake, to be the 5th sheep of Blaine Fleece and Fiber!