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Brace yourselves, readers...tomorrow is Shearing Day!!! The excitement that is building in me is liable to spill onto these pages!
 

The countdown continues...just six more days and those wooly critters will be home with us...although they won't be as wooly as they are now because they will be sheared first! My son said it will be like taking our dog, Black Beary, to the groomer to be shaved...you take a dog in and get a puppy back!

I say "Lamb for Easter" with my tongue firmly in my cheek...to celebrate Easter and springtime and the arrival of my sheep in just 10 more days, I am going to show off pictures of the 10 lambs that joined the flock at Jerry Lee Farm this year! :)

Here are Wanda and her two girls, Spring and Daylight:
 

Next are Shadow with her girl and boy, Windy and March:

On the same day, Nina Negra had 3 little girls - Saga, Sif, and Skadi:
 

Yes, it's confirmed - three weeks from tomorrow we will be watching our sheep get sheared...hopefully helping out a bit...and then bringing them home! In the meantime, what do we have going on? More barn work, of course! But now we're to the less-disgusting/more-fun part...renovations!

My Dear Husband, who can fix, literally, anything, has already repaired one of the gates to the sheep's pasture, so they will be safe and secure. The next chore was to fix the sliding door that separates the hay storage room from their feeding room:
 

Well, folks, it's raining cats and dogs, so the barn isn't being worked on this weekend. But I am so excited by the progress that has been made, so I think it's time for some Before and After Pictures!

Here is the section of the barn that will be used for winter hay storage - when we first went out to begin cleaning, this is what it looked like:
 

The floor was just straw and particle board, and it was storage for lawn tools and wasp nests! But now? It's all cleaned out (no more wasp nests, thank goodness), and it has a nice, solid floor, just waiting for hay!

To give you all a break from barn-cleaning pictures, I thought I would describe how I've been prepping the Icelandic fleece that I bought from Lee. You might recall that one of the fleeces I bought that first day was from a sheep that is owned by a friend of Lee's - and his sheep are fed differently than Lee's are (in terms of the type of feeder used). This became very apparent when Lee showed me the fleece - the amount of VM (vegetable matter) in Lee's fleece vs. that of her friend's was staggering - very little in Lee's, and a ton in her friend's.

So, I think I've mentioned that we're working on the sheep barn...a lot (both working on it a lot AND mentioned it A LOT!). Oh my gosh. So much gunk to remove from that poor barn!!! Back in my February 9th post ("Archaeologist turned Shepherdess turned...Archaeologist?"), I described the "flooring" (a term which I use very loosely) that is being removed so that we can create a healthy space for our sheep.

One thing that I've been the most concerned about for my sheep is their food. I'm not worried about their winter food - I plan to buy clover hay from a local dealer, and I now know, thanks to Lee, that my three sheep will require 1.5 tons of hay for the winter months. What I am concerned about are the plants growing in the pastures that they'll be using.

More work has gotten done on the barn!!  It's kind of funny, though, because as we were working, I remembered my long-ago desire to be an archaeologist...it happened like this:

Never fear...this blog is still about sheep - not mice! But as I lay awake last night, thinking about this next post, it occurred to me that the clean-up/renovating process that we're going through on our sheep barn is a lot like that wonderful book - and if you give a mouse a cookie, it doesn't end there!

After living out here for 12 years and all but ignoring the sheep barn, I knew that cleaning it up and preparing it for our sheep wasn't going to be a picnic. But I admit that I was a bit shocked to see just how much needs to be done on it.