Sheep & Wool . . .
This was definitely one of our busier weekends, yesterday the zoo, today was the MD Sheep & Wool Festival The girls weren't totally sure about going (but mommy, if all we're going to do is look at sheep, when can we PLAY?) but seemed to enjoy it once we were there. We spent some time at the sheep barns, wandered through the selling area enough to find a place selling wool roving cheaper than I'd found it online. It was fun too, they had a bunch of different colors in big baskets & you just put whatever you wanted in a bag & they weighed it, so I could get the wide variety of colors I wanted for the felted butterfly we'll be making in a few weeks (for the preschool curriculum we're doing) w/o spending a fortune :) AND I was able to get "real" black wool for the felt ant we'll be making instead of wool dyed black, which I think is what I would have had to settle for if I'd ordered online (unless I'd been willing to order a lb of the "real" black wool, which would have made a really big ant LOL (I got a nice big bag of the multi-colored stuff & it came out to just over 1/2 lb (cost $10 and the price was $18/lb). Then we watched the sheepdog herding (the girls kept thinking we were saying "hurting" which of course confused them greatly, but they were pretty interested by it once we got there. The sheep shearing only semi held their attention, but we were outside and had a big bag of kettle corn to eat while we watched so that kept them content at least LOL. And who knows, they didn't seem to be paying attention but maybe they were, there's been plenty of other times I thought they weren't paying attention & then a few days later they describe what I thought they didn't see in amazing detail LOL. Then we did some more wandering through the sheep barns at the girls' request. At one point during the sheep barn wandering the boy who owned (or at least his family did) the sheep was in the pen with them. He was really nice about helping to get the sheep in his pens right up against the fence so the girls got to pet several different kinds of sheep (the judging here is all/mostly judging the wool types, so there are tons of different kinds of sheep, not just a bunch of meat sheep that all look the same, so that was cool to see & feel the differences). And then another time the owner was there w/ the sheep & gave the girls each a handful of hay to feed the sheep, which of course the girls were thrilled about.
Two days of lots of walking around, a good portion of it w/ a 38 lb kid in a wrap (or today, most of it was just lots of ups & downs in arms because it was hard for the girls to see into alot of the sheep pens w/o being picked up, but they were running around in between) makes for a tired mommy, but that's ok, they had fun & that's what counts & the exercise is good for me, just did extra working of muscles that I don't generally work quite that much (I regularly wore close to 40 lbs when I was wearing the girls together when they were older babies younger toddlers), but that's when I was wearing them on a daily basis so had those muscles built up. Now that I go weeks w/o wearing them, I feel it alot more when I do for any length of time LOL.
Two days of lots of walking around, a good portion of it w/ a 38 lb kid in a wrap (or today, most of it was just lots of ups & downs in arms because it was hard for the girls to see into alot of the sheep pens w/o being picked up, but they were running around in between) makes for a tired mommy, but that's ok, they had fun & that's what counts & the exercise is good for me, just did extra working of muscles that I don't generally work quite that much (I regularly wore close to 40 lbs when I was wearing the girls together when they were older babies younger toddlers), but that's when I was wearing them on a daily basis so had those muscles built up. Now that I go weeks w/o wearing them, I feel it alot more when I do for any length of time LOL.