This Little Place Here: Sheep Learnin'

DD2 has been working with her sheep nearly seven days a week since she purchased them about three months ago. In order to ready them for showing at the county fair in early August, they (and she!) had a lot to learn. The sheep needed to not only get used to interacting with humans for something other than food, they also needed to learn how to lead, how to stand in a correct show stance, how to be bathed and clipped and have their feet trimmed.

DD2 had to learn all of this too, just on the opposite end: how to catch and lead a sheep, how to pose them in show stance, how to get them to stand still while in show stance, how to move around them while being assessed by a judge, how to bathe and clip them, how to trim the hooves of her sheep. She also had to learn how to promote them and how to write and send out 'buyer letters', which are letters sent to local businesses and individuals asking them to please attend (and bid on her animals at) the livestock auction at the end of the county fair.

I learned alongside her, or rather, at her side as she first learned all this from her sheep mentors, then taught me how so that I could help her train for the Fair, which is the culmination of this sheep raising project. It has been a really cool experience for me, partially because I have learned new things, but mostly because I have seen my daughter take ownership of something no one else in our family has tried. At this little place here, she is the resident expert on sheep. To say she has really blossomed and matured in the last several months would be a vast understatement.