I worked this morning but it was super busy and the four hours flew by. I got home to find very happy children and Lucy still ploughing her way through ‘The Naughtiest Girl in School’ :). Davies was thrilled to have gotten to the next level on his Were Rabbit X box game (he’s not played X box for a couple of weeks but picked it back up again this week, mostly to play Monkey ball with Scarlett but as ever when he leaves something alone for a while, when he comes back to it he has somehow improved). I got changed (Lucy ordered me to – she insisted she wanted her friend Nic back rather than library woman :lol:), had something to eat and drink and then we headed off out. Scarlett’s croc-a-likes had arrived so we gave our shoes their first trip into the world together.
We went up to the farm doing lambing – I think I linked to it earlier in the week – and Lucy, R & R came too. It is just the other side of the downs from where we live. At first glimpse it looked like it might be a disappointment as there was only 3 sheds – one with cows and a couple of calves and two with sheep. But we paid our £7 and ploughed on in anyway. Frankly they are coining it in for not a lot but actually we more than got our money’s worth. There were two sheds set up pretty similarly – in larger pens were pregnant ewes and in smaller ones there were individual ewes with the single, twins or triplet lambs she had birthed. There were two large pens in one of the sheds with 5 or 6 lambs each in for you to climb in and pet and play with which all the children loved. There were lambs being born hither and thither with lots of ewes inbetween their first and second lambs being born, plenty wandering round with amniotic sacks hanging out and lots of newborn lambs with their umbilical cords still attached. We’d been there a while before Davies and I managed to be in just the right spot to watch one being born though. It was the first live birth I’ve seen of any creature so I just thought it was magical 🙂 Davies asked lots of questions and learnt (whether he liked it or not) about waters, contractions, labour, birth, transition, placentas and why the birth might smart a bit but the bleeding afterwards is not painful. I found myself telling him in a loud enough voice to make myself shush a bit how the blood is similar to monthly menstrual blood in that you are not bleeding because you are hurting or injured. 😳 He really loved watching it all though and looked at me with eyes shining when the lamb came out with the final push and slithered to the ground to be licked clean by it’s mother.
The children also played on the haybales and generally had a great time. Davies’ favourite animals are sheep (partially due to Shaun the sheep and partially from way back when we went to the South of England show when he was four and he fell in love with one there) so this was his dream afternoon out really. 🙂 Pictures on flickr – I might edit some in this post tomorrow.
We had a quick wander up to the little church next to the farm where the children had a poke around, Lucy and I admired the 11th century wall paintings and Davies wanted to ‘play churches’ before some more people came in so I ushered everyone out incase they wanted to view the church in peace. We dropped Lucy & co home and came home ourselves. Ady pretty much followed us in and was an able assistant in the kitchen as I made quiche for our dinner and the kids tea. The children had a bath to wash the straw out of their hair and then I took Davies up to bed.
As promised I brought my laptop and asked him to dictate his Velveteen Rabbit sequel. That needs some editing but he also dictated a story about a fish and then I got him to dictate a guest blog post for Monster & Teeny, which was an interesting exercise as I literally just typed without any prompting him so it was intriguing to see which bits of the day he pulled out as worthy of note. 🙂
Apprentice watching this evening for real shouting at the TV stuff – love it 🙂 Tomorrow I’m working again in the morning and then doing *something* as yet unplanned with Julie & co in the afternoon. Busy, busy, busy. 🙂
You need a flickr post bar plugin! Saves loads of copying and pasting 🙂
Who would you have fired then? I reckon they’re only keeping the annoying bloke in for the ‘shout at the tv’ factor. I think Sir Alan has Sir BBC behind him pulling his strings!
Comment by Sarah — 05 April 2007 @ 6:15 am
FFS *you* can’t get sentimental about a lamb being born!!!! In a couple of weeks it will be getting a bolt in its head so that you can scoff it for one of your Sunday roasts.
I reckon he should have sacked all three – they were all a shower of piss.
Comment by Chris — 05 April 2007 @ 6:32 am
😆 Chris, clearly I was picturing the lamb with some rosemary and mint even while I was getting teary, but it is the first thing I’ve ever seen born so I did couple that with the need to write a poem about it 😆
I quite liked Trey last week when he was being all maverick under the crap leadership of that woman but this week he annoyed me for being just too gobby. I really want to see him as team leader to see if he can live up to his own hype. I think the ‘family man’ needed to go, he pretty much walked though rather than was fired and Rory was just a twat (no fellow poor person solidarity from me 😉 ). Hope that Trey gets to be team leader next week and either is good or gets fired. No one else has really registered for me yet apart from the woman on Eclipse, who I also don’t like.
Comment by Nic — 05 April 2007 @ 7:09 am
Damn, forgot to watch it. It’s the only programme of the type i can watch!
Nic, we need you to be library woman; Fran would like you to assess her for her Book Lover Brownie badge 😆
Comment by Merry — 05 April 2007 @ 8:16 am