Busy Weekend!

Okay, a longish post with many pictures coming here...go grab a cup of coffee and settle in (Beth, you'd better go brew a whole pot with dial-up!)...

Birthday Celebrated!

Friday evening we were joined by the kids' local adopted grandma for dinner and birthday cake. I made eggplant parmasan, and Beeb declared it a hit!

The birthday cake was also a hit. The look on his face when everyone started singing "Happy Birthday" was priceless (but not captured by camera). "Hey, dudes! They're all singing! They're all lookin' at me while they're singing! Crazy!"

The obligatory cake-all-over-the-face shot, though he wasn't as thorough with the cake as he was with the tomato sauce!

And one last gratuitous baby picture. Kitty Daddy found this footlocker at a thrift store and got it cleaned up for stowing some toys. This is where we store Beeb when we aren't using him.

Actually, it is his favorite place in the world to be right now. He carefully empties one side of toys, climbs in, and plays with the remaining toys and/or watches the world go by.

Sheep! Wool! Sheep AND Wool!

We (Bug, Bean, Beeb, and I) spent a good chunk of Saturday exploring the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival. Daddy stayed home to get a little work done and straighten up his office after a fairly crazy week just after been away for a week. We saw a little of everything. In one building was a shearing demonstration (no pictures as Beeb was in the sling and we were all in the bleachers and I couldn't reach the stroller to grab my camera). Talk about crazy hard work! The shearer was very personable and would talk about shearing and answer questions between sheep. He had the standard electric stand clippers as well as a hand cranked clipper stand and had volunteers crank while he sheared a couple of sheep! The cranking looked like hard work, but not nearly as hard as wrestling sheep with legs and one arm while shearing with the other hand. The same building there were some baby sheepies. These guys were about three days old:

And this little sweety-pie was one day old:

I invested a fair amount of effort figuring out what would have to be transferred from my backpack to the stroller basket to stow him away. In the end, I left him behind as Kitty Daddy's last words as we drove away was "Don't bring home any live sheep." While I figured this one was too tiny to count, I didn't think Kitty Daddy would see it the same way. *le sigh* We also looked at bunches of different breeds of sheep. Rams with two horns, four horns, no horns, curved horns, curled horns!

We watched the Herding 101 dog school and the kids loved it!

We watched some of the Crook and Whistle trials, but decided that watching dog school was more fun since the enclosed area was smaller so you had a closer view.

We wandered through just about everything and saw a mish-mash of fleeces, sheep, equipment, information, education.

We also checked out the vendors at the General Store. Ummm, let's just say there *may* have been a small accident involving an ATM card and some vendor merchandise. But, really, it wasn't my fault...it was the wool fumes. Yeah, the wool fumes, that was it. This is mine:

Twelve ounces of natural colored wool on clearance, a bag of hand-dyed silk hankies, a bundle of soy silk/merino roving that, I swear, jumped out of the basket and wrapped itself around me, and a 1.1 oz Shacht Hi-Lo spindle. It really could have been a lot worse. Bug fell head over heels in love with this. He got to practice treadling on a Ladybug at two different vendor stands and really thought we needed one, stat. Instead of that, he got an Ashford student drop spindle (just like my first one) and a small ball of roving and had his first spinning lesson last night. It is very much a cooperative effort at this point, but he is just delighted to be spinning. He can do the spindle spinning or help with the drafting, but even with park and draft, he can't quite coordinate doing all the parts himself. It will come. Bean wanted to spin too, so I finished plying the fiber that was on my Ashford and helped her break into her little ball of roving. All she can managed so far is giving the spindle a spin and can get the spin direction right slightly more than half the time. So in less than a day we went from a one spinner household to a three spinner household. I think I need to lock up my roving stash.

A post with spinning stuff (mine and theirs) will be coming soon!

Sith and Jedi and Clones, Oh My!

Today, I have a quiet afternoon with just the Beebster (who, incidentally, is napping!!). Kitty Daddy, Bug, and Bean have gone downtown to see the Clone Wars at the movie theater. If you don't know that there is a distinct tendency towards Star Wars obsession in the family, you haven't been around very long! While moving we ate lunches at McDonald's so many times that I turn green at the idea, because they had Happy Meal toys in conjunction with the release of the Clone Wars. Beeb is easy-going enough that we probably could have all gone, but I decided that I would rather just wait until the video comes out, rather than have to worry whether Beeb was being cute or charming or seriously annoying to other movie-goers. After a big day yesterday, a quiet afternoon is just the ticket. Catch up on some blogging and blog-reading, do a little straightening and catch up with the laundry. Okay, so no so much quiet, but still.