We sure had a beautiful weekend. It is hard to believe that a week ago we had a foot of snow that caused the area to shut down. I planted sweet peas and am now planning to get potatoes in the ground on Good Friday. Even if the weather is inclement, I hope to get at least one row of potatoes planted. The garlic I planted last fall is coming up; that made me happy to see. Time will tell how big each clove will get.

This is the season of rebirth. We used to raise sheep. Around Easter time, we had 50 or more lambs leaping and bleating out on pasture. Sheep are fussy to rear, especially during lambing. The lambs often were born during storms or when the thermometer would plummet. Many times we had to bring lambs in the house to warm them up.

Sometimes I had to wrestle a mother ewe to the ground and milk her to get colostrum, the first milk that is full of natural antibiotics. Occasionally a lamb didn't know enough to suck from a rubber nipple and I would dribble the colostrum down its throat. I would bleat like the mother to draw out the lamb's nursing instincts. This usually worked and the lamb's sucking instincts would kick in. Once in a while a ewe would ignore her new baby and have no motherly intuition. These lambs became bottle babies. I would buy lamb milk replacer and bottle-feed the lambs.

The first time I had a bottle lamb I thought it was fun having a lamb follow me everywhere. As it got older it became a pest. A bottle lamb really thinks that you are its mother. It is hard to keep a bottle lamb penned up, as it is desperate to be with the one that provides nourishment. One bottle lamb alone is the worst because the other sheep shun it and butt it with their heads.

This bottle lamb would follow the kids when they would get on the bus in the morning, just like the nursery rhyme, "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

I sold this pesky lamb to my neighbors. They had moved to southern Minnesota from Los Angeles. The mother, Sarah, had read books on homesteading and living off the land. She was home schooling her son and daughter and wanted to raise animals. She named the lamb, Dolly, even though Dolly was a male. Sarah kept Dolly in the basement. Sheep are smelly animals and their basement took on the odor of sheep manure. When the weather got better they fenced in part of their yard for Dolly, but he rarely stayed put. Sarah and her children felt sorry for Dolly and would bring him into the basement at night. When Dolly was four months old they gave him back to us as they moved back to Los Angeles. They had decided that living off the land was not for them.

Dolly was a headache and wouldn't stay in the pasture with our other sheep.

He ran all over the yard and his wool became embedded with burrs.

Whenever my children would open the door to come in from outside, Dolly would try to sideswipe them to get into the house, as this is where he had lived before.

He got in the porch one day and became confused and jumped through a window shattering glass everywhere. His wool was so thick he didn't get hurt at all. After this incident we sold Dolly and were not sentimental to see him turned into lamb chops. He was the most confused sheep. He didn't think of himself as a sheep and he had a female name. One thing I learned from Dolly was to never have a sheep as a pet again.

Sheila Donnelly can be reached at 434-2233 or by e-mail at :mailto:newsroom@austindailyherald.com