# Life Lessons - Nursery Rhymes - Mary Had A Little Lamb



## rockdoveranch (May 22, 2011)

3 or 4 times a day I walk out to where the ewes and lambs are to call our bottle baby to me for feeding.  She comes running, baaing all the way.  Then I must walk with her at my side to integrate her back into the herd that is grazing on 13+ mostly heavily wooded acres.  I have discovered that if I am VERY quiet it is easier for her to leave my side and run over to the other babies.  A cough or a sneeze, or even a whisper keeps her at my side.

In my silence I, for some unknown reason, find myself singing _Mary Had A Little Lamb_ in my head.  The lyrics "It* MADE *the children laugh and play" really bothers me as I see it as one of life's early lessons of teaching children not to be responsible for their own behavior.  I am old now, but I spent years raising my children to know that no one MAKES them do anything.  They are responsible for what they think, do and say, where all along, when they were little I read and sang nursery rhymes to them.

I looked up the rhyme and it was written by by Sarah Josepha in 1830 based upon a real incident that happened at a schoolhouse.  

The first four lines were the first words of_ recorded_ speech. They are the words uttered by Thomas Edison into his new invention -- the phonograph.

Over thinking or not, all this will go through my head again at Wimberly's next feeding.


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## country freedom (May 22, 2011)

I've had to explain to everyone that has sung that rhyme to me, even at work    (after they've found out my name is Mary), that ever since I've been very young - the lamb is not white - it's black - as coal.


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## rockdoveranch (May 22, 2011)

country freedom said:
			
		

> I've had to explain to everyone that has sung that rhyme to me, even at work    (after they've found out my name is Mary), that ever since I've been very young - the lamb is not white - it's black - as coal.


That is so funny!

The first time I brought a lamb to the kindergarten classes where my daughter is a kinder teacher in Houston, most the kinder teachers expected and prepared their kiddos for a white lamb with wool.

This year they all knew what the lamb would look like.    BUT, as I walked through the school many thought I had a baby deer.

When I brought white homing pigeons to release for the kinder teachers and kiddos one little one kept calling them chickens!  Gotta love it!


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