1Pen, 2 Pen, Good Sheep, Loose Sheep!
Molly is making incremental progress. She’s not setting the world on fire, but for a dog with no sheep of her own she’s coming along. We’ve been starting each lesson with nice quiet work in the small pen. She’s becoming a pro at exhausting sheep from the small pen to the alley. The alley work would be better if her handler had a better sense of the expectations. However, i’m doing pretty good at staying out of the way. She’s redevloping a strong fetch. Which we learned quite by accident. When moving sheep around in the small pen, a sheep had chewed through the twine that kept the gate closed. 1 sheep escaped, Molly went right out and turned it back in. If it had ended there, it would have been fabulous. I think that once she saw the other 3 sheep on the other side of the field it dawned on her they should come along. We did some good albeit unplanned field work. Some really strong fetches with 3 trial level sheep. Still not so much on the stop, but still wide and fast and covering well. She is also not bombing around as much. So hallelujah. 
After taking a well needed break, we went back to our pen work. This time we were looking for 1 successive excercise. To work through the steps and complete the task, going as slow as needed. So we started back in the small pen and then exhausted to the wide alley. Molly fetched the from the far end and set them back up away from the gate to the next pen and followed me away from the sheep on command without her leash. I then opened the next gate and sent Molly out to fetch the sheep and put them in another square pen. This time I asked Molly to follow me away from the sheep and to the gate. Thus pushing the sheep away from the gate. Then fetching them again into the arena and stopping nicely on command. This is where i chickened out, put her on her leash and we walked together across the field to the gate opened it up and put the sheep away. Chore completed.
T-30 days until we get our own sheep. 
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