From Spring Deluge to Winter’s Chill

It’s been raining for what seems like a month, with a couple days this past weekend of sunshine and seventy degree weather.  Four days later, we’re bracing for nights in the teens and 20s, but we are THRILLED to have some sunshine in our lives!

Since January 7th, our ewes have been hard at work having and keeping track of their babies!  We now have about 40 lambs, with fourteen more ewes to go.  Lambing with 38 ewes, instead of the 22 with which we started, and in winter this time, has certainly been more work, but things are going well so far (knock on wood). We’ve also had several firsts… our first set of triplets (now, we’ve had three sets of triplets) and our first assisted deliveries (lambs are supposed to come out like their diving, front legs and head first; we had one that had one leg backward and another that was just a little too hesitant to come out).  We also had our first case of theft when one of our pregnant ewes, hormones raging, tricked us into thinking she’d had a baby, when really she’d stolen a twin.  Unfortunately, she hadn’t developed her udder yet, so we ended up with a bottle baby. We also had one confusing morning, the day after Graham’s birthday, when we opened the barn to find eight lambs and four ewes who just couldn’t tell which lamb belonged where.  They each accepted one, but then another ewe adopted two of the abandoned lambs right before having twins of her own.  She’s kept three of them and all are doing well!

There’s nothing that brings a little ray of sunshine to your life like a gaggle of lambs playing, each bouncing for joy just to be alive, often frolicking themselves to the ground as they forget how to keep their spindly legs below them.  We’re hoping they’ll keep thriving despite the winter weather to come. Now, for pictures…

After dealing with this last night

I was happy to spend some time with this…