More lambs

#27, AKA Amanda, had two girls tonight while we were at Taekwondo and Pilates. Dear returned home, went to water the sheep and found the lambs. Last year 27 rejected one of her lambs, Buddy, and this year she did the same. Dear found Fiona by the waterer, unlicked, and alive. She is a strong little thing. The other girl is hanging close by her mom and 27 is taking great care of her. Dear held 27 while I held a foot and let Fiona nurse. The first few days of milk are very important for lambs, just as they are for humans. They need the first milk, colostrum from their mom. Fiona got a good feeding in and is now asleep in a laundry basket in our house. Dear has to build a pen for 27 and Fiona can not be left to roam the barn alone with no other bottle lambs to snuggle, not the first few nights. Our kind neighbor, Dan is stopping by to lend us some milk, lamb milk, since the stores are closed. We also have 2 Norwegian soldiers comming to stay with us this weekend. We are not sure what they will be thinking about all of this.



This is the best photo I could take of her. It is difficult to take a decent photo of an all black lamb.

Cute and slightly off color

On the farm

My camera did something weird to this photo, but I kind of like it.

I watched a documentary on Messner and I think Rosebud is practicing for Everest.
Here is our new mama for the year, 64. She is a great suffolk (with a little bit of hampshire) mom. She delivered 3 full breach lambs at about midnight on Friday. We stayed with her from 10-3. It was a long night but we wanted to make sure it all went the way it was supposed to. She had one ram lamb and two ewe lambs and they are all hopping around.
The heat lamp is nice and warm, so sometimes the chickens steal the lambs' spot for themselves. This time the lamb was able to sneak under it.

Here one is, hiding under mom.

A few weeks before 64 lambed we vaccinated her for entertoxemia and tetanus. We do that close to lambing so the lambs get the benefits of the vaccine through the ewe's milk. Later we will give them their own dose to strengthen their immunity. We will band their tails tomorrow. We already cut their umbilical cords shorter and iodined them. It is important to disinfect the navel because illness and disease is easily passed through the navel. Many people iodine the navel twice.

We will try a partial castration on the ram at 4 weeks. We usually just band the scrotum and it falls off, but this time we are going to push the testicles up into the lamb's body and band below that, right at the body line. The body heat kills the sperm and sterilizes the ram, but because he still has his testicles, his body still produces male hormones that help with the growth of lean muscle tissue. This kind of banding needs to be done at about 1 month of age.

Waiting

This week 64 is due to lamb then 27 (Amanda) a few days later. We have some barn work to do. I will post pictures as soon as I get them.

Not a Morning Person

I have never been much of a fan of getting up early, but sometimes I must. This morning was a must and by the time I got back home, this is what was there to great me:


I had to get a little closer.

and closer still. I love sun rises. I wish I woke up every morning to see them.

Another purse

I finished working on the 2 owl sweaters and I had enough of the Cascade Eco Wool to make this purse. Since I prefered the look of crochet to knitting in these felted purses, that is what I did here. This will be up on etsy sometime this week.