Our Crazy life

January is supposed to be a bit slow on the farm.

 

But it has been anything but slow. It has been ...

 

C

R

A
Z
Y

!

The "big thing" is that we tried an alternative lambing practice this year ... it's a long story that you can ask John about if you really want to know all the details, but ultimately it let the sheep dictate how things went a bit more. And they dictated lambing in January.

We don't want to lamb in January. I mean, ANY month but January 

P-L-E-A-S-E!

 

We've had a serious of "bad luck" with our baby lambs. 

• First, a mother appeared to have a problem with her teats and her twins died. We tried to save them but were unable to. 
• Another mom had twins. One appeared from the onset to have a bit of brain damage. It just wasn't acting right. We intervened quickly but we could not save it. The Kotynskis had taken her home, but she died quickly.
  
• One of our veteran and favorite sheep, Tamarind, delivered a healthy baby. Then she had a prolapsed uterus. We attempted to save her to no avail. I got a video of what life looked like as we held the baby lamb, tried to save the Mama, and did piano lessons all at the same time. The Kotynski family decided to take that little girl home temporarily and bottle feed her.
• Next, we had a mother completely abandon her baby. This doesn't happen often, but it did. My friend Erin Law was over when it happened, and she took this little boy home. Here is a video of her little doggie bonding with the lamb.  
• Shortly after that we had a mother have TRIPLETS. This is always tricky as it can be hard for a Mama to feed triplets. Many farmers automatically pull one when a sheep has triplets. We don't, but this Mama seemed to be ignoring one of the three a bit so we brought him in. Our friends Blair and LoriAnn were visiting when we brought him in, so we got some pics of them together:
  

• He has gone to our friend Cali's house for right now. Here is a picture of Cali getting ready to take her little lamb for a walk:

• And then, just yesterday, another situation emerged. This time it was temperature based. Freezing temperatures. Frigid. And a Mama dropped twins. One just wasn't getting cleaned off well. The sheep got very cold. We tried a few intervention techniques, but it didn't appear the Mama was doing a great job or the lamb was feeding well so we decided to pull the baby. I got a video of Ritter with the lamb here. The twin survived the night out in the field -- we weren't even sure if that would happen, but it did. This second lamb spent the night with me, and is now with the Kotynski family. Here are some pictures of their two lambs:
  

 

So now, we have four sheep spread all over Greene County. The plan is to let the temps. get a little warmer, get them all back together, and then reintegrate them into our flock. It will give us some very friendly lambs which could be lots of fun! The two males will have to be processed, but the girls could stay with our herd. We normally don't keep girls who are bottle lambs as to prevent passing along "bad mothering genes." But our females were an orphan and this new gal who we pulled due to cold weather so we aren't sure we will process them. 

And of course, while we are dealing with craziness with SHEEP we also have a house full of DOGS. The cold temps meant I had to bring them inside. Here's a video of the dog and life INSANITY!