Sunday, March 26, 2017

Saturday Night LIVE!

We were gone most of Sabbath for church, followed by dinner with friends and family at the pastor's house. When we got home, I turned the impatient girls out on pasture – two of them looking larger than ever. That's the thing about lambing season and watching ewes. You think they are looking big and bagged up . . . and then they get bigger and more bagged up.

Blaise started boinging around the pasture like a wild woman, pausing to head-butt the other girls. She and Sarai came to the gate; Sarai hung out for awhile. That can be significant, so I kept an eye on her through the windows as she went back to grazing. When I happened to see just four ewes,

I looked to see if Sarai was back at the gate. Nope.
 Do you see her anywhere? I didn't, not immediately.
Look closer in the lightened photo below.
 Aha! She had climbed between the boards to get in the shed!
Sarai was communicating loud and clear, so I ran down to the barn calling her name. She climbed out and met me at the gate so I could usher her into the maternity ward. Then I exited stage left for several hours while we did chores and watched Pete's Dragon on Netflix.

When I went down around 11:30 pm, Sarai was in active labor. In order to keep an eye on her progress without disturbing her, I went in the barn where I could watch through an opening in the wall (I had plugged in the heat bulb so I had enough light to see). After 45 minutes of pushing on and off Sarai hadn't produced so much as a bubble, so I headed to the house to wake Rick. He agreed that it was time to do an internal check in case of a malpresentation like last year, and got up to collect equipment and supplies from his vet truck. I grabbed some towels and headed back down – to be greeted by the happy sight and sound of new life! Sarai was vigorously cleaning off a LOUD brown lamb. Judging by its petite size, we suspected Sarai wasn't done, but I was no longer worried and sent Rick back to bed. Sure enough, in due time she pushed out lamb #2, a bigger black lamb with frosting on its face. By this time I had checked lamb #1 and knew I had a girl (YAY!), so figured the bigger lamb was likely a ram. But no, Sarai gave me TWO girls – one of them the black-based ewe I have been wishing for! Hallelujah; how abundantly I've been blessed!


Here is little Miss Loud-Mouth:


And here is Miss Frosting Face:
I have two pairs of official "B" names picked out, but deciding can wait for now. Oh, and no one picked March 26 for a lambing date, but Diane was only one day off when she chose March 27. She picked March 28 for Vienna, so I'm hoping and praying that Diane guessed one day late for her as well!

Then I could relax and enjoy our trip away from . . .

7 comments:

Debbie said...

Congrats! Wonderful photos of the new girls!

janna e said...

Congratulations! I'm so glad all went well for Sarai!

Mama Pea said...

Excellent job by Sarai, but she had good back-up waiting in the wings. Adorable video of Little Miss Loud Mouth! So cute.

FullyFleeced said...

yea! congrats on the beautiful little ewe lambs :)

Theresa said...

Happiness is....;-)

Goatldi said...

Girls yippie! And the correct color too. You my dear are on a roll congratulations!

DianeOart said...

Congrats on the beautiful girls... for a bad guess I wasn't too far off. ;)