What a difference a few days (and hours) make!

 Last Sabbath afternoon was sunny and beautiful, so I decided to let all but the three Ram-ada Inn sheep out on pasture. It was a bit of a three-ring circus getting the lambs out; Bette is super-protective of Boop, and Broadway and Bette clung tightly to me. Once the gate was shut, I shot a little video which makes it clear who the 'baby mamas' are!

Yep, Bernadette ran off to eat grass without a backward look at Broadway; the cow.

There was nothing to do but lead my little lambs to a fairly dry spot, and sit down to love on them while they gazed at the big, big world:

Three days later, something happened which caused me to catch my breath:

Do you see what's happening??? For the very first time, Bernadette let Broadway nurse on her own! I wasn't sure if it was a one-off, but the next feeding time confirmed it; Bernadette was finally mothering her lamb after 13 days! Wonders never cease.

It took a couple feedings for Broadway to realize that she could access the milk bar without me being there; she had already figured out that the milk source stood quietly (with me holding her halter) if she stayed on the non-surgical side and accessed both teats from there.

Broadway being able to nurse at will freed me up to stretch out older Bling's feedings a bit, giving me the luxury of sleeping through the (albeit short) night for the first time since her birth. That has improved my outlook on life immensely, as did what happened on Wednesday. I let the sheep out on pasture again, and Broadway took off with Bernadette, who talked to her and kept her close (although without the aggressive protectiveness of Bette, who saw the younger lambs as threats to her Amazon of a lamb and tried to smash them). I was hoping Bling would follow, and she seemed briefly tempted to, but then stuck to me like a (unbelievably cute) burr. I had to walk through the pasture very carefully as I attempted to get photos:

"Should I go or should I stay?"

"Nope; definitely staying with 'Mom'"!

I snapped this just before rescuing Bling from Bette's charge!

Miss Broadway Fancy-Pants with her dam and "Uncle Bing"

That's the good news from . . .

Hanging on and letting go

So let's just get the bad news out of the way first, shall we? Sometime in the night just hours before we headed to the airport to fly to Texas for my brother's memorial service, my frail old wether Bittersweet lay down and died. There wasn't enough time to do more than remove him from the Sheep Sheraton before we left.

The other animals all fared well under my dear friend's care. She agreed with my concern that Bernadette was drying up, so she started supplementing Broadway with the bottle after she nursed. Bernadette is still not willingly standing for her lamb to suckle, but she is getting tamer to me, sometimes drawing near for chin rubs while I feed Bling. The lambs are both little dolls:

When Rick finally had time to bury Bittersweet, we decided to put Vienna down and bury them together. "Grandma" has been skin and bones for many months despite supplemental feed morning and evening, and recently had been struggling with her cud; it was time. Rick asked about saving her fleece, but I knew standing for my slow scissor-shearing would have been too hard on her and I just couldn't face shearing her after Rick put her down. To my surprise, he did it for me, a true labor of love.

As for our trip to Texas, it was precious. Dad had declined dramatically in the two and a half weeks since I departed, but though bed-bound, he is still very much present. I took photos of him with his two great-grandchildren, but never thought to have someone take a photo of my sister and me with him, or his three grandchildren with him; that will be a life-long regret. Rick stayed with him during my brother's memorial last Sunday; Brian streamed it to Rick's phone so they could watch it together while I shot it in video segments on Dad's iPhone so he could watch it all again later.

Compare these to my post from March 22....

Last Monday we all left for home; my sister and her son, me and my family, and late in the day, my brother's daughter (above) and her family. That was very hard; we are concerned for Mom's ability to keep everything straight and take proper care of herself and my dad. An in-home aide is coming for a couple hours morning and evening; we think she needs someone to come in for at least 12 hours a day. But what can we do? As with my son, you can't make an adult do anything....

I can only do my best to get things done here at home and away between feeding lambs every three-four hours, which is challenging when it's at least a 45-minute round trip to anywhere. Chores, cooking, cleaning, sleeping, part-time office job, Rick's clinic payroll, getting groceries and feed, medical appointments; I even managed to squeeze in one short ride on Stella and an agility class with Poppy this week. (I think it broke her. 😉)

I also turned out Bette and Boop with some other sheep and took some photos. It may seem like Boop has gotten 'lost in the shuffle,' but she is doing well. She and her dam still live in the barn stall, as Bette is a fiercely protective mother and would probably hurt other sheep, considering nearly everyone else is old, young, (hopefully) pregnant or recovering. She started a battle with her own dam Bree in the pasture but fortunately the green grass called.

Boop's 'plain brown wrapper' covers a top-notch specimen!

Yearling Berlin's coat desperately needed to be switched out for a larger one, so I got shots of her and her lovely fleece (already reserved). Berlin's sire is Spot, so she is the older half-sister to this year's lambs:

As close as I could get to accurate color.

Bridget is not yet showing signs of imminent lambing, so she is still hanging out with Spot in the Ram-ada Inn (with Blaise safely enclosed on her own side, still thin but vastly improved). We are down to eight hens; the two old Olive Eggers passed away in the last seven weeks. Chuckie is the same as ever, often showing up in the Sheep Sheraton for the middle-of-the-night feeding, startling sheep, hoping for attention.

That's it for the menagie at . . .

F Y I, no foolin'

I have an overwhelming backlog of photos and events

to post here to my 'online farm/life journal.'

But.

Current life demands

exacerbated by

a combined absence of over four weeks

plus

a chronic lack of quality sleep

shadowed by

my parents' situation

and

the storm clouds of national and international drama

perhaps unwisely seasoned with

my choices of audiobooks

. . .

render me incapable of posting more than this:

Spring is springing;

three lambs are thriving;

two old sheep are with us no more.

That's it for now from . . .

The lambing season from purgatory continues

I would call this the lambing season from hell but for the three beautiful ewe lambs on the ground. Still, the losses and trauma to get them and keep them surely qualifies as purgatory, if I believed in such a place. (I don't believe in a place called hell, either, but that's a Bible study for another time.)

As I mentioned in my last post, Bernadette was giving me subtle signs (the ones Rick missed on Bette) that she was close to lambing. I installed her in a lambing 'jug' (pen) set up within the Sheep Sheraton, and checked on her periodically throughout Tuesday and Tuesday night. When I went down to do chores and check on her Wednesday morning, her tail was messy, but still no sign of labor. Uh-oh. I grabbed a rubber glove and some lube and discovered . . . ring womb. I couldn't get in more than two or three fingers, nor could I feel any lamb parts. Rick had already left, but he came right home at my call to do an emergency c-section, the first in my flock.

With the way things have been going, I kept my hopes on saving the ewe. When Rick pulled out a stressed but living lamb, my heart jumped. It was hard seeing it wet and cold on the concrete floor of the barn, but Rick had to get the ewe closed up and I had to hold her steady for him, so I could only pray. When I was finally free to pick it up and towel it off some, I could hardly believe my eyes; we had been blessed with yet another ewe lamb, the splashiest one yet!

Rick told me to run up the house and grab a by-now very hungry Bling so we could try to graft her onto a ewe with milk. In the meantime, he milked some colostrum out of Bernadette and tube-fed her lamb to give it a boost. We tried to get Bling onto a teat, but having never nursed, she couldn't figure out what we were doing to her, so she got a bottle. Then into the lambing jug they all went, with me as nurse to watch over all the 'patients.'

Half-sisters Broadway and Bling (yes, newborn Broadway is actually a bit bigger)

Rick had given Bernie a small dose of oxytocin to encourage mothering and milk let-down, with instructions on giving her more if needed. But she started pawing, and then lay down and started PUSHING. Rick called about then and said not to give her more oxytocin (I hadn't); hopefully the ring womb would keep her from pushing out her uterus. After watching her strain awhile, I saw something protruding and called Rick in a panic: "She's pushing her uterus out!" He told me to put my hand against it to keep her from expelling it, but when I did, the mass was HARD. What the ? ? ? "I think it's a LAMB! I thought you said there was only ONE!!!" He told me to pull it out, and I helped Bernadette deliver a very strange, dead fetus, encapsulated in a tight sack, all folded up into the size of a very large sweet potato. Apparently that was in the birth canal, the size and shape of which would not be conducive to dilating her cervix.

The good news is that Bernie doesn't seem to be antagonistic to either lamb; the bad news is that she seems to have no mothering instinct towards either lamb and is definitely against to the idea of either of them nursing off of her. So every three hours Bling gets a bottle and I restrain Bernie so her daughter Broadway (I needed another "flashy" name and her dam is named after stage star Bernadette Peters) can nurse. It's hard because Bling is so clearly bonded to me and wants to follow me out of the pen, but having a sister and learning to be a sheep is essential to her future. And when she's not missing me, she's starting to play lamb games!

I was hoping to leave a less complicated job to my angelic friends who are holding down the fort for us while we are gone, but it is not to be. The other good news is that Bridget looks nowhere close to lambing; please don't let those be 'famous last words' 😳

Sleep-deprived and exhausted at . . .