Category: Around the Homestead

I haven’t blogged for awhile.  We’ve lost some baby lambs at Dad’s and are kind of bumming.  We were in the teens and twenties, so it was not a good weekend for the little ones.  For anyone with baby lambs or even goats for that matter.  They have little disposable, clear plastic, raincoats for babies.  I honestly think they are the reason we didn’t lose more babies than we did (raincoats and good mamas).  The mamas would lay on the north side of their babies to block the wind.  Wow!  It’s just amazing to watch animals interact with themselves or their babies.  How people can convince themselves they are just dumb creatures with no feelings or thoughts I will never know. 

We were so excited Saturday with the arrival of our first baby lamb.  A boy, Dorper/Texel cross, and the cutest thing I have ever seen in my life.  We weighed him last night (at two days old) he weighed a whopping14 pounds.  Then we had another baby last night (Texel boy) who weighed 10 lbs at birth.  However, he had a baby sister who didn’t make it.  Mama is having a slow recovery, so we will worry ourselves sick over her until she is back to normal.  She is our little buddy, so my dh and I are having a hard time with her being down.

I finally have pictures!

Our little (first born) Texel/Dorper baby boy.

Our little (second born) Texel baby boy.

I just love them!  When everything else fails I just look at them (or the 10 bottle babies at my parent’s house), think about how much they rely on us to care for them, and it give me the strength to go another day.

Dad goes to the doctor tomorrow to see if he can start putting weight on his ankle.  Just him being out in the lots for short spans of time calling the shots would be a blessing.

Have a great week! 

Mom is off today so she can try to keep up with the babies dropping at home.  We are guessing 12-14 babies last night.  Two more ended up in the house to bottle feed.  One fell into some sort of bucket for a water line out in the lot.  They are buried in the ground and supposed to have lids on them (it’s a new house and I’m not sure everything is completely finished out in the lots), but between the sheep and the wind it had lost its lid and a baby fell into it.  Dh found the baby in the bucket sitting in stagnant water.  Yuck!  We tried to get one of the new mamas to claim it, but we have no idea how long the baby had been there and no one would take him on.  So, into the house he went.  Then, there was a set of quadruplets (or so we thought) we left for last to move to avoid confusion.  By the time we went to move them the mama had kicked one of the babies to the curb.  It was the runt and didn’t look like the others, so it may not have even been her’s to begin with, but I felt bad for the little thing.  We put her in the pen with the mamas and babies again hoping one of them would latch onto her.  No luck!  I warned the little lamb when we got to the front door of the house if we got a dirty look when we walked in not to take it personal.  She’s a crier too, so I bet that made last night pleasant for mom, dad, and the four other lambs.  Dd keeps saying he has more babies in the house than in the lots.  Not true, but close.  He has five babies to tend to in the house.  There are boxes and dog kennels everywhere.  We are hoping to get them all into the stock trailer and onto buckets over the weekend, but it’s going to take some doing. 

Tuesday a mama had twins (his Romanovs have had a time this year) who weren’t doing well.  One of them was born with a crooked neck, the other just never had much life to him and didn’t make it.  Dd said mama probably laid wrong and got the babies turned funny, so they didn’t grow correctly.  Once we took the one with the bad neck in and got her warmed up we started working with her.  She took a bottle better than any of the other lambs and fights so hard to stand up on her own even though the odds are stacked against her.  Dad, however, was discouraged and told me to go set her with her mom, but she would probably never nurse and never make it.  So, we put her in the stock trailer with her mean mama and peak in on her from time to time to find her fighting to get rolled over so she can stand up or up on all fours staggering around the trailer.  Last night dh and I pinned mama in the corner and got the baby to stand on her own and nurse from her mama nearly on her own.  She isn’t strong enough to hold her little head up on her own “yet,” but Randy and I have vowed to work with her every evening if Dad agreed it was worth the effort.  He said he has had them grow out of it and their necks have straighted out as they have grown.  So, we are going to make an effort to work with her and hope we are not just prolonging the inevitable.  If she wasn’t such a fighter we probably would have all given up, but she won’t back down.  She will kick her little body around until she finds her feet, take a bottle with no effort at all, and when we tried to get her to nurse she was a pro, like she’d been doing it all along.  We most likely got her nursing off mama in time to get colostrum from her which will only help her grow stronger.  Wish us luck!  The little girl has a long road ahead of her, but as long as she keeps fighting we are going to stick with her.

I know I keep promising pictures, but I haven’t gotten it done yet.  I will get some taken today and with any luck at all have them posted Monday!  Last night one of the babies inside had actually gone hoarse from crying.  She won’t take a bottle very well (so she’s not growing like a weed or anything), so Dad is spacing her feedings further apart in hopes she will get more aggressive at feeding time.  She just squeaks like a mouse in her little box because she has no voice left.  She has a buddy now (the little boy who fell in the water bucket), but is still squeaking away  : )     She is the smallest lamb I have ever seen in my life.  I found her Tuesday out in the lot by herself getting butted around by the other mamas for trying to steal a gulp of milk here and there.  Her little mouth was getting cold, so she became orphan #3 (Dad already had a set of twins who were abandoned in the night Monday). 

We are trying so hard to keep it all straight, and I know Dad is discouraged with the lack of organization.  He’s always so good with the sheep and has everyone squared away.  The dm, dh, and I all working full-time and picking up the pieces in the evenings it’s just too hard.  Too much happens during the day when we’re not there.

I will be off tomorrow and hopefully be able to tend to things as they occur.  I’m leaving even earlier today than I did Tuesday and Wednesday.  My Avon order comes in this afternoon, so I’m hoping to get done with chores early so I can get home and get it checked in and bagged up for delivery tomorrow.  Sometimes selling Avon seems like too much, but it’s helping us get one step closer to paying off our bills and having me at home full-time.  In my mind it’s worth it!~Smile

Hope everyone has a great weekend.  It’s going to be a yucky weekend here weatherwise, but the show must go on like it or not : )     They are even calling for a low of 26 Saturday night.  Our peach tree is past the blossoming stage, our crabapple is in full-bloom, and our newly planted grapevines are well on their way.  Hope everything hangs in there.  We will really miss crabapple jelly if the freeze gets them!

Oh yeah, I pulled another baby last night and it is up nursing and doing well.  Yea!

We came home from work to eleven new baby lambs at Mom and Dad’s. Katahdin, Dorper, and Romanov ewes all had babies yesterday. Overall the Katahdins have been really impressive as far as being prolific. We are considering crossing our texels ewes with Dad’s RR Katahdin ram. Hmm…. wonder how that will work.

The chickens are still doing well. We had 10 eggs Tuesday and 7 last night. Hope they keep it up. Still contemplating if we want to hatch out some bantie chicks. Not sure how we will keep track of which eggs we are hatching and which ones we are collecting. They stockpile eggs underneath them like crazy. One chicken had nine eggs under her in one day. They are funny!

We had really bad thunderstoms including small hail last night. Hope all the animals did okay. Our’s were shut in the the building and our llama, Hank, refused to come out this morning when Randy opened the gate. There was still lots of lightening so he probably figured he was too much of a target .~Smile

It’s the end of the work week for me! Yippee!

We had a good weekend! Friday was spent on the road getting cutters sharpened so we could shear our sheep on Sunday. My dh wanted to learn so a friend of our came out to shear our sheep and give him a lesson. Saturday we got all the chores (our house and Mom and Dad’s) done early because another couple was coming out to spend the evening with us. We had a great time visiting with them! Sunday we planted 60 trees/shrubs at Mom and Dad’s. Mom cooked us all lunch, went home to rest up, and at 3:00 our sheep were getting sheared. Randy attempted to shear one of the sheep, but he was nervous he might cut one of them. Also, they are overly pregnant right now, and he just didn’t feel comfortable. The guy who sheared them for us is going to let Randy go with him when he does another small batch and take notes. Dad also offered for Randy to practice shearing his sheep. The equipment if fairly expensive, so we want to make sure it’s something he wants to do before investing in all of it. Dh has a bad back also, so we’re all a little worried it might be too hard on him. We finally finished shearing and got everything picked up at 8:00pm. We showered real quick, had egg sandwiches for dinner, and off to bed to start another week. Four o’clock came rather early for me this morning~LOL

Still no babies at our house, but one of Dad’s Katahdins had triplets. Go girl! One will be pulled for a bottle lamb, but we still haven’t decided how we’re going to get the little one mid-day bottles since we all work full-time. Possibly a nursing bucket will be put into action. Dad goes to the doctor today to check his broken ankle, so hopefully he gets a good report.

This morning dh and I were really dragging. We both wanted to call work and crawl back into bed. It’s going to have to be an early bedtime for us this evening.

We had a rough weekend with the sheep. We had a mama at Dad’s house go into labor, have problems, I tried to pull the lambs, and couldn’t. We took her to the vet where he pulled twins (not alive). Dad was relieved we saved the ewe, but she died in the night Saturday. Her body had just been under too much stress for too long. The sheep have been taking out the electric fencing on a regular basis and helping themselves to the pasture. There are so many of them and some of them have wool, so they just push right through it hot or not.

We also managed to leave a gate unlatched and the donkey, Dusty, got out Friday. Then, we left a gate unlatched on Saturday and all the mamas and babies escaped into the front yard. Dad was in the house in bed and looked out the window to see about eight sheep eating out in the yard. We had gone back to our house to get our garden planted and received a phone call. Too many people in and out of gates to keep it all straight ~Smile

There is good news, however. When we brought the ewe home from the vet we arrived to a ewe with healthy twins (a boy and a girl). Doesn’t completely make up for the one we lost, but it helps.

I won’t go too into detail, but let’s just say we are struggling with Dad’s sheep.  My db left for firefighting training yesterday evening, so we are short another person.  We had a ewe miscarry a baby lamb last night, however, she is wild and in a pen with 200 other sheep so we couldn’t catch her to separate her into a pen by herself.  If we don’t get her caught soon we risk losing her to infection, mastitis, or who knows what else.  We have another sick ewe, so sick we got her separated no problem.  We are doctoring her and hopefully she will make a full recovery.  It just breaks my heart to see them sick, in pain, and scared.  We are all starting to wear down and tempers and attitudes are starting to show the strain everyone is under.

On a happier note, our little bottle baby is looking better everyday.  He was so happy to see me yesterday (he had already eaten and wasn’t just hoping for food) we couldn’t crawl through the panels fast enough to get to me.  He is like a puppy and makes me smile.