So much easier with moms do their part

Yesterday Charles and I went into Morganfield to rearrange the awards and photographs on the walls of my new office. It always helps to have someone with severe OCD to hang about 50 things up on one wall - it involves a laser level, measuring tapes and a lot of math.
Of course it took longer than I expected, so after grocery shopping we didn't get home until after 5pm. As we drove up the driveway, making plans to split into Charles unloading groceries while I got on with feeding my animals, I saw two new babies in the sheep field.
I noticed that Mabel was standing off a little from the others a couple days ago, which can be a sign that labor is coming. At least she waited for a nice sunny day in the mid-40's (F). Both are baby ewes - this is our first ever set of twin ewe lambs - and one of them is an unusual color for us. It's white with light brown markings. The other is mostly black with a white skullcap and white blaze in her chest. They will probably get names next week.
Mabel is doing a great job raising both of them, which is great for me, since Flora still gets two bottles a day. Flora will get bottles for about another 4 weeks.

Flora the Fauna

It took her a couple of days to get the hang of the bottle, but Flora is doing well. In fact, by today or certainly by tomorrow, she will figure out that she can jump out of the box where she has been living since last Wednesday. I'll have to figure something out, because it's below freezing and I don't want to put her in the barn yet. There's no electricity in the barn, so there's no heat source. Currently she sleeps on top of a heating pad and under a heat lamp.
No more lambs yet, but I haven't checked this morning. Later on today the sheep and their donkeys will (hopefully) move up to a paddock around the barn. They'll be closer to the house and will have good shelter in the barn and to kidding pens where I can put new mothers and babies if the weather gets nasty. I'm remembering the 2009Ice Storm that hit at the end of January, when I did have Maizie the goat in the barn with her week-old twins Phoebe and Moses. Once I get the sheep up to the barn, as far as I'm concerned, we can have a mild, wet, muddy winter.

Surprise! Surprise!

Okay, so I shouldn't be too surprised because it's all my fault! Back in the spring, our first lamb that was born was a ram lamb to Tweed. He was a single lamb, and then got the added benefit of eating from his older sister's milk because she lost her lamb after a couple of days. By the time I got to the field to band (bloodless castration) the ram lambs, "Juan Fatram" was just too endowed for it to work. Juan went into the freezer in November, but apparently not before he'd developed good relationships with some of my ewes.
This afternoon, when Ashley was out feeding she noticed a funny little bunch of fur out in the grass. She came and got Charles who called me just as I was getting in my car to come home from work. The lamb is doing all right, but her mother, Cathy Gale, has rejected her. Cathy had a second lamb but it looked to have been stillborn. Cathy doesn't have a very good mothering record - one stillborn, twin rams, one ram and one bottle ewe lamb, and now one stillborn and one bottle ewe lamb.
The new ewe lamb looks like a skunk with a white stripe on her face with black on the sides, so her name started out "Skunk" then went to "Flower" and finally settled on "Flora".

Welcome to 2011!

Okay - it's resolution time: this year I resolve to embrace change with less fear, and I resolve to resume writing here to keep my friends and family better updated on our farm life.
The second half of 2010 was filled with working on our house. We're down to electricity, insulation and wall board. There's a few other small things, like some finish plumbing and temporary permanent flooring, that will also need to be done around the time we move in. The toilets are in, as well as the wood-burning stove. I am reminded of where we were at New Year's Day 2010 - not knowing that we faced shoveling snow out of our living room three times (once over 7 inches) before winter gave up.
As long as the weather stays nice, early this afternoon I will check on my bees and give each hive a candy board to give them a food boost for the winter. A candy board is exactly what it sounds like and give my hives extra food just in case they run out of honey before spring.
My primary task for today - which is a beautiful day, so far - is fencing for my male animals. A lot of my animals are free-range right now, and I need to get that under a modicum of control. After the boys, I'll finish the sheep fencing I started a couple of weeks ago, then the female goats and finally the chickens. Not all today, but tops on the "To Do List".