And That’s Life

If nothing else, farming has taught me better how to accept the ups and downs of life.  Farming, especially with livestock has so many surprises, good and bad.  It is so nice to ride a high and enjoy all the wonderful things that can come from this life, but there are also some hard times.

I’d love to stamp my feet and scream and roll around on the ground and make a general big fuss of things when something doesn’t go my way.  That would be so mature, wouldn’t it?  It seems to work for my kids, but since I tell them all the time that they need to grow up and learn to deal with the blows in life, I too have to grow up, toughen up, learn from my mistakes and march forward.

But that can be SO hard sometimes.  Here’s today’s example.

I noticed a few weeks ago, that my calendar was saying that the lambing window was starting soon.  This went right along with me noticing that two of the ewes in particular were starting to really bag up.  Looks like we could have another round of babies here on the farm.

For the past week, I have expected to walk out every morning to some lambs from my moorit ewe, but alas, nothing was happening.  This morning after doing chores and finding no babies, I sat down and looked at the dates again and found that she wasn’t supposed to lamb until Thursday, so I decided to leave her be and stop worrying.

Of course, that meant that she was going to lamb immediately.  I walked out this afternoon to do chores and she had just dropped the second lamb.  The first was laying in the straw not cleaned off at all, and I was suspicious.  The second the second lamb was out mama bolted off and clearly was going to have nothing to do with them.

I rushed over to discover that lamb #1 had been neglected and was not alive anymore but I had walked in at just the right moment to save #2.  I got the slime off it’s nose, tickled it, held it upside down and got it’s airway clear.  I then rushed it into the house, got an old towel and started to work on it very vigorously.  He (yes, a ram) immediately started right up!  Hooray.

I managed to get him dried off and I took him back to mama.  She’s a first timer, and she wanted nothing to do with him.  She was not interested in him at all.  I decided to take him in again and get him warmed up before trying to nurse again.  As soon as he was standing up trying, I took him out to nurse, but he was much smaller than the other lamb, and he was needing some help.  Mama who was not interested in being a mama wanted to eat her alfalfa, and she didn’t really want to take care of the lamb.

I decided to milk the colostrum out for now and bottle feed it to make sure he gets some then see if he perks up to nurse.  This seems to be doing the trick.

Now, the fact that I saved him is good news, and I am so exciting to have lambs around for me and the kids to enjoy.  I’m incredibly bummed that I lost a lamb though.  I set up my breeding program to get a variety of different colored lambs, but I was MOST wanting a black ewe to use as foundation breeding stock for the future.  I bought a really nice ram with a fantastic fleece this year.  He had some black in his background, and I was hoping that my girls would give me some black.

BUT, of course, my very first BLACK EWE had to be the one that I lost.  I am beyond bummed about this.  This makes me feel like I want to dance around stomping my feet and complaining about the rough hand of cards that I’ve been dealt, but I’m trying very hard to act like an adult here.  These things happen in farming, that’s just life, and no matter how big of a fit I throw, it isn’t going to change the fact that I lost her and she’s gone, and the only way to move on is to focus on the future and the other four ewes that are going to throw me some very lovely lambs very soon.

The bright side is that I now have a little black ram dubbed Snuffles downstairs in a laundry basket calling for my attention.  He’s here and he’s got the will to live, and I think I’m just going to bury the bad and run with the good I’ve been dealt today.