shearing and lambing, oh my

Yes, I missed a day, because it was a shearing day like no other. It started with a bang, literally, as Primo burst through our front door to announce that we had lambs. Our first of the season.

We dropped our shearing day preparations and piled out the door for a lamb drill. Holly and Lambykins were due tomorrow, and we fully expected at least one of them to lamb a few hours after shearing, but certainly not before! Thank goodness we had moved them into the barn on Friday night. Holly had triplet rams waiting for us, one white and two black.

Unfortunately I hadn't organized our lambing supplies, yet another thing I forgot to do, so it wasn't a very smooth operation. We managed to get umbilical cords clipped and dipped once we found the iodine and dipping bottle. But the stripping was a problem! With all that wool still on her, none of us were having much luck finding her udder, least of all the babies.

This was the point at which the shearer and our wonderful army of helpers arrived. He got his overheard shearing apparatus mounted, and Holly was the first up.

The babies weren't super happy to be left alone in the jug.

It was quite a noisy fifteen minutes as they called back and forth to each other. We popped her back in as soon as possible and they got to work, with much less difficulty.

All three soon had full bellies and were snoozing in the corner in their little coats.

More sheep, more shearing, a few shots and a lot of trimmed hooves...

... we eventually ended up with a lot of naked sheep...

... and a whole bunch of boots and fleeces on the front porch, and people eating breakfast inside.

To make a difficult day more difficult, I had thrown my back out the day before. Shearing day is not a day to be incapacitated. Muscle relaxants didn't help matters; I spent most of the day apologizing to everyone about how out of it I was. As soon as everyone left I collapsed back on the heating pad. A few hours and a massage later I was feeling a bit better, and went out to check the babies.

Another surprise, this time from Lambykins. Terzo is more than a little disappointed, though. Only one, and another darn ram.

So to make a long, long story short: that's why a blog post didn't happen last night.

Current tally: two ewes delivered, four to go, with a score of four ram lambs and zero ewe lambs. Next due date is Saturday.