Lambs!

Emily Dickinson once said, "I write to taste life twice: once in the moment and once in retrospect."

I agree.  I only wish I had more time to write and record these fun, crazy, kid-growing-up, traveling, farming, LIFE adventures.

Today I snuggled Lena in the rocking chair for a long time, singing songs and reading books and that is something I want to remember.  I soaked it up in the moment and in retrospect, I'll remember her head on my arm, her hands curled up in her blankie, bright blue baby eyes calm and relaxed.

Speaking of babies...

our ewes, which we got last summer and decided to keep around, had babies!  Twilight had hers on Feb. 16, a little ewe lamb (girl) that we named Daisy.  She's almost perfectly white.

Here's Nora with the two ewes, each almost a year old.

Daisy. In this photo she's almost two weeks old.

Clare holding Daisy:

We went on a family vacation over spring break, just two nights at a hotel in Escanaba that has a really nice pool with a water slide.  Friends of ours live there so we visited them both at the pool and at their house.  Meanwhile, my brother took care of our animals.  I kept waiting for him to text and tell me that our other ewe had her babies.

Instead, we got home from our trip and I told Clare to go see if Midnight had her babies.  She came running out of the barn, saying, "There's two of them!  A brown one and a white one!"

Sure enough, there were two perfectly healthy little lambs in the stall.  The brown spotted one is a boy that we named Pepper and the white one is a girl named Lily.  (In honor of its being born near Easter: "Easter Lily")

Look at that little face!

The kids seeing the babies right after our trip.  Clare is cold; it WAS pretty chilly in the barn.

Molly, the best farm dog you could ever have, makes friends with Pepper:

Asleep in a patch of sunlight:

Clare has taken a new interest in our lambs.  When we kept them just as meat animals, she didn't want to get too attached.  Now that we're hoping to keep some of these sheep for awhile, she's excited to take care of them.  Here she's trying to brush Twilight's wool/hair coat with a horse comb but it's not working too well.

Hmmm.  Daisy must never have read "Don't hop on pop!"  Or on mom, for that matter.

Lena got to pet Lily today.  Look at those big, blue eyes!  This little girl is cuter than any lamb, any day!

Clare loves being with the sheep.  It sure can be cold in the barn, though.  Some days it feels like spring is never going to really come.  Our snow and cold keep hanging on.

Sage, the dad of these lambs, is feeling a bit left out of all the attention.  He's a Shetland ram, and our ewes are (I believe) a mix of Katahdin and Suffolk.  We have no idea what size our lambs will grow to, probably a bit smaller than their mothers.  But we've gotten the joy of experimenting with lambing for practically free and all of us enjoy the sheep and the baby lambs.   With one exception.  One day when he was helping me with the lambs in the barn Karl did say, "Mom, can we go inside? This is getting boring."

Sage, king of the... feed box.