JenLa

This damn time change is killing me. I despise daylight savings, it can go suck gorilla nads. Anyway, this isn’t a post about that, it’s to show you more lambs.

I really expected to see Honey with lambs on Sunday morning, but she came trotting out of the barn to greet us and get her treat still as round as a….really…round…thing. But when we went inside, Camille surprised us with this little girl:

Anemone, just minutes old.

All dried off!

She’s a funny looking little thing, and I adore that long fuzzy hair around her face and neck. This was Camille’s first lambing and she did okay, but she didn’t want to let the baby nurse until she was dry. She kept jumping away from her and at one point Anemone had almost made contact, got her head stuck in the leg strap of Camille’s coat and got knocked over in the process, so we took the coat off for a few days to let her get the hang of it. It turns out she needed stripping (you milk them briefly to force out a waxy plug and get the milk flowing.) but even after that she wouldn’t settle down. We put her and Anemone in Lambing Jail because I was not going to permit her to reject this lamb. They went into the jug and stayed there. By evening, Anemone was trying to sproing around, but there wasn’t enough room. I decided to let them out and see how it would go.

Camille took off running for the pastures, leaving poor little Anemone to cry in confusion. After a minute mom looked around and didn’t see her and started to yell for her. Baby couldn’t figure out where it was coming from, though. I picked her up and put her outside the barn and she tried out her tiny, tiny little voice. Next thing we knew, Camille was racing up to her, reprimanding her the entire time. Since then, Anemone has been bouncing up and down right next to her at all times. I plead with Camille not to turn her baby into a psychotic flake like she was, but it appears genetics would not be denied. She’s full of hop and ready to flip out at the drop of her hat just like mommy. Joy.

We tucked everyone in wondering if Honey would just decide to be last after all despite being the largest and showing the most signs of impending labor. Both she and Pie were eating fine and full of energy last night, so it was anyone’s guess what we’d wake up to this morning.

Amaryllis, female. Same father as Anise and Absinthe. See a pattern here?

Acorn, ram lamb. He’s already a bruiser.

Honey was waiting at the door with these little gifts. Amaryllis looks nearly exactly like her half-brother. Apparently Luther throws black lambs, often with white spots on top of their heads. Acorn looks like his mom. The second after I took that picture of him, he backed up and rammed Bakka in the face. He thinks he’s the Big Ram already. He didn’t know enough to be crushed when I informed him that he’d probably be wethered in the next couple days, but even the mighty power of the rubber band may not be enough to subdue this personality. He’s a total character.

So we’re just waiting for Pie now. She could be tomorrow or she could be days away. She doesn’t look like she’s going to go anytime soon, but I was very surprised by Camille so who knows? I think she has one lamb in there, and we’re very hopeful for a ewe. You can see that our naming convention is for trees, plants and flowers and we’re using the alphabetical system of keeping track of what year they were born. We should just have to choose one more, but everything we have picked out seems to us to be gender dependent.

I’d love to go on some more, and I have lots of video that needs to go on YouTube, but right now I want to sleep the deep and trusting sleep of the very young:

Your first nap in the sun is always the best.

Jared called me at work this morning. It’s very rare for him to do that because I’m not really allowed to talk on the cell phone at work, so I knew something was up.

[static] [static] Hey. You there? Aw crap, my battery is dying. Gotta make this quick. [static]………pause………..WE HAVE TWO LITTLE BLACK BABY LAMBS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (you could totally hear the squee in his voice). I’ll call you back, gotta plug in my phone. OH MY GOD THEY’RE CUTE.

So Jemima, having had a lovely week with warm temperatures chose the early morning hours of the day when it decided to snow like crazy with rapidly dropping temperatures and gusting winds. At least she chose to do it in the barn. By the time they were discovered, everything had progressed to the point of dry lambs who had already been nursing. You have to love Shetlands if for no other reason than that. Being very good guard llamas Ouachita and Bakka were very curious and decided to spend most of the day hovering near the barn. Jemima let the babies go out a couple times late this afternoon, but only for a minute or two each time. Everyone appears well but tired. We’re huge dorks so of course we called our families as if we’d had these babies ourselves. Jared’s mother, who was watching his niece at the time said “Lambs!” and the two year old, hearing her, said “Baa baa black sheep!” (to her all sheep are ‘baa baa black sheep’, she just happened to be right in this case.)

Meet the first babies born at Fleury Farms:

Absinth, who is a little boy.

And Anise, his sister.

The flash in the weird afternoon barn lighting is throwing the color a little off, but I should be able to get some really good photos soon. They appear to be black like mom, but whether they’ll remain that way or become a dark moorit (red/brown) like their father, Luther, remains to be seen. I’ve gotten absolutely nothing done since I got home from work for watching them. She let me hold them for a bit, too. Looooooooovvvvvvvvvve! They’re so tiny-like smaller than most cats tiny. We were admiring their perfect tiny-ness when Jared observed, “Yeah, they’re awfully small, but they don’t look like they’d fit inside Jemima. It’s kind of like those purchases where once you take them out of the box and unfold them, you can never get them back in again.” Jemima just sort of stared at him. I dare you to try it, buddy.

Looks like Honey, who was also bred to Luther, is showing signs of labor so we may have half siblings of Anise and Absinth tomorrow. She’s a much lighter color, so we’re anxious to see what we get.

You guys have all gotta get sheep. It’s SO. MUCH. FUN.!

We’re still waiting for lambs. All signs point to yes, but the ewes seem to be holding it in. Meanwhile…

Behold, the crippling cuteness:

Mr. Showbiz, aka “Biz”

Luckenbach Starr, aka “Lukas”

OMGWTFBBQ!!!!!!!!!!!!

They’re little!

Wow. They smell almost like…llamas!

Yes, a distinctly llama-like aroma.

Catch ya another time, big guy.

Yeah, smell ya later.

Oh yeah, I finished some organic wool/cotton socks for Jared:

————————————————————————–WHO CARES??????????

Stats:

Pattern: Ice Queen by Rosemary Hill, Knitty Winter 2007 (Queue it with the Ravelry Link)

Needles: US 7, Addi Turbo

Yarn: My own handspun 100% silk tussah singles.

Mods: I didn’t do beads on the picot edgings.

Thoughts: Good god, I hate picot cast off. It looks nice but I don’t enjoy the execution. The yarn is from some tussah silk roving I got this past SAFF and therefore qualifies me for the Knit Something From Your SAFF Purchases contest. Go me! Besides that, it covers one of my Mission: Possible 2008 goals of knitting something from handspun. Double go me! However, I’m not sure this is really the right yarn for this and I’m not too happy with my blocking job. I may never wear it-then again I may-I do like it, it might just be the fact that I’m posting it on a day when it’s 70 degrees. I hemmed and hawed about the beads. I confess that while I adore beads and have a very large collection, and I love knitting and have an even larger collection of that, I don’t like the two together very much. Therefore, I sprinkled them lightly around in the body of this but decided no on the edges. I’m still convinced they’d catch in my hair if I actually wore it for any length of time. This is a very nice pattern, I enjoyed knitting it. It’s easy to understand and is without mistakes. I might make it again in a more appropriate yarn.

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It’s a lovely spring day today. A high of 70F and a sunny breeze. The girls seem to be thinking it’s the ideal weather for riding out the last days of pregnancy:

Honey seems the closest. If you look where the leg strap of her coat is going down toward the ground, you’ll see that her poor udder looks very full. It’s one sign she’s getting closer. She pees about every ten minutes, too. You can see the baby (babies?) kicking now and she finds it difficult to remain standing for long.

We’re enjoying the last few days of Jared’s freedom before he returns to L.A. for his show while trying to get the farm ready for spring. We’re also desperately hoping to see some lambs drop before he leaves. This is for all the people still stuck in the snow, I wanted to show you that warmer weather is on the way:

The beetlings are showing leaves!

And since the goats just haven’t been getting the blog coverage they deserve, I have this picture of Kitty, which I’m considering using as my Ravatar for awhile.

Though this one of my favorite face on the farm might win out:

Bud is a yearling now. We gave him a mohawk so we could tell him from his twin sister at a distance. He has the sweetest face and I just want to smooch him every time I look at him. Hard to remember that it was almost a year ago we barely saved him from tetanus. He’s quite the handsome guy and thinks he’s a big, tough ram until the smallest shetland female comes over and stares him into submission. He’s all “Yes, ma’am. Sorry. You can lay here, I’ll go somewhere else now.” He dances and kicks, leaps and gambols his way to the barn for every feeding. He gets them all in a state of excitement and even the llamas and a couple of the ewes kick up their heels because his joy is contagious. I can’t wait until he has lambs to play with. I’m going to have to get larger memory cards for the camera for all the home movies.

We have two llama crias coming later this week. Both are little boys and I can’t wait to introduce them. Pictures of unendurable cuteness pending their arrival.

The new arrivals I hinted at previously. Five bred Shetland ewes, some of whom will definitely be delivering twins. Mid-March is our LZ [lambing zone] and hopefully they will all live up to their heritage and be perfect, easy moms. Particularly because I’ll be alone again by then.

Front: Jemima [shaela]
Middle, left to right: Pie [musket, katmoget], Camille [fawn], Sadie [fawn, katmoget]
Rear: Honey [musket]
The Corries love them and are beyond thrilled to a] have other sheep around and b] have the goats removed to another pasture because of it. The Shetlands aren’t nearly so warm and friendly in return. Blossom, the ewe lamb, spends lots of time nose rubbing and wagging her tail at them and Round Ears has decided she’s in charge, being the biggest and the senior sheep. The preggos are still reserving judgment on the llamas and the cows in the next pasture. They’re unimpressed with the goats. The chickens, however? I’ve been trying to train the chickens to roost in a nesting box at night because they’ve been roosting in the feeding trough and that leads to ugliness. I wait until it’s dark and the chickens are asleep so I can go pick them up and move them and they barely make a peep. Last night I had to do it from inside the barn on the pasture side and as I was walking out with a small chicken in each hand, the new girls came running up to see what I had [weird, since they don't come running up when I have food.] and they sniffed the chickens and put their lips on their beaks as if to taste them. I know, it’s perplexing, isn’t it? They are a little skittish of the cats even though they had one where they came from. They haven’t met Wyatt yet, because even on a good day meeting Wyatt can be a little….enervating. They had lots of dogs before, though because the breeder also raises Great Pyrenes Dogs, so I hope they take to him the way Bud and Blossom did because he really wants to be a part of the farm and nobody else will let him.

Speaking of Great Pyrenes, I got an email from Delia at TheFiberDenn, from whom I have had the lovely experience of buying some hand dyed roving in the past year. Though she was hesitant to come right out and ask for help spreading the word, I’m happy to help. She writes:

Hi Jen, hi Laura,

I came to your site through Spinning Guy’s blog and saw your ‘Mission Possible 2008′ which mentioned charity and i thought i’d write to you regarding Jack’s need.

Briefly, Jack is a great pyreness puppy who developed serious knee and hips problem due to human neglect/abuse. He is now rescued by his original birth family, who is taking care of him. His initial surgery estimate was $8000, a hefty sum for many familyies to invest in a dog at one go. I was touched by the fact that Jack’s family had no second thoughts of taking Jack back and they very quickly researched what they can do for Jack. That family is Dave Paul’s, the owner of The Merlin Tree, the maker/inventor of the Hitchiker Wheel.

A fundraising project was set-up here to help pay for Jack’s surgery. Currently, all the prizes are donated by Dave, my fiber bussiness and couple of my blog friends and we’re at $290/$8000. This project ends on Feb 15.

I do not know Dave or Jack on a personal basis but a particular experience in my own personal life prompted me to initiate help for Jack. I’m not a high-networked individual in blogland and that contribute largely to how slow the donations are coming in because the words are not getting out (?), etc.

I don’t know how highly networked we are, but fiber-phile animal lovers all need to stick together, so everyone spread the word, okay? As a community we’ve done it before and I know we can do it again. Hopefully what has been done to Jack can be undone.

Man, I have loads of catching up to do! I still have an FO from 2007 to show you and some new WIPs. And then I need you to help me decide if I should get more Shetlands or another llama. I still need someone to buy those three crappy goats. Every potential sale has fallen through and they’re going to become carne asada if I don’t find someone who wants them for pets soon. Which one of you wants fibery lawn mowers?