Friday Night Dose of Cute: Back in the Baby Business!

Ava and her new twins

Nine more photos and a lamb report below. . .

We're all wiggling with joy. (Okay, maybe not all of us.)

Last night's prediction turned out to be partly right. The rest of the lambs didn't all arrive at once, but the first one did arrive this morning while I was the least awake, aka totally (finally!) back asleep.

Yesterday morning I'd asked Joe, who was getting up at the crack of dawn, to please go down and do a barn check so I could get a little more sleep. "You just have to check on everyone. If anything's happening, you can come back and get me." This morning he did the same thing, and when I woke up and groggily asked him if everybody was okay, he said they were, including the new all brown girl.

"It was the white ewe, and she looked like she was going to have twins, but I waited down there a long time, and she only had the one lamb."

Last night I'd gotten lucky at treat time and was able to lock three of the ewes voted most likely to pop during the night into bonding suites, including two white ones—Ava, a seven year old, experienced Katahdin we bought last year, and Fiona, a first timer. I thought the new mother was Fiona.

Fortunately during the ensuing conversation, I realized he'd actually meant Ava—one of the surprise ewes Edward covered a few days into breeding season last fall after breaking through 11 strands of barbed wire—so I didn't go down to the barn and freak out because Fiona's baby had escaped. But what I did find when I got down there was that Ava had had twins, apparently just quite a while apart.

Despite the fact that both her belly and her bag are huge, I ended up letting Fiona out of her pen this morning. Not only was she was going a little nuts in there, but I also remembered that she's Silly's daughter, and Silly is the one I kept securely in a bonding pen for five days one year, sure that any second she was going to give birth, only to finally let her out because nothing kept happening.

Meanwhile, late this afternoon Franny's Sister, another first time mother, gave birth—in quick succession—to twins, but photos of them (along with a few other 'older' lambs you still haven't met) will have to wait.

The two new mothers and their four baby girls are so far all doing fine. I'm headed back to the barn shortly for one last check before going to bed.

Current lamb count: 13. Ewe lambs: 8. Ram lambs: 5. Number of mothers: 6. Number of pregnant ewes remaining: 14.

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