Dear Curiosity Journal,
On Thursday morning, I was about to leave to deliver vegetables to Driftless Music Gardens for the Bonfire Music Festival, when I saw Cauliflower’s water bag. Of course, she would go into labor at the most inconvenient time. I asked Rufus to make the veggie delivery while I waited for the lamb delivery. After an hour of labor and no progress, I decided to intervene. This was, by far, the most difficult birth of the lambing season. We worked for over an hour to pull out an enormous set of twin boys. At one point, I thought all three of them were going to die and our intern, Annie, was going to be traumatized for life. The first lamb, Carrot, was 10.5 lbs. and the second lamb, Corn, was 11.5 lbs. They both have giant heads. By the time they came out, my hands were going numb, my arms were fatigued, there was a lot of blood, and I had gotten birth juices in my mouth, but none of that mattered because, by some miracle, everyone survived. In fact, the three of them are thriving. Carrot, the first lamb, who received the roughest pull, was “knuckling” (walking down on his knees) for the first few hours but was up on his feet by the next morning. These big boys were born to eat and are already surpassing the others in size and vigor after their traumatic entrance. This wraps up our lambing season. We have determined conclusively to dial back the feed next season for more reasonably sized babies because these mama ewes and this sheep midwife had to work overtime to bring these chunky babies into the world, and we are all exhausted. Our final 2024 lambing numbers are 3 ewes, giving birth to 3 sets of twins, 2 girls, 3 boys, 1 stillborn boy, and many, many hours of priceless experiential learning.
~Joy
