Many of you know that Jenny- the business manager and brains of this operation- recently gave birth to Chloe, the most beautiful, perfect baby girl to ever don a onesie. This is a cold hard fact, not just this writer’s opinion.

For the Doubting Thomases in the crowd I present Exhibit A:

But she’s not just the loveliest creature on earth. This kid’s got charisma!

Exhibit B:

Anyway, with Jenny out on maternity leave, I have been trying to pick up some of the work she normally does while simultaneously not complaining, which is probably way harder for me than you would expect. Did I mention that I also had the flu?!? 

The only real victim of this charming baby has been my email inbox.

Oh my dear Lord do we get a lot of emails! Like, hundreds of email a day. And tolerant, organized Jenny whips through them as they come in, responding to what she can and forwarding those that I need to answer. She even flags the ones she forwards that are really important and- for the ones that are YOU-MUST-DO-THIS-NOW emails she forwards them, flags them, then calls me on the telephone and makes sure I’m not distracted by shiny objects before I hit the send button. That’s how Jenny rolls.

That’s also why she is indispensable. In. Dis. Pens. Able. As in, we cannot function without Jenny at the helm. As in, “Don’t get any big ideas, Baby. I know you think staring at your tiny, perfect chin dimple and adorable button nose is a full-time gig, but it isn’t. We need her here!”

There are really two messages in this post. The first is that if I owe you an email, please accept my apology! I’m working my way through them.

The second is really a message to Jenny. Please enjoy every special, blessed moment with the tiny human you created. Then come back to work. You keep this ship afloat and prevent mutinies on a daily basis. You keep us all on task and make us laugh while doing it. We need you. Even more than we knew.

]]> http://www.fiberfarm.com/2011/10/listen-up-baby/feed 12 http://www.fiberfarm.com/2011/04/so-very-busy http://www.fiberfarm.com/2011/04/so-very-busy#comments Fri, 22 Apr 2011 03:16:56 +0000 Susan http://www.fiberfarm.com/?p=11520

I am so sorry for the light posting this week. Between nursing and bottle feeding the lambs in the nursery and getting ready for our first photo shoot this weekend, I have just been spent at the end of the day.

I can semi-officially announce that Lambing Season 2011 is over! Maybe. Miss Lundy had a lovely set of boy-girl twins this afternoon while I was driving to Richmond to pick Jenny up at the airport. Caroline got Lundy taken care and followed all of our newborn lambs with a little help from Amy.

Their names are Warbler and Downy Woodpecker, selected by Jenny and Joel.

The not-such-good-news is that I did a check on Victoria and Charlotte yesterday and neither of them is even remotely bagged up. That means that they either aren’t bred at all or were bred on the last possible day of breeding season. My money is on not bred, and normally I’d be bummed, but this lambing season has been so hateful and horrible that I won’t be sad to see it’s backside.

The photo shoot this weekend is for the three pattern books that KFI is publishing to go along with each of our three new yarn lines!  Here is your first sneak peek at some of the amazing garments Tanis designed with Willa, Findley and Chadwick.

In other news, I’d like to introduce you Tanis’ brand-new baby boy, Callum Finnegan Chang!

Callum was born yesterday at 4:31 p.m., via C-section. He weighs 4 pounds is 6 ounces, 17″ long. Callum arrived a wee bit early (7 weeks!) so he will be spending a little time in the NICU before coming home. He isn’t knitting quite yet, but we all expect he will be soon! Congratulations to Tanis and Roger.

Erin came over this afternoon to see the new babies and name them. Feenat is Irish for woodland creature, and Erin wanted to keep with her Irish theme. She came up with a way to combine the Irish theme with our birds naming convention.

Meet Brendan, which means “Little Raven”.

And this is Callum, Irish for “dove”.

Feenat is an amazing mother, which is all the more amazing considering her mama rejected her at birth.

Erin is crazy in love with them already.

In other news, our three sickest lambs showed some improvement today, eating from bottles on their own.

All the other lambs are showing no signs of WMD so far.

We are doing lots of snorgling and trying to appreciate what we have.

]]> http://www.fiberfarm.com/2011/04/more-photos-of-the-feenat-twins/feed 36 http://www.fiberfarm.com/2011/04/feenat-had-twins http://www.fiberfarm.com/2011/04/feenat-had-twins#comments Tue, 19 Apr 2011 13:55:51 +0000 Susan http://www.fiberfarm.com/?p=11488

Both ram lambs. Both sturdy as hell. I suspect the little black lamb will be everybody’s favorite.

This has been the most difficult lambing season ever. Our first set of twins, Piper and Petrel, were born with signs of White Muscle Disease. It took me 36 hours to figure out what the problem was, and we lost little Petrel. It was heartbreaking, but I spoke with our vet, Dr. Grover, and we came up with a plan for every lamb born thereafter.

We followed the plan religiously. When lambs were born, we immediately gave them a 1 ml dose of BoSe, a vitamin E/Selenium. This should have been the end of the problems. On Thursday, we noticed that four of the lambs that had been treated started showing signs of White Muscle Disease. Dr. Grover was out of the country, so his partner Dr. Diorgio came to the farm on Friday. She was surprised that the single dose of BoSe hadn’t solved our problem, and together we came up with a new protocol: 1/2 ml of BoSe three days in a row, plus 1/2 ml of antibiotics, just to make sure mechanical pneumonia didn’t set in while we wait. We would dose them all again one week later and one month later.

One of the  four lambs that were already looking poorly showed some improvement; the other three haven’t gotten better but they haven’t gotten worse either. They don’t have the strength to drink an entirely bottle on their own, so we are tube feeding them four times a day, giving them vitamin shoots, subQ fluids, and doing everything we can to keep them alive. Some days it looks like they are improving, some days, not so much.

This morning, we noticed another lamb that went through the three day protocol is showing signs of White Muscle Disease.

I immediately called Dr. Diorgio in tears. The horrible thing is that she is just as perplexed by this as I am. She did some research and can’t find any thing in any about white muscle disease being unresponsive to this many doses of BoSe.  I asked her if I should bring the five sick lambs into the office so she could see them and she told me quite honestly that she has no idea how to treat them. Selenium can very quickly become toxic in sheep if too much is given, and we are rapidly approaching the maximum possible dose.

Just so you know, this vet practice specializes in large animals and doesn’t treat horses. In other words, farm animals are what they do all day, every day. If they don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know who would.

Dr. Diorgio put a call into one of her vet school professors at Virginia Tech who specializes in ovines. We are waiting to hear back from him. In the meantime, I fear for our entire lamb crop.

I am so tired, and so discouraged, and so tightly wrapped right now. I have been in situations where I didn’t know what to do as a shepherd, but I always knew who to call to get the answers. This time, the experts don’t have any answers so far, and I feel so very helpless. All I can do is wait and hope that all the lambs hang on, and that the VA Tech professor has some answers for us.

Luckily, no new lambs have been born in the interim, although I think Lundy may deliver late tonight.

I’m trying to stay upbeat here, but it is taking a mighty effort.

It’s kind of hard to take a picture of a bottle baby.

They’re more interested in checking your pockets for milk bottles.

This morning we wormed both the entire flock, mucked out stalls, turned the compost, scrubbed the water tanks out and I don’t know what all else. Everyone was exhausted by the afternoon.

Some of us managed to look adorable in spite of our exhaustion.

My sister Carrie had a great weekend getting to know to first three members of her colored flock.

She and Ursa got along famously.

I spent most of the weekend trying my hardest to doctor three of our weakest lambs who are struggling with White Muscle Disease. The vet came out on Friday morning and came up with a new protocol for all the lambs and all but three have responded beautifully. Scarlet, Auklet and Puffin are weak, but we aren’t giving up on them yet.

After giving each of them antibiotics, B vitamins and sub Q fluids tonight, I was feeling terribly defeated. I went out and sat in the ewes’ pasture for a while, and watched all the other lambs and kids racing around the fields, leaping in to the air and playfully bitting heads. The air was cool, my dogs were beside me and a giant orange moon was rising in the blue, blue sky.  It was a nice reminder of the reason for all my efforts.

I’ve been getting lots of emails with questions about the way we do things during lambing time. I figured the easiest way to answer them is to walk you through a typical day. There are two caveats though:

1. There is no such thing as a typical day during lambing season.

and

2. This is the way we handle lambing at Juniper Moon Farm. Other farms do it differently. This is what we found works for us over the course of the past seven years.

During lambing season, I typically take the night shift, which means I go to sleep at about 5 a.m.. Caroline takes the day shift, and her day starts at 7 a.m. First she takes a quick check of all the pastures to make sure none of the ewes have gone into labor in the two hours since I went to bed.

Then she comes in and heats up seven bottles of milk replacer formula for our bottle babies and goes out to the barn to feed Ursa, Lyra, Orion, Indigo and Scarlett. We also supplement two of our dam-raised babies, Wren and Piper, who don’t look like they are getting quite enough from their mamas.

Then Caroline feeds and waters the sheep, goats, pigs, chickens and Aberdeen, our mule. All of that takes about an hour.

If any of the ewes go into labor in the morning, Caroline wakes me up to get the ewe into a stall or lambing pen and I take over from there. Caroline does a little more with each birth and I hope to turn one over to her entirely (with my supervision) before long.

Our lambing procedure is to get mama indoors if there is time. If not, we bring her and babies in from the pasture. Once they are comfortably indoors, we give each lamb a shot of selenium, an oral dose of something called Lamb and Kid Paste, trim their umbilical cord trimmed and spray it with a disinfectant (to prevent infection.)

Once all of that is done, we stay with mama and baby until the placenta is passed and the lamb finds mama’s teat and starts to drink.

If it’s a quite morning with no births, Caroline checks the pastures every hour or so and I sleep until 10 or 11 a.m.

For me, the afternoon is for yarn line and farm business, running to Charlottesville for supplies if needed and returning phone calls. Caroline uses this time do farm chores like moving the pigs, cleaning out the chicken coop and the like. She also has to feed the bottle babies at noon and 7 p.m., which takes about half an hour each time.

I generally try to grab an hour nap in the early evening before taking over pasture checks from Caroline at 10 p.m. Between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m., I check the pastures and barn every hour or so, staying on the lookout for ewes that have self-isolated or are actively in labor. As I write this, Delaware appears to be in early labor, so I’m checking the pasture every half hour.

In between pasture checks, I answer emails, work on the Spring/Summer 2012 yarn lines, and feed all the bottle babies one last time. If anyone goes into labor at night, I generally handle it alone rather than waking Caroline, because  I need her to be fresh in the morning so that I can sleep at least for a couple hours.

After my last pasture check at 5 a.m., I mix up a couple of gallons of milk replacer formula, so Caroline won’t have to do it in the morning and then go to bed and read till I fall asleep.

You may be wondering why we stay up all night waiting for lambs rather than just letting nature take it’s course. A couple reasons. First of all, we have five first time mamas lambing this year, and there is always a possibility that they won’t understand that they just gave birth and are responsible for the baby.  Secondly, even with experienced mamas, things can and do go wrong.

This morning, Catalina delivered one big, healthy ram lamb and appeared to be done. We watched her for an hour and a half and saw no signs of labor. I was nearly convinced she only had one lamb, but I decided to put my hand inside her and check, just for my own peace of mind. Long story short, there was a second lamb inside her and his legs were all tangled up. I had to put both my hands inside her, reposition the lamb, and then pull with all my might to get lamb out.

Without help, not only would we have lost the lamb, we probably would have lost Catalina too. I feel a very deep responsibility to the animals in my care and I have an obligation to do my very best for them. Losing sleep for a month is a small price to pay.

Tomorrow, I’ll answer some of your specific lambing questions.

UPDATE: Just to further illustrate my point about no day being typical, after I finished this post, I continued to check on Delaware every half hour or so. At 3:00 a.m., she finally moved into active labor. It was POURING rain by then, so I had to nix my plan to let her lamb in the field and then moved her indoors. Luckily, I had set up a lambing pen in the run-in shed earlier (the barn is completely full) and I was able to push/drag Delaware up the hill and, eventually, into the warm, dry pen.

It became obvious fairly quickly that something was wrong. Delaware was really struggling from the get go. I reach up inside her only to find a GIANT lamb in the exact same tangled-up position as Catalina’s second baby early yesterday. Remember, I had never seen this presentation ever before, and then within 24 hours, I get two of them.

I spent about half an hour trying to right the lamb by turning it inside the birth canal, but he was just too big and Delaware too small. Finally, I went in and woke Caroline for help. But even with C holding mama and me pulling as hard as I could, we were getting no where.

After we struggled a while, Caroline asked me about using the Lamb Puller. It never would have occurred to me, as I have had the thing for five years and never even had to take it out of the package, but I was looking for something else in the lambing kit the other day and showed it to Caroline.

We actually had to read the directions standing there in the run-in and, honestly, they made no sense to me. I was already pulling as hard as I could- how was this thing going to help?

Since we were out of ideas and the situation was getting desperate, I looped the pulled behind the lambs ears and pulled with all my strength. On the second pull he popped right out. I think it works by pulling from a different angle than you can achieve on your own.

Mama and baby both seem fine in spite of the ordeal.

After I got the new lamb cleaned up, I noticed that Piper was in the barn on her own, shivering and wet. I took her in, dried her off and started looking for something to put on her to keep her warm till sunrise. Luckily, our dear friend Helen had sent me a package this week with a new little down coat inside that fit Piper perfectly. Thank you Helen!

As I said, there is no such thing as a typical day! Now I’m off to shower- I smell a lot like the inside of a sheep!- and try to sleep for a few hours.

If you have any questions about lambing, feel free to ask them in the comments and I’ll try to answer them in my post later today.

Too tired to write today. Enjoy these pictures and I’ll catch y’all up on the farm happenings tomorrow.

After staying up all night, I woke up at 8 a.m. with my Spidey senses tingling and look what I found in the pasture. Miss Martha gave birth to a giant, healthy ram lamb. We haven’t named him yet.

Then the phone rang. It was the post office calling to tell me that our order of 45 baby chicks had arrived. I swung by, picked them up and headed to Amy’s house to get them into the brooder where they will spend the next four weeks or so.

We ordered 12 different varieties of birds, and it was super fun opening the box and trying to figure about who was what.

The silkies were super-easy to identify already.

They are all so lovely.

Emily, Amy’s oldest daughter, got straight to work dipping each chick’s beak in water to teach them how to drink. This is something that the mama hen would do if they were being raised by a hen.

Wren

Wren and Piper relaxing in the run in shed.

Cini and Lucy. Lucy is grounded for eating a baby chicken last week. She’s on a tie out until she learns better or the chicks get to big to eat, whichever comes first.

Dakota, mama of Scarlett and Indigo, is doing a good job loving on her babies but she doesn’t seem to understand that she needs to feed them as well.

We’ve been bottle feeding them in the meantime and they are quickly becoming favorites.

I’m more than a little bit in love with them.

Ethel is still doing a great job with her chicks. They are growing like crazy!

Soon, all 11 of them won’t be able to fit under her!

Two perfect little ewe labs were standing in the pasture when Caroline went out to feed this morning. Their mama, Amelia, is truly my best mother, and she already had those babies cleaned up and on their feet by the time Caroline got there. They are in the little paddock behind the barn, cause there is no room at the inn inside right now! Once we get Capri and her adopted babies bonded (hopefully by tomorrow!) we’ll get that little family out of the stall and make room for more mamas.

UPDATE:  My friend Amy, who spent two night in a row at my house so I could pick up the colored lambs in PA, gets to name these two but with a caveat. Amelia’s ewe twins two year’s ago were named Delaware and Dakota and last year’s ewe twins were Darcy and Dashwood. Since Amelia has been on a winning streak, the names had to be birds- to fit with this year’s naming convention- and they both had to start with the letter D. She came up with Doria’s Goshawk and Demoiselle Crane. Dori and Demi for short.