New Life

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If you bring a lamb as your gift, present it to the Lord. 
Leviticus 3:7

One thing I love about the month of January is not only that it is the start of a New Year with a chance to create more stories in this journey we call life, but it is the start of new life here on the farm.  It's officially lambing season! 

Lambing season always has it's many challenges between bottle babies, still born lambs, and many other problems that you pray never arise.  Every year we start out hoping we get through the lambing season with no bottle babies and all the moms do well.  Well this year it didn't take long.  Our first lamb was born on the 19th.  A big healthy boy and him and mom were doing great! Then two days later the second lamb followed.  This one a preemie, but appears healthy and ready to thrive. However, mom just didn't have milk ready so she ended up being the first bottle baby of 2021.  As much as the kids love having a bottle baby, it can be exhausting after a few weeks in.  It is an up early in the morning, stay up late kind of job.  Not to mention its cold out there at there at night, and I am scared of the dark so it makes it even worse.  When I draw the short straw for the night, I always use my light to scan the yard.  Deer, coyotes, and who knows what else might be out there are always things I am looking for.  Maybe it comes from past experiences when I had a opossum greet me at the door one night without a flashlight.  By week three we are always ready for the bottle baby experience to be over and when it happens so early in the season like this we know we are in for the long haul. 

We also had to teach a mom to accept her lambs nursing this week.  That can be a process in and of itself as well and it requires patience and time also.  This mom did the same thing last year, but this year the process didn't take as long for her to get used to it.  We have found that now after just a couple days we can just stand by the pen and she will let them eat.  And to think we are only in the beginning. As of the posting of this blog on 1/25/2021 we only have 6 lambs so far! We hope to have a successful season, but know that the day to day challenges will be time consuming and many hours will be spent in the barn moving sheep, tagging lambs, bottle feeds, and more over the coming weeks.  We also hope that we get visitors who just want to see the lambs, because well we love it when kids come out and snuggle on them as well.  I remember the days where families would just stop by to see if they can see the lambs.  Those were fun because lots of kids got to experience the farm that way.  I hope to have our first YouTube Video up about lambing season in the next couple weeks as we get more lambs.  For now continue to pray that our lambing season continues to go smooth and no creepy animals are in the yard at night as we go through this bottle feeding time :).  

Farming with Faith & Family! 
God Bless 
Amanda 




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