Babies on the way!

Well, I wandered down to the barn this morning to check on our sheep and realised that the dates I'd written down for when my ewes are due to lamb might be off by about 2 months! At least 5 of them are heavily pregnant to my bottle ram lamb. By the look of the ewes, they are most likely carrying twins, so it's going to be double the fun again this year! Hopefully this year we'll get some ewe lambs.

For the last two years, we used a ram that I had called 'Cec' as in 'Cec the stud ram' from the NZ Animated movies 'Footrot Flats'.

Every ewe that Cec covered produced ram lambs! His son (Reginald) also produced ram lambs, so this year we hope to strike it lucky by getting a ewe or two. Either way, if the mums rear their babies, rams or ewes, I'll be happy. The last few years we've had a lot of bottle fed babies (usually given to us) so it would be nice to see our girls take care of their babies and leave my kitchen free of lambs for a season!

Ram lambs will be marked (turned into wethers) for future dog training, and hopefully the ewes will be of a suitable quality that we can retain them and breed on. My old ewe (Violet) will probably be separated from the ram after this season as I believe she's getting a bit too old for breeding, and would probably appreciate retirement.

I'm not too sure what Jock would think about having lambs running around his kitchen either.

On another note, Dog Day is happening today, the one I mentioned in an earlier post, and I was right about the weather. It hasn't stopped raining since I got up, and if you go out from behind shelter, the wind drives the rain straight into your face. I'm not adverse to working in the rain, but trying to do it whilst fending off something like pneumonia is beyond me. I think that although Jock would probably benefit from training in a different environment, we made the right decision to stay home today.

It seems, however, that no matter how bad the weather is, he will still happily play with his watering can. I didn't get any photo's of him romping around the paddock this morning, I spent all of my time trying to walk without slipping over. If the weather fines up (I doubt it will) I'll do a bit more obedience training today. Key points to work on will be 'stay close' (walking at my leg), 'stand' (stop and stay stopped!), and 'steady' (slowing pace when required). I'll let you all know how we go!