One of the fun things about raising livestock is the babies. (One of the not-so-fun things is when the mama sheep knock you down as you try to get to their feed troughs with a bucket of feed, but that’s for another day.) In cold weather, it’s not unusual to have a newborn lamb lying on the register in the kitchen getting warmed up. (One thing I love about our old farm house is registers in the floor that you can stand on to warm up.) Most people lamb in the spring because most breeds of sheep won’t breed in hot weather; however, our Dorset sheep breed year-round. That gives us two advantages — one is that we get lambs in the fall and winter so we have lambs ready to sell at Easter and Passover time, when the prices are the best; the other is that we can get three lamb crops in two years. The disadvantage of lambing in the winter is that it never fails that we have lambs born on the coldest night of the year. We should buy stock in heat lights.
We often have a few bottle lambs, because the mamas sometimes don’t have milk. It never ceases to amaze me how hard my husband works to save “orphan” and cold lambs. He brings them into the house and we squirt milk into their mouths until they figure out how to suck on the bottle. And once they figure it out, they can down a 16-ounce bottle in about 15 seconds! They usually are in the kitchen for a week or so until they are strong enough to get out of a laundry basket, and then they go to a pen in the basement until we can stretch out the feedings to just a couple bottles a day plus some lamb feed.
The calves are fun, too. We have had calves in the house, but that is a rare occurrence. Last year we had two bottle calves in the barn, and we seldom have bottle calves. You can see that the calves like to congregate together. It’s fun to watch them playing with their calf buddies in the spring as the weather warms up.
Then of course, there is this cutie, our grandbaby Charlotte. She’s not technically a farm baby because she lives in town, but I’ll claim her as one. When she gets bigger, I’m sure she will have a good time playing with the lambs. We fed a lamb in the basement when she was here for Thanksgiving, and it produced some of her first laughs.
