Last weekend the family gave me an extremely valuable gift for Father’s Day… a certificate entitling me to a precious two hours of their time.  Two hours to get something done on the Rock Farm.  It was a wonderful gift, in the hectic mayhem of juggling school, sport, work and family time.

I figured two hours would be perfect to complete the most pressing requirement on the Rock Farm.  Marking our lambs.

Marking involves many steps.  We vaccinate the lambs, put in ear tags with our unique property code (colour coded for 2018), and put rubber rings around their tails and testicles.  Our yards are not ideal for this – being mainly set up to handle cattle – and we soon found some of the younger lambs were able to slip out the yards back into the paddock.

Our two hours passed quickly and we soon had marked most of the lambs.  I will need to catch up with the stragglers and sort them out soon.

This year we counted 20 lambs out of 11 ewes.  As one ewe was dry, this means that all of the lambs born were twins.  When we brought in the sheep, one poor little lamb was very weak, having either got separated or rejected by his mother.  I was hoping we wouldn’t have any poddy lambs this year, but we brought the little fellow up to the house and found the re-purposed baby bottle kept especially for occasions such as this.

The little fellow enthusiastically enjoyed his first warm drink in a long time, and we thought that we had saved him from the worst.

As cute as lambs are, the last thing you want is to keep them inside any longer than you need to get them dry and warm.  The Little Fisherman and I collected some old iron from the ‘resource centre’ and soon put together  a shelter in a little holding paddock adjoining the shed.  It was far more substantial than the old tarpaulin I had used to shelter our sick ewes a couple of weeks earlier – and I figured it would hopefully last a little longer too!

Back at the box in front of the fire, the Dachshund was only interested in licking any spilt milk off the lamb.  On the other hand, the Border Collie, Sapphire, wouldn’t let the lamb out of her sight.  She was adorable nursing the little fellow as we kept our fingers crossed.

Sadly the lamb never recovered his strength and passed away the following morning.  I don’t know why he was separated from his mother, but sometimes nature does these things for a reason.  Other times there are no reasons, and we just have to learn to accept them and move on.

They might not be easy lessons, but they are extremely valuable ones to share with our growing family.