One Busy Morning

By 10:30am, Phil and I had

• Done the chores


• Milked the cow


• Freed two lambs from their hidden spot behind the haybales (exactly where Clementine had hidden herself the first morning)


• Supported Maybelle’s new baby, first seen around 6am and probably born around 5:30


• Had the repair man out for the second day to fix the internet—which he managed today!


• Received delivery of the rented telescoping forklift


• Received delivery of our metal building

It was a busy morning.

Maybelle, daughter of Rotten Isabella and, if I remember correctly, a bottle-fed baby, had licked her daughter clean (yes: our SIXTH ewe lamb this week!). Her baby is a unique mix of white body and black legs: really unusual coloring.

Her baby was also incredibly weak. Maybelle herself, although two years old, is barely bigger than our yearling lambs. Her baby did not stand for some time, and when it finally did, extremely wobbly, it turned its hooves under. I hadn’t seen that before, and it was rather disturbing, but the book said that that’s not a sign of illness or inherited deformities: it’s simply a symptom of a quart sized object squeezed into a pint sized jar.

Sure enough, with a little gentle manipulation, the baby could totter normally.

I am cautiously hopeful for Maybelle’s lamb. So far, it hasn’t shown the slightest aptitude for nursing. I did syringe feeding today, but Maybelle won’t always be so easy to capture so I can milk her out. I am praying the Lord helps Maybelle be a good mother.

To wrap up the lamb news: the four lambs and two mothers yesterday are still confused. Eve refuses to allow any lambs except her black come close to her. Rotten, unnatural mother, to forsake her precious white Catechism, the baby whose birth I witnessed! The rage I feel surprises me, perhaps because I cannot imagine butting away one of my own children, allowing it to starve.

Isabella grudgingly allows both white babies and the other black to nurse. I’m rethinking my “Rotten Isabella” title and am tempted to now have “Rotten Eve” instead. (To think that I once considered these eyes malevolent and threatening!)

However, since it could very well have been my own eager intrusiveness yesterday that caused her confusion, I’m reluctant to pass off that unkind epithet.

The four names we’ve come up with for yesterday’s ewes: Chocolate and Caper as the blacks; Catechism and Camelot as the whites.

The metal building was its own challenge to unload. Some sections are 27 feet long, and Phil didn’t have a terribly wide area to maneuver in. The over four inches of rain this week made the ground sloppy with mud, and with only Phil operating the unfamiliar machinery and figuring the angles to set it down, he had a challenging job.

Especially since the forklift ended up being twice as large as he expected. So he was maneuvering this massive machinery around our tiny parking lot at the top of our hill.

The driver sat in the cab of his truck, and I checked things off the 15 page checklist as Phil unloaded.

Only once did we have a little difficulty. One section had been loaded precariously on the truck, and, somehow, in setting it down, the piece slipped off the forks and snapped off one of our apple trees at the base. Phil felt sick about it, but I figured, with all the challenges of the unloading, I can deal with one apple tree as collateral damage.

And there it is, our building in a box.

As always, the Lord was very gracious: from the time the metal building arrived around 8am, until we were done unloading at 10:30, no cars needed to pass on our little road. What a mercy.

Later in the day, Phil went to find new hay. Both our sources are about out for the season (it was a bad year for hay, after all). He had good success, and we are thankful again that the Lord is looking out for us. If there’s no hay, there’s no farm. Animals don’t do well without food.

I potted on 50 lavender plants, and look forward to the day when the blue building is in place and lavender decorates the ground outside.

We also cleared the building site. It had been the storage place for fencing materials and general farm miscellany. With the forklift, we could move it fairly easily.

I'm excited for the beautiful blue building to rise up out of our cherry orchard. I think it's a cheery color, and the large indoor space is welcome, too.