The Problem-Solver Is Tired

It wasn't until noon on Saturday that I actually thought all six of our ewe lambs would live. Maybelle's daughter, in the cattle trailer, would simply not suckle, despite my best efforts. Then, I peeked in on her and her mother, and she was happily nursing away.

And so, we more fully embrace Cassandra, the sixth C of lambing season.

Little Catechism is not having an easy time of it, though. She sneaks meals from either Eve or Isabella when she can, but when I go to check on the four lambs, she's usually off by herself, asleep. Maybe that's why she looks so worried.

I catch a Eve, press my knee into her neck, and push Catechism into her udder. So I see this view a lot.

In a last ditch effort to get Eve to accept her actual baby, I put a little sweater on Chocolate, the favored twin.

After a day, I took it off, turned it inside out, and put it on little Catechism, and Eve seemed momentarily interested, or at least confused. But I think the color differential (and, perhaps, the lack of covering on the tail area) made the sweater ineffective. Perhaps if both lambs had been white, the trick would have worked.


On Saturday, we attempted to move the peat bales into their approximate spots, while we had time on the forklift before it's picked up Monday.

This proved to be basically impossible. The rain has soaked into the deep hay and manure pack, right in front of the gate. All that organic matter absorbs water quite well, and when the heavy machine with its huge wheels went to drive up the slope, it dug in about a foot, and the machine almost got stuck.

The machine did make it up the hill, though, but on the second pass, while Phil was dropping the bale, I had to run and deal with 200 pounds of seed potatoes being delivered, and one of the lambs figured out how to get through the cattle panels and was baa-ing pathetically. (See half the potatoes in the photo below, in crates to sprout.)

When I turned my attention back to the peat drop, the 2000 pound bale had burst through the cattle panel fence, collapsed the pig's electric wire, and rolled down the slope of the gully there.

Needless to say, we quit that project for a time.

When we started again, hours later, the boys had managed to run the battery down playing with the lights and the horn. Phil jumped the machine. We managed to get about four bales placed before the conditions thwarted us again.

Phil has exhausted himself. He spent part of yesterday and just about all of today asleep. I hadn't realized how the responsibility is wearing him down, until he said something really insightful yesterday. I was sort of inclined to keep dropping peat bales, and trust the machine wouldn't get stuck.

Phil said, "If it DID get stuck, though, I would be responsible for getting it unstuck. You wouldn't have any ideas on how to fix it, or be able to offer significant manpower to get it out."

And while this sounds harsh, it's really true. I was an English and Humanities major. I like literature and art history, opera and (some) poetry. I'm pleased that I can carry pallets around, and heft five-gallon buckets (translation: I'm not that strong).

Phil is an engineer, a problem-solver by trade. He can see, spatially, how to make things work. He can tie knots (learned from years of rock climbing), and has arm muscles the size of grapefruits. It's true: if something goes wrong, I look to him to fix it. And he can.

And so he sleeps. And I puttered around today, reading about homeopathy. There's a part of me that longs to be a healer in my community; I indulged in that dream a bit today.

Prescription for Phil: lots and lots of rest.