All pictures taken by my father. Thanks, Daddy!

Three weeks ago we started gearing up for our first lambing season on the farm. Vet supplies were cross checked, ordered, loaded (by my good-hearted mother while we were out of town) into a big tub and stashed in the feed room. A local shepherd friend came out to crutch the ewes for us, shaving their nethers for easy viewing and clean access to milk for the lambs. He and Megan (above), who used to work with this same flock, reckoned two of them were about a week from delivery, so we piled on extra monitoring and raced up from Portland as soon as Spring Break began for the children, thinking we’d be lucky not to miss the first births.

We checked them day and night for two weeks… and nothing happened. It was a pleasant ritual to tramp down to the barn under a spangled sky, with a full-throated frog chorus from the pond, but there were never any lambs. We peered at their bottoms on Saturday, and although Artemis and Aphrodite were both sporting udders the size of regulation soccer balls, nobody skipped breakfast or showed any intention of going into labor. We glumly concluded we’d better go back for the reopening of school and plan to return on short notice as soon as the girl who feeds them when we’re away reported some action.

It turned out to be a blessing that Manrico the wether had come down with conjunctivitis and an abscess during our stay. We’d pressed friends into service knocking together a pen of wood palettes and old gates lashed to the boys’ open-sided shelter and logged some practice runs for Lark in herding them into our makeshift paddock. (She turned out to be indispensible — nine years of city life doesn’t cancel out a thousand years of breeding, thank goodness.) Talking it over, Adam and I decided we didn’t think it was feasible for anyone without a dog to pen and doctor Manzy, and it didn’t feel right to leave him in need of another day of antibiotic ointment and the abscess incompletely healed. So on Sunday Adam stayed behind with the dog and I drove the kids back to Portland.

We were getting bagels at the local coffee shop on Monday morning when the texts started coming in.

LAMBS!

Two

One was stuck in the trough and is very very weak

And neither can find their mom. Hera is trying but she doesn’t have any milk

One is dying on me.

(This is not what you want to glimpse flashing across your screen as you’re driving down the highway in a minivan with five elementary schoolers.) Luckily, Adam’s quick work with a towel and some Nutri-drench and warm molasses solution was enough to keep the little ewe lamb alive, and Megan swiftly arrived to help both babies get reconnected with their mother and begin to nurse. By the time I’d seen the children off to their classrooms, another ewe was in labor. Ada stopped by my desk to check for news at every opportunity, and just before lunch I was able to report that Artemis had delivered a very large ram lamb and that Athena had turned out to be the mother of the twins.

Adam improvised some sweaters for the babies by cutting off the sleeves of his sweatshirt, as the temperature had dipped back down below forty degrees during the night and the little girl needed help keeping her core body heat up. And after some time Artemis delivered a second lamb, so we’ve got two sets of boy-girl twins!

Actually my mum took this one. Thanks, Mum!

Artemis took to motherhood immediately and washed those babies with a will. Both of hers were soon up and nursing, too.

All this was too good to miss. As soon as school was finished and I’d returned all the children that don’t belong to me and cut deals for drive swaps to clear the rest of the week, I tossed my two back in the car and we hurtled north again through the night. We slept in a motel near the ferry dock and came across this morning under a majestic sunrise. By breakfast time we were cuddling lambs and taking turns to spy on Aphrodite, who’s surely got to knuckle under and produce her lambs soon. Lambwatch 2017 is in full swing! Time to get cracking on some better sweaters.