Current Lamb Count: Wait, There's Another Lamb?

Yeah. Sometimes, the chaos that is the sheep flock makes it difficult to spot little things like, oh, a newborn lamb.

A. had a crazy day yesterday, full of lawyerly things that resulted in him checking the flock in the morning before the craziness began and then not again until around five o'clock at night. Cubby and I followed him up to the pasture in the evening so Cubby could have a short outing and escape the confines of the four rooms for a few minutes.

When we got up to the pasture, we saw that two of the ewes had somehow gotten through the fence and were munching on the remains of the neighbors' garden. Whoopsy.

A. was hiking up to the top of the pasture to let the wayward ewes back in and so intent was he on corralling them that he didn't even notice the one lamb with an undocked tail and a trailing umbilical cord bleating in the barn. But Cubby and I saw it, so we announced the birth to the shepherd who was up at the top of the pasture trying to break down the fence to let the wandering ewes back in.

A. decided that the new mother needed some milking, as one side of her udder seemed to be swollen, so he called our resident milker (the MiL) away from her dinner preparations and Cubby and I returned to the house to monitor the interrupted cooking.

We mostly failed at that monitoring by the way, as I managed to turn the fish into essentially mush in my attempt to flip it and added a little too much milk to the potatoes that I was mashing while trying to keep Cubby from pulling mayonnaise and balsamic vinegar from the cupboard.

Maybe he was planning on making coleslaw?

ANYWAY.

So! Current lamb count: Eight--five girls, three boys. And one ewe left to deliver.