I wrote a lot last week about the hard part of lambing, it’s only fair to write about the sweet part, which began on our return from New York. There are no more births to come, we had four lambs, lost one, Ma’s delivery was a struggle. Today we docked the tails of the new lambs and next week we will band (castrate) Jack and we will be finished with the lambing process.

We are not planning to do it again, I’ll give all the lambing tools to Darryl Kuehne, our farmer friend. I’ve done it a bunch of times, I wanted to do it with Maria, this is enough for both of us, I think. But now, it is a pleasure to have these lambs. In the evening, we come out and see them dancing and running and jumping together across the pasture. The lambs are friendly, they are happy to come and sniff us and be held, their mothers watching warily.

The weather has been beautiful, dry and warm, the memory of the winter is fading. It is a joy to see the ewes and their lambs out in the pasture grazing. We need to figure out how re-acclimate the lambs and the donkeys, but not for a few weeks. There is a hard part to having animals, there is a sweet part. Life itself.