Baby Lambs

I know it's redundant, like hot fire or wet rain, but what else can you say when a little white fluff with long, dangly legs and big, dark eyes cuddles against you?

Baby lamb! And so many of them!

It's lambing time and my sister-in-law arranged for us to visit her friend's farm. A farm filled with sheep, ducks, and chickens, and mud.

We arrived after only a brief moment of being lost, and then quickly clomped off down the hill, with me carrying the kitchen lamb (be still my maternal heart!).

{A kitchen lamb is one that doesn't bond with its mother and is then raised in the kitchen until it's older, so it's essentially bonded with people. Wilbur from Charlotte's Web was a "kitchen pig."}

Our destination were the sheep — ewes, a few rams, and lots and lots of little lambs — in the field below. We stood around with them for a while as they regarded us warily. Their guardian llama stood heads above and looked down on us. The sheep dog (who really looks just like a sheep!) came up and smelled us for minutes at a time. We tried to avoid stepping in the neat piles of black sheep poop.

The baa-ing was loud and cacophonous as the babies and mothers tried to stay together. The sounds (and smells) is how they know whose is whose and I was a bit distressed when our presence separated a few ewes from their lambs and each of their baa's grew persistent and desperate. Ewes were constantly pushing away little lambs who weren't theirs. Eventually it all got straightened out. (Phew!)

But the kitchen lamb stayed with us, at least until the end of our visit.

On the way home we talked about butchering and meat and eating it or not and our relationship to food — because Orlando brought it up. I have my own feelings and comfort around how and what I eat (and I do eat some meat), though as a family we make individual choices...

While we've had these conversations before, it seemed we went a little further this time. Because it was, of course, impossible to be on the farm without acknowledging why Farmer Michelle had gone through the experience of paying and caring for and breeding these sheep: The boy lambs will be butchered at the end of the season.

Holding that reality while holding that baby boy lamb can be its own education. And I realize that each education is as unique as the person in whose hands the lamb rests.


{Hm. This isn't the post I set out to write. I really just wanted to share how incredibly cute these lambs are! But there you go... }