Typical first proper day of the school holidays - rain rain rain! Absolutely no possibility for a mummy to sneak off into the garden for a spot of fun weeding (!).
However, E off to her first ever sleepover, and when we arrived to drop her off we were greeted by the little friend in a state of high excitement as their first ever lambs had arrived the previous evening. The family have a smallholding but are fairly new to the enterprise and this is the first time that they have put their ewes to the ram....and of course the first babies decided to make their appearance on the one evening when the mum of the house happened to have been left 'home alone' for once so had to call for the help of an experienced neighbour, who luckily was happy to help out. Apparently mummy sheep did a marvellous job at the technical end of things without needing much involvement, but having had the first lamb unexpectedly whilst out in the field, it took a bit of a circus act to coax her into the barn and the lambing pen in order to finish the job and deliver the other lamb.
But as we saw this afternoon, mum and babies look like they are doing fab:
There is a girl lamb and a boy lamb, here's the girl lamb below:
These are Dorset Downs sheep, which have an excellent reputation as mothers, fortunately, but my goodness, they are tall and wide! You would have to be quite strong to make one of these large ladies go somewhere if she didn't want to....
I took full advantage of my visit by asking if I could photo their seriously meaty orchard protection cages:
Husband of the house likes to over-engineer things as much as A does, so I thought he might like to see what could be expected of him to protect any newly planted fruit trees here at Windy Acre from the dastardly predations of the demon bunny. Admittedly, these were built to protect the young trees as much from the weighty scratchings of the sheep as from deer, badger and rabbit nibbling, but you get the concept at least.
Back home we had a visit by our friendly builder to quote for starting the work to remedy our damp east gable wall, and preliminary ideas chat regarding the extension of the kitchen with a new master bedroom above....as is always the way with such conversations, some parts look to be more straightforward than others...But the ball is rolling and that's what is important. Certainly regarding the damp wall, as the sooner its starting to breathe and dry out the better.
Fingers crossed for a quiet night over in the sleepover house x
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