posted 9 years ago
You know it is lambing season when…
1. Your neighbors think you are a heroine addict because when you go to buy a pack of gum, a hypodermic needle falls out of your jacket pocket from giving vaccinations to lambs!
2. No amount of concealer type of make-up can cover the bright dark spots under your eyes from weeks of checking the lambing shed every few hours!
3. A “good nights sleep” is described as 4 consecutive hours without having to get up!
4. Your facebook page doesn’t have an updated photo of your children or grandchildren, but it does have one of the triplets born two nights ago!
5. Your normally spotless home has laundry in the hamper, dirty dishes on the kitchen table and a mud room spotted with manure because a set of twins, triplets and a single all decided to arrive about the same time.
6. Your emotional highs and lows are in direct proportion to the farms lamb mortality rate.
7. Your wife is dressed up in rainbow leg warmers, muck boots and brown Carhartt jacket one moment holding a baby lamb covered in amniotic fluid, and an hour later is dressed in a fashionable dress and high heels ready to go to church…and you find yourself rather surprisingly attracted to both (see number 3 as to why).
8. You friends and family instinctively know that “we got 3 in the house” is not reference to children, pets or even cell phones, but rather Shepard code 101 for ‘weak lambs that are not doing so well’ and need to be brought in where it is warm.
9. You have never got any former medical training, but can give injections, perform enemas, know mineral deficiencies by the lambs symptoms, convert dry weights to liquid measure without looking them up, and even can be a midwife and withdraw multiple lambs from a single womb.
10. You spare no expense in buying medications, paying for gas, calling vets, researching on the internet, and conversing with neighbors just so that you can say, you tried your best to keep every lamb born alive. It is, after all, what being a sheep farmer is all about.
11. Your fingers are permanently stained a reddish-brown from dipping so many umbilical cords