Okay, THAT was a surprise!

I got a message on MSN this morning from The Boy.

Mom?

Yes..

Ewen  (the calf) is in with the sheep, and the wether is in with the cow, and Jaws has a lamb.

A lamb???

We didn’t even think Jaws was pregnant, never mind due!

As for the rest, well, Ewen does jump the fence to visit the sheep sometimes. We get him out of there, so that nobody gets hurt, but he was not fussing and he jumped back into his own pasture as soon as The Boy went outside. The wether was encouraged to return where he belonged, and once outside, The Boy discovered that Jaws not only had one lamb, she had twin boys!

He got them into the barn, fed their mama, got her some water, and trimmed up her (really awful) shearing job so that the lambs could locate their milk. I called to see how things were going and heard “Mom, this sheep has no udder. I can’t even FIND it!” Jaws does have a rather oddly shaped udder, the teats are farther to the side than on most sheep, so he had a bit of work to get the wool tags cleared out so that he (and the lambs) could find the business end of things, but all is well and the babies are happy and nursing well. He’s calling them Fred and Frank (this is an F year at our house – I know, we’re not in line with the ‘official naming alphabet’, but it works for us.)

I was met by a grinning Boy when I got home. “We have three lambs now!” Who else? Cherub, of course! The only 2 non-seasonal breeders we have here both had their lambs today, thankfully a very warm and reasonably dry February day (for Alberta, anyhow) and my amazing kid just calmly took care of all the details and got everyone where they needed to be. Cherub wasn’t doing a good job of cleaning off her lamb, so he handed the lamb to Bob the dog who took care of that task. Bob is now snoozing in the barn, just outside the pens where the sheep are. Bob loves lambing season.

Sheep are great.

We *should* have peace and quiet on the lambing front until Easter now – the Icelandics are strongly seasonal breeders and lamb much later in the spring, and based on what we saw in the pasture last fall, we are expecting more surprises nearer to April.

Then again, sheep like to surprise you, so I guess we’ll just keep checking out the window and see what happens!