Lambs and children just seem to go together naturally. One of my favorite family videos is of my then two year old son leading a parade of bottle lambs.
We try to involve our children in most of the aspects of farming and ranching. They are expected to help with daily chores as their ages and abilities permit. We are active foster parents, so the composition of our family changes rather frequently and new children need to be taught the ropes.
The main lamb drop on our farm usually takes place in January and February. We have a small handful of 16 or so fiber ewes that lamb around Christmas time. We use these lambs as sort of a "warm-up" for the rest of the flock. Our fiber ewes are mostly Merinos, although we do have a few other breeds in this flock. We call them our fiber ewes because our main production goal with them is fine wool. We rarely sell these for meat, and the ewes pretty much get to hang around until they keel over from old age.
We shear about three weeks before the first ewes are due to lamb. We learned the hard way that failing to shear before lambing will result in the loss of more than half our lambs. The ewes, toasty and comfy in full fleece, will chose to pasture lamb. It only takes about 15 minutes for a wet newborn to die of exposure that way.
Shearing days are a big event on our farm. Children who attend public school get to stay home to help. For our homeschooled crew, it becomes part of our lesson plans. We make big meals and plenty of snacks. It usually takes two full days to shear. Our sheep shearer is a wonderful man with a large family of his own. He is very tolerant of the "help" the children give and is a patient teacher.
The night before shearing, we have a family meeting and all of the children are assigned tasks for the next two days. Hopefully, these are based on what they enjoy doing and what they are good at. One or two help to catch ewes for the shearer, another sorts and bags wool, another keeps the shearing floor clean. Depending on the number of children we have, one or two may help me in the kitchen. I always take lots of pictures. Children love to see themselves and it helps to keep memories alive; especially in the case of our foster children, who usually end up going back home or in some way moving on.
As the sheep are sheared, we sort or mark them by how close they to lambing appear to be. Ewes with really full udders are marked or sorted for the lambing pens. Some ewes get bred right away and others miss a cycle. The older children help to decide which pen a ewe should go in, or what mark they should receive (January or February lambing).
When shearing is finished and things settle down, we move into "pre-lambing" mode. We lamb indoors with jugs for new families. The final cleaning of the lambing barn takes place, pens are bedded, heat lamps checked and jugs set up. We try to save much of the simpler work for when the children have more free time on the weekends. They help with all of the lighter work.
The "jugs" or lambing pens are very important. Older, more experienced ewes rarely have trouble taking care of their lambs. But new moms often are somewhat confused by the lambing process and may not always realize that they have more than one baby. Sometime, too, their newly full udders are sore and they are reluctant to let lambs nurse. We keep new families "jugged" until we know that mother and babies are well bonded, and the babies have a good start in life. Sometimes it's for one day; sometimes as long as three or fours day. It just depends on the ewe and her lambs.
We expect the older children to help with barn checks on non-school nights. While we homeschool our biological children, we're not allowed to do that with foster children. Subsequently, we work around various schedules. The children are taught to recognize the signs of imminent lambing, which we try to teach with the early-lambing Merino ewes.
About half of our ewes lamb between 4:00 and 6:00 in the morning. The rest of lambings are spread out during the day, with a heavier concentration of lambs dropped between 3:00 and 6:00 in the evening. Night barn checks are really important and children assigned to them take them very seriously. They have to earn the privilege of being allowed the responsibility. We usually have one child make the 2:00 a.m. check. If any ewe looks imminent, the child wakes us up. I usually make the 4:00 a.m. check with whichever child is assigned, because lambings are generally about to start then.
The children assist in every aspect of the birthing process. With most ewes, the process is simply one of observation. We dip the lambs' navels in iodine and make sure they are actually getting colostrum. We weigh and ear tag them immediately and record the information in a small notebook, to be transferred to the computer database later in the day.
Complicated or problem births require my intervention. If I have to pull lambs, I have any available children standing by to help. Someone will dry off the lamb and iodine it, another will weigh and tag, and another will give it back to me. If I only have our youngest ones with me, someone is sent to get Dad!
Sick, cold or injured lambs are brought into the house. I have found that it is much, much easier to keep up with the high demands of these lambs if I have them handy. I can feed or doctor them as needed while still managing other household tasks. Some lambs are able to return to their mothers after they are more stable. A lamb separated too long from its mother is rarely accepted by her again, so most grow up on a bottle. I can't recall but one child who balked at helping with bottle lambs. Most are delighted to make bottles, keep them warm and give them companionship. I have pulled more than one lamb from a sleeping child's bed at night!
Inevitably, we deal with death. Some years are worse than others. One year, we had a lamb that had died in utero. I could not extract him and called the vet. She could not pull him either and had to cut him into pieces to get him out. It was gory and sad. However, all of the children observed this process. I had real reservations about it, but it turned into a great learning experience. We talked about medical care, what happens if you leave a dead baby in a mother, human deaths and other experiences. In our case, many of our foster children have been through very harrowing experiences before coming to our home. At first I thought the death experiences would be too much for them, but I realized later that it opened the door for more communication and sharing. The compassion these children show for orphan lambs is particularly moving. It ends up being a great healing experience for many of them.
One year, one ewe had triplets. She was a ditzy animal and wouldn't accept any of them, no matter what we tried. We had a doe goat that had just kidded a single (one kid) the day before. She had plenty of milk to start all four babies off well, had fostered before, and we easily grafted the lambs to her. At the time, we had an eight year old foster child who had two sisters. They were all living with us and she was struggling to understand what had happened to her. It turned out that all three lambs were ewes. It was the perfect opportunity to explain fostering, using the goat as an example. She came to me the next day and announced that she had named the lambs after herself and her sisters, and the ewe was now named after her mother. "I know the mom sheep loves her babies, but she can't take care of them right now. The goat mom loves all the babies, even the ones that aren't hers." Bingo.
The whole experience of lambing teaches children about the natural rhythms of birth and death, about seasons and times, about parenting. It brings the tremendous joy of new life, the amazing (or failed) bond between mother and child and the reality of hard work. But I have found that most children, even the littlest ones, embrace the experience.
Bobbi Andrzejek
Bobbi and her husband Patrick farm 65 acres in eastern South Dakota. They have a variety of animals that include sheep, goats, llamas, pigs, cows, peafowl, geese and chickens. Bobbi is passionate about fiber arts, self-sufficiency and children. Bobbi and Pat have two biological children (John and Deborah) at home and have been foster parents to 23 other children.
Email: bobbia@iw.net