frigga (warning! lamb birthing pictures to follow)

olive had her lamb last weekend. i was worried about olive as she is such a small ewe. i had not intended to breed her this year, but it seemed she and pattur had other plans. i had separated them but there was a time in december where i came up in the morning to find the fence knocked over and everyone was together. i had to leave them that way for a day until we fixed the fence. and voila! about a month ago i realized olive was expecting.

so, she was under close watch as i waited for her lamb to come. i was thankful that it was early sunday morning; bright, sunny, warm and with the whole day ahead of us incase we needed the vet.

i knew she had started stage one of labor the day before. she was restless and laying down by herself a lot. but it wasn't until sunday morning that stage two was in full swing. she chose to lay down in the stall, so i just quietly closed her in there and watched and waited.

i was so relieved to find two front hooves and a little snout emerging










after a good deal of pushing, i realized the lamb was stuck! i had seen this level of 'stuck' before when i did the lambing week at the heifer project. i paged the vet and decided to try helping why i waited. i was able to carefully get the head 'unstuck'. but then the next few pushes were pretty futile. nothing was moving. i could tell this was a BIG lamb. so i decided to pull. at this point i think i have about every single lamb pulling technique and malpresentation problem memorized from this book, so i was fairly confident on what i wanted to do. i wanted to get one leg free so to angle the lambs shoulders making it as narrow as possible. thankfully it worked. as i pulled one leg forward and down, the lamb was instantly freed! with the next push there was a whole lot of lamb and olive took a break so i grabbed my camera:










then the next push and she was out. what a relief.










introducing frigga, a grey ewe lamb: