Lambs are arriving!!!

The first lamb arrived safely last monday and is healthy and bouncing around outside in the barnyard. Yesterday, one of our Icelandics had twins and seemed confused and uninterested in nursing them. We left them in the barn with Mom until this morning but they were just too cold and hungry to persevere with that strategy so we brought them inside. The white one (Tom calls him Clinton) had gotten himself stuck in the gate as well and he was really a mess when Henning found him at 7:30 a.m. His mouth was cold and he was half frozen. I checked the internet for advice and filled a sink with warm water and submerged him for an hour. That got his temp up and then Henning slid a piece of tubing down his throat directly into his tummy and we got 4 oz of colustrum into him. Luckily, I had bought colustrum, a baby bottle and all that sort of stuff last week. We spent the day feeding and warming both lambs and if we are lucky, Clinton may survive. As I write this at 9:30 pm, they are both in a box in front of the kitchen stove and fast asleep after their bedtime feeding.

renovations

We've been busy renovating the farmhouse. First, filling a million nailholes, repairing damaged window frames and painting the sunroom which was a god-awful faux finished brownish mess. Now it is a calm cream with new frames on the arched windows and all the woodwork painted creamy white. The kitchen was a garish green and is now the same cream colour. My lovely pine cabinets suffered too much to be restored and Tom sanded them down and we painted them an antique oxblood colour which looks really nice with the white porcelain knobs and the Italian tile on the backsplash. Henning spent a day sanding down the pine door to the living room and it is now beautifully refinished.

We got our lamb from the abbatoir yesterday and tonight I made a lamb curry with home-made naan. Delicious. Still running out at intervals to see if any sheep are showing signs of lambing but nothing happening yet. I really hope they wait until March as we could still have lots of really cold weather. Today was mild..plus five and supposed to be mild until the weekend. But I recall those minus thirty days at the end of February!

We got our smoked bacon from Reiche's the other day and fried some up for breakfast. Delicious! Then Tomasz decided to make home-made "sledzie" which is pickled herring and insisted we have it the traditional way with rye bread, sour cream and a shot of vodka. Delicious also. (Not recommended as a breakfast dish).