You immediately thought of newborn babies reading this - as in human babies - right?
I am talking about sheep!
I was very lucky this spring and got to visit a farm with newborn lambs because one of my extra daughters - long explanation in another post here - works there. So my friend and I got to go in with the newborns, hold them and feed them. I smelled of sheep for hours afterwards, but it was soooo worth it!
The newborn lambs were incredibly cute and behaved like any other children - jumping around, climbing on their mothers, running away, nibbling on everything and complaining if they didn't get food fast enough.
We bottlefed a few of them, where the mother had too much milk or the mother was no longer taking care of the little ones.
They have different types of sheep on the farm and all of them had babies. The mothers were very protective of their young and some of them had adoted other newborns too. Normally you don't want more than two lambs to a mother, but sometimes nature brings surprises. But the mothers can't always care for three, so right after another birth, the "extra" lamb gets placed with another sheep and hopefully get adopted. Not always... and they have ways to try to make it happen.
We got to hear the sad stories too. One lamb was born with an open belly, all the intestines outside of it's body. It had to be put down, so we got to see buckets of dead lambs... I could have done without that, but it is the way of life.
One little lamb among all the white ones, was all black. I asked if it had been adopted too, but no, it was living with it's mom and siblings.
So sometimes there is a black sheep in the family!
