I think I may just love mint a little too much. But I love mint.

Ever since it’s shown up in the garden, I’ve been using it. If I don’t use it, it will take over my garden. It’s a good thing I like it, but we may still have to put up stronger boundaries for it. I keep giggling at the thought of letting it go wild in a pasture, and then finishing the lambs on it next spring. (Add a little garlic to their water — a great parasite help! — preseasoned Easter lamb surely is a selling point, right?) (Note to self: you do not need help selling lamb. You need help growing your flock faster.)

Mint and runny eggs — not usually a combination that most people would think of, right? It is SO GOOD. I wander around the garden before almost every meal to see what looks good. One morning I picked mint, parsley and chives from the garden, added some parm and garlic, and baked it with my eggs on a whim. (20 minutes at 400 degrees) I usually use spinach and chives, or cilantro, but mint turned out to be awesome. I have to force myself to use other herbs in my egg now. I think Frank might be getting a wee bit tired of it.

There’s nothing I like better on a hot summer’s day than ice cold cucumber spearmint soup. It’s so easy to make. Peel and seed four long cucumbers, place in blender with any combination of white things. I like buttermilk and cream cheese. Sour cream and yogurt. Heavy cream and dill. I use handfuls of spearmint, add a little salt, then stick it in the freezer for about an hour. (Set a timer that you can hear outside!) Garnish with fresh mint and just picked chives.

I was a Girl Scout growing up, and I sold about a million boxes of Thin Mint cookies. I needed a way to make my own, and the recipe from Small Batch Baking is pretty good. I use whole wheat flour and lard in my chocolate wafer cookie, and for the glaze, I pour one cup boiling water over about three cups of chocolate mint leaves and let it cool, then cover and place in the ice box for two or three days. Add that liquid to two cups of melted chocolate, add a little butter and the glaze is the perfect consistency. I keep frozen logs of the dough in the freezer, slice a few off while it’s still frozen so I can slice really thinly, and then store the finished cookies in the freezer. I love having an ice cold cookie whenever I want, usually two or three in a week.

Whenever Frank manages to steal some nice oranges from the loot destined for the pigs, we juice them. I juiced 4 oranges, added about a cup of mint extract (just mint I’d soaked in water for a few days in the icebox), and simple sugar made with organic sugar, to make 2 cups of fluid. I added 2 ounces of dark Bermuda rum to keep it from freezing too hard. Yum! Highly recommended.

What do I do when I only have a few ripe strawberries? (I mean, besides eat them straight away.) 1 cup strawberries, 2 cups mint leaves soaked in water for two days, then drained, 1 cup simple syrup, 1 ounce lemon vodka. Yum. Adding just a little bit of alcohol (rum, vodka) keeps the sorbet from turning into a solid brick in the freezer.

Things to write up later. Potato mint garlic potato salad, perfect to use with new red potatoes. Shredded pork, mint, and ginger on Thai egg noodles. Mint jelly that turned out a weird color because I use raw sugar and mint leaves and refuse to use green food coloring, but it tastes great!

Right in the middle of the rotten weather over the weekend, when it was alternatively raining really hard then snowing really hard with lots and lots of very strong wind, we had the first lamb of the season, of course. I just knew that was going to be the case. This was a first time mama and yet she still had that baby boy up, cleaned off and nursing within minutes. I love these Icelandic sheep. She could have had him in any of three sheds, but of course chose to do it right out in the open. Oy.

Ever since, I’ve been watching the sheepies extra carefully. The ewes all look wide enough to land an airplane on. We had a visitor (and customer) here today, and she got to see our second lamb of the season, this time a girl. I’m getting good enough that I could tell it was a girl from quite a ways away, from the back! I had to go check to be sure, of course. I noticed right away that this lamb had huge ears just like the first one.

The weather yesterday and today has just been absolutely glorious. Cold nights and warm days, big blue skies. Perfect sap weather! The puppies and I have been manning the evaporator all day long. I’m having so much fun with them. They are six weeks old now. They are pretty much potty trained, which is nice because I like to have them romping around my living room. I’ve been working on getting them to come on command, and that’s going pretty well, and just yesterday I started some “sit” training. Two of them still need homes. Pass the word!

I started this week on piglet and calf watch. I was getting worried about my ability to tell a pregnant sow from one who wasn’t, because where were my piglets?! Maybe she was just fat. She kept separating herself from the herd, not showing up for breakfast, hollowing out all sorts of possible farrowing locations, but then the next day, she’d be up and about, hungry, not looking like she was going to have those piglets afterall. I was really starting to doubt my pig farmer credentials.

Ella Mae’s due date was August 24th. We know the precise date she got pregnant because we did it through Artificial Insemination, using semen from Gordon, a registered American Milking Devon bull from nearby Sullivan. Elly was loving all of the extra attention she was getting from me, but as the week went on and on, and Tropical Storm Danny was headed our way, with lots of rain forecast. I decided then that we were having a boy calf, we’d name him Danny, because he was going to be born at the most inconvenient time possible.

On Monday night, Frank and I were headed back to the house from feeding the pigs (no piglets, woe), and I noticed Gracie (an Icelandic ewe) seemed to be licking a white bucket or something. What had I forgot out there? I went over to investigate and it turned out to be two surprise lambs! A spotted ewe lamb and a black ram lamb with sugar lips, so he’ll look just like George and Gracie, that gorgeous gray pattern. So I guess when I put the rams back in with the ewes, she was still in heat. That’s crazy — we had our first lambs the first week of April, and when that happens, I’ve always assumed it’s safe to put the boys back in. Oh, well. I’ll take them! They are adorable. I’ve been spending lots of time out cuddling them this week, while still waiting for piglets and the calf.

The heavy rain started in Friday night, as forecast. Danny was no longer hurricane strength and we didn’t get any wind to speak of, but the rain was something else. Saturday morning, Elly was down in the corner of the paddock, by the swamp, having her calf in the pouring rain, just as I expected. Why stay in a shed when you can be out in the rain? We let her be until I saw she was licking off a calf, and then went down to see what she had. As expected, it’s a boy, and we will name him Danny.

We got them up into a shed, which was tricky. I pulled Elly’s halter and Frank carried the baby. Getting them both uphill in the pouring rain and slippery mud was less than fun, but it didn’t really take that long. We got him to latch to a couple of teats so that I knew he was getting a belly full of colostrum. That was pretty easy — a lot like doing it for lambs, and easier than it was with Polly when she was born. (Hell, we had to have the vet out to have her tubed, because I just couldn’t get her to latch.)

I’m really pleased with Ella Mae. All that worry about her prolapse, all that advise to cull her. I’m really glad I went up to the annual meeting of the American Milking Devon association and talked with her previous owner and other farmers who have the breed. They all told me that her prolapse was minor, vulva only, and her previous owner said she’d looked like that last time and didn’t have a problem with the delivery. That certainly was the case this time as well. Whew! I’m glad we took a chance. She’s been just a dream cow, temperament wise, and is being a good mama. Go Elly! Lots of people are assuming I’m sad we had a boy instead of girl calf, but I’m not, really. I’m happy to grow my own beef.

Then, last evening, after we got home from celebratory sushi, we were going to feed the pigs but noticed that all of that morning’s apples were still there. That’s odd. It’s not rare for there to be some food from breakfast still left at dinner time. I try to do that, actually, so I know we don’t have hungry pigs. But all of them? Hmmm. So we went to investigate.

Well hidden, we found Mina with piglets, and the rest of the herd was sort of surrounding her location. I pretty much just took the picture and left them all alone. She had them nursing, it was starting to get dark, and seemed to have it all under control. I went back this morning, all are dong fine, and I think there are eight piglets. Yay! I’m glad I was right and she was closing to farrowing. I think I get a bit of my pig farmer cred back now. The weather this week is supposed to be lovely, nevermind that she had them at the height of the rain.

What a day. What a week! It’s like spring time all over again with the sounds of babies all over the farm.

There’s quite the farming community on Twitter. There’s a perception out there that farmers aren’t smart enough or connected enough or have time enough to Twitter. It turns out that a lot of Big Ag has guys out in big tractors and combines and such driving in big circles all the live long day. Many of them have iPhones or Blackberries with GPS and camera capabilities, and are kind of bored. They use their devices sort of like CB radios and chat. Lots of stuff about sports and the weather, but lots about jobs and the media. Jokes. Music. Conservative. Oh, and the bible and God. Always that.

There’s also a whole bunch of hippie granola liberal do-gooder organic sustainable farmers, all along the spectrum. Pious. Health nuts. Defensive. Strident. Funny.

There are homesteaders of both stripes, I’ve found. It’s probably split 50/50, just like everything else in this country.

It takes a while to figure out who is who, of course. If you look at the #agchat or #followfarmer, it’s all mixed up. #ProFood is sort of where I belong, but I find them on the strident obnoxious in your face, which I really can’t stand. They interrupt interesting conversations about actual farming issues — how to irrigate, how to deal with the weather, how to handle pests, or late blight — with political and emotional issues. Sometimes you just need to get the facts and opinions about late blight and don’t want to hear about anything else at the time. That’s just irritating. Shut up!

But some of the stuff from the big ag guys astounds me. OMG the lies. Keeping pigs indoors is done for the comfort and safety of the pigs? Seriously? Bullshit. It’s done for the convenience of the farmer. I know pigs. You can NOT tell me that they’d rather be confined like sardines in your barn instead of out in a wallow. Hell, mine won’t even go into the sheds I provide them when it’s below zero, if they have hay and a pigpile. Plus, they “rearrange” the wall on the sheds so the structures are barely stable, after a while.

Safety? We’ve had a horrible predator year this year, and have lost sheep and birds in horrifying numbers. We haven’t lost a single pig, period. It’s a stupid animal who goes into the pig pen. Three strands of electric is plenty porous for a fox or coyote to get in. Probably even a big raccoon. In the winter, they are behind “hog panels” that they sort of rearrange as their mood suits. Walk right in, Mr. Bear! A neighbor said that I don’t have pigs, I have small hippos. Hungry hippos. Cute, though.

Big Ag isn’t real fond of the coverage they are getting in the press right now. They HATE the Time story. The party line is to talk about how Time just slammed farmers while they are down. Don’t you love farmers? It’s right there next to baseball and apple pie to love farmers. Boo, Time.

They tell the story of “Livestock vs. Deadstock” to combat the coverage about the overuse of antibiotics. It’s an absolute sidestep. No one is advocating not using antibiotics to heal a sick animal. That’s not the point. It’s using antibiotics on animals who would be healthy if only they were eating grass instead of grain.

Dairy farmers are going out of business all across the country. It is devastating. I don’t know what the answer is to all of these questions. Clearly the way they were operating isn’t working. The regulations and subsidies and prices of milk and the import and exports and ack. I don’t understand it all. I don’t have time to try to understand it, to be honest.

It turns out that Twitter is sort of like cable tv. Well, what I hear about cable TV. My time to fart around on the internet and/or watch TV is pretty limited. Farming, to me, takes a lot of time, and I don’t have a Smart Phone or reliable wireless. I also have a pretty limited attention span. I kind of like to dip my toe in from time to time, but really, I’d rather go cuddle a sheep.

Or pester Elly, who may never have her calf. We are supposed to get rain from Danny tomorrow. If there are high winds, I think that’s the time she’ll freshen. Her official due date was the 24th, so she is now four days over due and not really showing many signs. She’s had a bit of mucus and her udders are filling up, but she’s still eating for two and quite active. She is loving all of the extra attention. If you can believe it, I haven’t quite figured out yet whether I will bottle feed the calf or not. I’m leaning toward letting her raise it, but she’s never done that before. Her calf was always bottle raised, and she led her life tethered in a stall.

It often happens this way on the farm — someone dies and someone is born, both on the same day.

Sadly, Misty died today from a ruptured spleen, delivered by a kick from our new male llama. We had let them get to know each other, and didn’t leave them alone until there was no spitting and they were familiar with each other. But he’s a kicker — both Frank and I have hoof marks on our arms from his first days here. I’m so depressed about it. Misty was so neat. Now having lost both her and her sister Mary, I’m not sure I want to have llamas anymore. So much individual personality, and yet their benefit to our farm is intangible. The horses can take the place as guard critters. No one is going to mess with Prince or Pearl. Poor Misty. I’m glad to have known her, and she’ll be greatly missed.

Right after I found Misty, I noticed that Serena had a lamb. She’s a first time mama, and did really well. Had him up and claimed in no time. I jugged them to be on the safe side, but she’s a great mama. I keep thinking we are done with lambing for the year, but because we left Spike in with his girls so long, I guess he eventually settled them after all. This little one is a moorit ram lamb. After her sister had a moorit ewe lamb earlier, I spoke to Mike Kelley to see if Spike carried moorit in his line, and he does. I’m thrilled. Moorit sheep are my very favorite. I’d love to have a whole flock this color. There’s only Lily left to lamb, if she’s going to. She doesn’t look bagged up at all, but who knows.

I had a surprise this morning. I thought I was done with lambing, and that none of Spike’s girls caught. I figured his troubles with parasites all last summer stunted his maturity, but I’d give him another year to see if he catches up.

But I woke up this morning to a beautiful new moorit ewe lamb out of Venus. Venus was one of my lambs last year, so I wouldn’t have been heart-broken if she didn’t catch, but thought it was worth attempting. She had the baby up and cleaned, but I hadn’t seen any nursing, so I jugged them.

The curious bit is that the two days that Miguel got out and into that pen were January 13th and February 3rd. That would make due dates of May 28th or June 28, and today is June 2nd.

So now I’ve got to figure out of Spike has any moorit in his background. We know Venus does, because Miguel is her daddy, and he’s moorit.

Spike’s parentage is this, from Dancing Lamb Farm:

Sire: DL-101R

Dam: TNY-148L

This black, horned, ewe lamb is out of my milkiest pureblood Icelandic ewe. Her mom produced more milk than most of my dairy cross ewes last year. One of the Lacaune crosses is the only one to produce more. I’m keeping her twin sister. She would be an excellant choice for someone wanting a true triple purpose sheep (milk, fiber, meat). She’s being bred to DL-325S out of Brendon, an Aboti son with great fleece.

Clicking on the breed book just makes my brain bleed. I’m hoping Frank will figure it out.

I so want to keep this little girl! Moorit is my favorite of all the Icelandic sheep colors, and though I had three moorit lambs this year, all of them are boys.

Marilyn separated herself from the herd last night, and I fully expected to find lambs from her this morning. Instead, she was down, and when I went to check her out, I found she had a prolapse. I’d never actually seen one before, but it was all we could think of. It looked like a basketball coming out her back side. Since we’ve never dealt with this before, I called the vet and Jan came out in about an hour.

After she got the prolapse back inside, she found Marilyn wasn’t that dilated, but was straining and would push the prolapse back out if left alone. So she used her fingers to manually dilate the cervix, which only took a few minutes. It wasn’t too painful, I could tell, but I’m sure it wasn’t comfortable. It brought back awful memories of my own labors all those years ago. Ugh!

Soon enough, though, she was dilated enough for Jan to pull out two lambs. (I didn’t know you could sort of force dilation that way.) First was a little white ewe lamb, and I was worried when I saw it that it was dead, but she felt a heartbeat, swung her a little to clear out the lungs and sure enough, she started breathing. We put the lamb up near Marilyn’s head and she started cleaning her straight away, while Jan delivered another white lamb, this time a ram with HUGE horn buds.

Mother and babes are all doing fine. I’ve got them jugged, down near where I still have Naomi and Selina with their lambs. (Naomi didn’t have another overnight, so it looks like she just had the one single ewe lamb and the two moorit ram lambs are indeed Selina’s, like I had originally thought.) We are to give Marilyn penicillin for a couple of days, just to be on the safe side, and considering how dirty that prolapse got that makes a lot of sense to me.

Hopefully, we won’t have another prolapse, but now that we’ve seen how to handle it first hand, I guess we’ll do it on our own next time and not need to call the vet. But I’m so grateful we have a vet who makes farm calls!

Fiona started us off with a bang this morning. We woke up to two lambs, a moorit badger-faced boy and a black ewe lamb. She’s always got things under control, and I didn’t jug her. Basically, she took over one of the sheds and kicked everyone out, which is fine. It was a beautiful day, so they didn’t need to be inside anyway!

Later in the afternoon, I brought all of the sheepies over some treats, and gave Fiona some brocolli stems, which she loves. That convinced her to leave the lambs with me for a few minutes, and I got a quick video of the lambs. I love the way baby lambs sound. So distinctive!

Naomi lambed in the early afternoon, after separating herself from the herd, so I knew she was the next to go. She had a little black badger-face ewe lamb that looks exactly like her! Cute. I wasn’t sure she was done, though, so I didn’t go check for sex or anything for a while, and she seemed fine, so I left her alone and we kept working on running fence around where my garden is going to go.

I went back to check about 20 minutes later, and there was mayhem in the pen — two little moorit ram lambs not sure who their mama was, and Selina and Naomi both trying to claim them both. I was pretty convinced that both ram lambs were Selina’s, so jugged them that way, but one of them slipped through the pallet into where I had Naomi jugged, and she had him nursing, so maybe I was wrong and Selina didn’t twin, but Naomi did. I’m leaving them alone for a bit to see how it sorts out. It’s plausible either way, since Miguel is the daddy of both.What a day. We’ve never had three ewes go on the first day, and we still might have two more tonight. Both Doppa and June are showing signs.

We brought the sheep home from Marlborough today. They’d gotten out three times in the last week and attacked their hostesses garden. Clearly not okay. And because it was a fencing issue, I had to go. That’s a 2-3 hour trip, and if I do it too often I lose the contract I’m working on. That’s even more not ok.

Lisa also noticed that Leon was really upset yesterday, so she counted noses, and sure enough, Bill is missing. She called Dave down at Wellscroft where we buy all our fence and offered to pay him to meet us there to figure out the problem. He told her not to bother. It’s coyotes. The Marlborough-Harrisville area is having serious coyote issues this year.

“You’ve got Icelandics, right? Do you have a leadersheep? You’re finding them down by the barn? You know what I think about Icelandics and fences, but listen to your leadersheep. She’s pulling them out of green pasture to hide in the barn. What is she telling you?”

We talked it over. We have no pasture. We’ll be feeding hay, which means we can’t sell pastured lamb. On the other hand, I’ve wasted 8 hours this week going to Marlborough, and if I bill 14 more hours in a month it buys the hay for everyone including Prince and Pearl. So the sheepies are home.

When we got there today with the trailer to bring them home in, it was really clear where the coyotes had gotten in. We are not only down Bill, but also another lamb. We must remember to fix that strand before we try to use it again. Actually, we are really not that impressed with using electronet anymore at all, now that we own a dozen strands.

Lisa is taking a cheese class this weekend, so for now they’re in with the ewe lambs, eating hay. Sunday night or Monday we’ll set things up as best we can and we’ll put the hours we’ve spent traveling to Marlborough into making our own pasture.

This isn’t a particularly good success story for Other People’s Pasture. It was great pasture, and they really wanted our sheep to keep it open for them, but they had no fencing at all, and weren’t willing to even give the sheep water every day, so either we or Valerie had to make the trip three or four times a week.

We took the truck into town yesterday, so we could visit Wellscroft Farm to pick up some electrical tape and portable fencing to use for the horses, for a hopeless search for heirloom tomato plants, and to visit the new Cheshire Horse store.

Dave showed me how to stop the puppy from barking while he waited in the truck. Brilliant and worth the visit. He’s so eager to please and I so rarely need to scold him that it worked like a charm. I just grabbed his muzzle very firmly and said “no, don’t you do it again” and shook him firmly for about a second. When I walked away, he tentatively tried another, so I returned and did it again. I walked away, and he whimpered softly. I turned back and glared at him, and even that stopped. I went back three, four minutes later and praised him, showed him his chew toy, left again. We stayed about 15 minutes more, and he was silent the whole time.

We then dropped him off with Valerie for babysitting while we ran the rest of the errands. We are clearly still at the limits of his good behavior ability. It is so handy to have her near by. When both she and Jeremy were home for the weekend and helping on the farm, it was amazing how much got done. We clearly should have started this venture before the kids left for college. Doh.

We spoke to a Purina rep while at Cheshire Horse. We are looking for a pellet that will feed all critters, rather than having six different kinds of feed. She suggested Allstock, which we are trying two bags of. We also got special Mare/foal food for Pearl. She will have to be supplemented for a while, specially. I can’t believe we are going to have a baby horse soon. It’s a bit overwhelming, that thought.

I never did start my tomato seeds this spring. I just had no time or energy, and we’d misplaced the seed packets from three years ago. Frank finally found them yesterday, which inspired me to clean up the raised bed, anyway. It’s just too late to start them now, so I searched all over Keene for something worth planting. I couldn’t find anyone growing Heirloom Tomatoes, so there’s clearly a market niche there for me still. There was three years ago, so I guess I’m glad to see I can help fill it again, but next year. In the meantime, I reminded myself that home grown tomatoes of most any type are better than most any type of store bought ones. I now have enough random stuff to fill that raised bed, waiting to get planted.

We have some bark mulch being delivered tonight. I really need as much help as I can get as I weed these beds. It is so much work to get them back under control, and I have to keep myself from being overwhelmed with how much work there is to do. I have time. I don’t have a garden tour or something to prepare for. There’s no deadline on my flower beds, and I really enjoy having them, so it is okay to take my time on them. I worry that some gardeners coming out to save the trillium will sneer at how weedy they are, but it is more important to save these plants than save my ego.

The traffic in Keene was horrific. They have started on the construction for the new circle thingie, and that is right in the middle of where we go for hardware purchases, animal feed, and the state liquor store. At least the grocery store is on the other side of town, though I’m cooking so much stuff these days that we are down to an every other week trip. That should get even less painful as I grow our own veggies again.

Look who we saw when we entered our driveway. It was really hard not to laugh. They saw the truck, and quickly turned around to walk all the way back down the 800 foot driveway. Thank god they’d already been introduced to the Red Scoop of Joy. Getting them back in was pretty easy. There was only one who was too stupid to get the concept of a gate, but Frank and I handled her in a couple of irritating minutes. He kept muttering “I thought pigs were supposed to be smart, little chorizo” as we went round and round in circles.

(I watched to see how they are getting out. They are rooting under the cattle panel, lifting it with their noses. We need to get them trained to an electric fence quick like before they learn to tunnel.)

We quickly went to all the evening chores. Hay for the horses, water all around, bottle baby fed. He is finally, finally coming in to be fed, rather than needing to be chased. I’m good with a crook, but man. If you are hungry, come have it and stop crying about it. We lost his mama to worms, sadly, our first of the season. I need to call the vet, as soon as they open today.

I heard someone calling “is anyone home?” and called out to Frank that someone was here. “Are you missing a llama?” I looked around, and sure enough, no Misty. Damn it. “Yes, we are”, I told Rick, our neighbor from down the road. He and Liz own these pretty horses. (She had visited last weekend to get us to sign a petition about the house with the awful puppy mill. She wants one of the feeder pigs for a roast in August. Sold. One down, two to go.)

Rick said a neighbor had called him with a llama on his deck. (I must remember to ask for that picture.) He figured it was ours and he was right. I finished feeding the baby while Frank finished water duty, then we jumped into the truck with some grain and the red scoop of joy. We found her about a mile away, over near the Quinn’s, where we’d put the critters two summers ago.

I think she is looking for her sister, poor thing. She was completely uninterested in grain of any sort, and in a panic, quite upset. Stubborn, no moving, pulled off her halter. It took every guile of ours and three sets of neighbors (two of whom have horses) to get her back home. We finally shoved her into one of their trailers.

I don’t like her condition. I had a lot of time to feel her yesterday, and I think she is losing weight since the vet was here a week ago when Mary died. She won’t eat any grain, unless I feed it to her by hand. Then she’ll eat it. Poor thing. Everyone seems to think I need to get her another llama buddy. I’m feeling so overwhelmed at the thought of another animal, though. A new llama, especially a rescue, needs time and attention, and I just don’t think I have either to spare. I’m really not sure what to do about her.

She also really, really doesn’t like the pigs. She looks at them and makes her danger call warning, all. day. long. I wonder if it is worth the stress on her to rehalter her and bring her over to meet them in person. I’m also not sure what to make of the fact that she was out at the same time the pigs were. Did she see the break-out and go try to bring them back in, as she does with the sheep? And then go visit the Quinn’s, where she might find her sister? I’m just not sure of the sequence or motivation.

I’m not sure who it was that said yesterday that we sure have our hands full. We sure do. I’m so glad we have such helpful (and understanding) neighbors. I need to think of something nice to bring them. (honey? eggs?)

(oh yeah. We have the chickens restricted to the coop in the mornings now. We can’t figure out where they are laying. Again. I think they might be doing it under the deck, where I can’t see. The puppy has found several. I wonder if I can train him to bring them to me.)

I’m trying to remember that keeping this journal helps me. I felt a bit of a jinx by writing a sheep and llama update, patting ourself on the back for a fairly easy lambing season. We then promptly lost a mama and got a bottle baby, and had issues with attachment with Gracie and her baby. I’m not normally that superstitious, but Murphy isn’t my friend, really. I do know that this all would have happened anyway.