Checking In
This week, within the span of an hour, I received an info dump including the world trash crisis, the current mental health crisis, the philosophies of a popular college football coach, the negative physical effects of doomscrolling, heartbreaking failures in the foster system, and the long-reaching impacts of engineering on a particular car model.
It was the finals round for Original Oration in a regional forensics tournament hosted at the local high school, and I was lucky enough to be asked to judge.
I have very fond memories of participating on my high school debate team. For three years I practiced how to speak and think on my feet. I learned how to construct arguments based on facts, research, and logic, and how to disagree respectfully in a public forum. Most importantly, those years helped build the foundation of learning to appreciate that there are usually several reasonable perspectives and approaches to solving problems, and it is wise to be open to hearing, examining, and fully understanding those you may eventually reject.
The event I got to judge was a little different. These students had the task of informing their audience about a topic and persuading us to think or act in a certain way. In my day, the event may have been called “Persuasive Speech.”
I learned quite a bit that day! Did you know there’s a literal island’s worth of trash in the Pacific twice the size of Texas? Were you aware that doomscrolling is tied to our need for vigilance?
The things you can learn!
I don’t think it would qualify as doomscrolling, exactly, but I think Lucy’s lambing watch is a close cousin.
Here’s the deal. We don’t know exactly when Lucy interacted with sheep of the male persuasion. We only know when those interactions stopped.
We know that she is progressively getting enormous. She has entered “wider than she is tall” range.
We have learned that she is not very tolerant of discomfort. Or, perhaps more accurately, she is quite expressive about her discomfort. She grunts, sighs, bleats, baas, and positively hollers. She butts her head against the wall, the feed trough, the hay feeder, the straw bale, the water bucket, and has gone so far as to go shoulder-deep with her head into the water bucket and stay there for a good three to five minutes for a proper fuss.
She will go into statue mode, complete with the thousand-yard stare, for minutes, and you can see ripples along her enormous flank, she braces like she’s about to embark on a momentous journey, and we think YES! FINALLY! THE TIME HAS COME!
And then she urps up some cud and goes back to normal Lucyness.
And she’s done this for two weeks.
After the first few times, we were so convinced the time was now that we went on literal watch. I set alarms to check her every 90 minutes through the night.
For a fair few nights.
I checked her rear more times than I want to confess and took eleventy billion pics to compare with all the “How Do You Know When Your Sheep Is About to Lamb” sites that exist out there.
Because Lucy is only the second ewe to (potentially) lamb under our watch. The other was Jane, who managed to completely hide that she was pregnant until 20 minutes before she started labor. Suddenly she was rolling on the ground, showing parts she’d kept hidden (SURPRISE!), and shortly thereafter we had a little ram bleating out his arrival. Bing, bam, boom, lamb.
Lucy is not pulling a Jane.
Friends, we called our vet friend for advice. She came out and was kind enough to examine her…nothing doing. NOTHING.
Lucy is just pregnant.
Perpetually pregnant, enlarging at an astronomical rate, sometimes mad about it, and only becoming more of all of it.
Again, not exactly doomscrolling, but it feels awfully close. We go check the feed (drive by and lay eyes on Lucy), get the same news (no lambing activity, but sometimes sheepy disgruntlement at her current state of affairs), and a teaser (well, but does she look a little different? Better not wait too long before the next check…).
It’s funny how “just checking” can become something else entirely.
Greg’s Got Questions
Thank you to those of you who participated in the poll last week!
The winning question was: When you think of Lucy, what makes her unique compared to our other sheep, especially the baby dolls?
In addition to all the aspects of her personality that we’re learning during her pregnancy, Lucy is the smallest of all the adult ewes.
She’s lowest in the hierarchy and tends to be shoved and butted out of the way at the hay feeders and feed troughs until the bigger girls are finished.
She came from Illinois with the Valais and Merinos, and I wondered how the Arkansas Babydoll ewe flock would react to her when they were all put together. Lucy sort of drifts on the outskirts a bit. When she’s in a tighter group, it’s usually with Emma and Harriet, the Merino mother/lamb pair who she shared space with while Emma was lambing and the pair was bonding.
It will be interesting to see how the dynamics shift when Lucy is back with the ewe flock after her lambing time. Jane has become more willing to interact with us and assert herself around her lamb. Maybe Lucy will alter her behavior a bit, too?
Questions for YOU:
Would you be willing to take a moment and give some feedback on what you would like? I’d appreciate it! Thank you!
(As a matter of procedure, the poll function takes you to another page to submit your vote, so if that happens to you, you’re on the right track!)
Option 1: More photos.
Option 2: More videos.
Option 3: More knitting.
Option 4: More farm life.
Option 5: More educational tie-ins.
Happy knitting,
Kiersten J
