New Family Member?

A few days ago, my family got the surprise of our lives. When my dad went to the farm to put the sheep up for the night, the number of sheep was wrong. Luckily, we hadn’t lost any. There was one more than there was supposed to be.

My dad’s sheep, Teaka, had another baby. When we bought her, she came with her daughter, Abby. The woman who sold her to us warned us that she might be bred, but since Dad is notorious for wrongly guessing when and if a sheep is pregnant, we weren’t expecting much.

Here’s the new baby! She’s still wet in this picture, and she’s still unnamed. We’re thinking Lady Baba, a riff on the pop singer, but my little brother says no. Either way, she’ll be named soon, and she’ll be growing, just like our other new arrival, Frederick. He already has little horns, and he’s only three weeks old. They grow up so fast!

My friend keeps telling me how much she looks like a Holstein cow. She kind of does! We don’t know who the father of this little angel is, so we don’t really know where she gets her pattern. We do know, however, that her older sister is a little angry at her. We had to separate the mom and baby from the big sister, because the big sister was hogging all the milk. Since Abby is more than old enough to be weaned, it’s no big deal on that front, but it is the first time she’s been separated from her mother. Teaka is taking it pretty well, since she has a new little one to baby, but Abby has been pitching a fit. Luckily she’s with her friends, Sophia and Nikolai, along with Sophia’s cranky mom.

Although we were not expecting the unnamed baby sheep, we’re happy to have her.

Hopefully this is the only surprise we get this week, as I’m headed to Vanderbilt Hospital for a rheumatology appointment, and my grandpa has recently been in the hospital. Surprise sheep? Good! Surprise costly diagnoses? Not fun!