4+2, and a welly goes astray

First of all may I wish you a happy and successful new year, and hope that you make headway along the pathway of your lives. 

This is my boot / wellington. It was not on my foot. It was stuck in the mud of the sheep paddock. My foot was in the boot / wellington, then it was not. My foot became in the mud. Mud is sticky and sinky. It had embraced the welly like a long lost friend just at the moment when I was lifing up my foot, welly and all, but the welly did not come with my foot, it stayed in the mud. Hey presto! Foot crashed down in the wet, cold, slurpy, poo filled mud.  

And then came the long hobble back to the house and the wonderful warmth of a bowl of hot water in which my foot became cleansed. Such a simple task, the washing off of the foot, but it was delicious. We might still be having mild and quite sunny weather, but the ground is still awfully cold on the the naked foot. 

Meanwhile, Lester was out in the Back Field rotovating this year's veg plot. We have promised ourselves that we shall make a stirling effort all through the growing season and not run out of steam mid way through the season like we did in 2011 and 2012, both years becoming very busy during the summer which diverted us away from tending the veg plot.  

..... and we have four new arrivals, two goatlings and two lambs. All were OK last night, but had to be left out in the field, their mums not wanting to come back into shelter for the night. These little family units need to bond, so we did not interfere, hoping that no fox would take it into their heads to rob the mums of their youngsters. Continually we are having to take a step back and adopt a 'wait and see' approach to our animals. A couple of days ago two ewes refused to co-operate with their companion members in the flock .....

..... both were limping slightly, so we left them to it. There has been a lot of bashing and barging going on lately, especially when the goats were with the sheep, the dynamics of the two species resulting in some rough behaviour, especially at breakfast and supper time. With the sheep being so plump with their unborn lambs they are top heavy so any bash on their rear can make them quite sore. Anyway, that is what we think, as we keep a watchful eye on these two. One is moving better, but the other one still prefers to stay in the field at night. 

We also had problems with the mum of the two lambs born last week. An overnight barging left her with a damaged leg she could hardly walk on, so we kept her penned while we watched her. Up until the moment she received her injury she was busy rejecting the second born lamb, but we did not interfere, thinking that nature needed to take its course,which it sort of did, because by having the injury she could not move around hardly at all and spent two days lying down, which gave that second lamb an opportunity to make her attach to him. We did not intervene. We stood back. It was hard to do that and not charge in and 'save' the lamb from the roughness of his mum's rejection, but the wounded leg of the mum saved him from becoming an orphan and he is now a hooligan with his sister, with a mum to snuggle up to when he needs to. 

The goats are now in the Tall Barn at night, so the barging has lessened. The ram is still running with the ewes, and he is also responsible for roughness, but we can't do anything about that at the moment. He needs to be put in a paddock away from the girls, and that we shall do when time and money permits. There is a continual drain on our finances as we continue to sort out our house and smallholding. Not many people do the two things at the same time. We are. The Universe gave us this opportunity to live a different sort of life, and we took up the opportunity when it arrived, even though we did not know how it was going to work out. We still don't. Lester's work with the UK is diminishing, so we don't know where funds are going to come from, all we can do is keep faith that they will arrive from somewhere. And I hope that when the Universe presents you with an opportunity to change your life around, that you will have the courage to take that opportunity up, even if you don't know how the hell it is going to pan out, and that is what I would wish for you this coming year of 2013.