Dave

Lambing season starts around the end of February, so from this time onwards, my husband is very busy looking after thousands of ewes and newborn lambs.  It is an accepted fact in the farming industry, that from the moment a sheep enters this world, it is looking for the quickest way to leave as it possibly can and it's my husband's job to stop them doing so.

There are many abandoned and orphaned lambs which end up being reared by hand, usually living all together in a barn until they are old enough to be turned out to a field.

From about the end of February, the children and I start bleating (!) to my husband that we would like to look after a lamb but he always say no, as he is worried that we will get too attached and tears will ensue when it is time for the lamb to leave. 

I think my husband felt the only way to put a stop to our constant requests, was to give in and at the start of the Easter holidays, Dave came to stay. He was born on the Thursday, one of a pair of twins, but his mother took against him and left him to fend for himself. This is him sitting on my lap the first evening he spent with us.

He was really quite robust compared to some of the sorry states that my husband has rescued, although you can see that he hadn't grown into his skin yet. 

Dave was too small to sleep outside without his mum to keep him warm, so we tucked him up in a corner of the kitchen.  The first night we had him, he was very vocal and we thought he must be missing his mum and brother.  I'd heard that if you put a cuddly toy in with them, it stops them being lonely.  We found the largest one we could, which happened to be a cow, and it worked.  Dave curled up to the cow and went straight to sleep.  Ahh.  I was a bit concerned that Dave might develop an identity crisis being with a cow, but he seemed to cope OK.
 

We settled into the rhythm of bottle feeding, with the first feed at 6.00am, followed by four-hourly feeds, with his last feed at 10.00pm. I slipped right back into preparing bottles and early morning feeds, it was just like having a baby again!

Dave was such a joy to look after.  He'd go straight into the garden after his first feed and spend the whole day gamboling around until it was time to go to bed.  Lambs really do jump about with all four feet off the ground!

As the holidays came to an end, we knew that Dave would have to move on. We were all very brave and planned that he would go on the Saturday morning of last weekend of the holidays.  Saturday came and went, and we couldn't bear to let him go. 

We decided to hang onto him until the last minute and he went off to his new home early on the Tuesday morning, before we went back to school.

Dave had proved to be such a special lamb, that we couldn't let him join the other lambs.  My husband knows a lovely couple who have a smallholding.  They have a tiny flock of sheep, made up of many other 'Daves', so off he went to spend the rest of his days with them and with the promise that we could visit him whenever we wanted.