Sleep

Spring is always such a busy time. The days are lengthening, baby animals are being born, chicks are arriving, the garden needs to get in. There’s certainly never a lack of things to do! Lambing season is especially intense due to the needs of the ewes and lambs at this delicate time.

When we first started lambing on our farm, we knew that we would need to check the ewes every two hours. But that meant setting the alarm, getting up, throwing on the chore coat and boots and hat and trudging out to the barn, then coming back, pulling all the gear off, and climbing back into bed…only to set the alarm for another two hours.

Kara eventually invested in a cot, with the idea of sleeping in the barn, but it can be mighty cold out there in springtime! So, the cot theory didn’t last long.

Eventually, we invested in a barn camera, which threw a signal from the barn to a receiver in the farmhouse, and we could watch the camera on the old TV set up in the bedroom. A mess of black wires and antennae, the setup was crude at best. The microwave had to be unplugged, as well as all the cordless phones because they interfered with the visual signal. The truck couldn’t be parked in front of the garage because it blocked the line-of-sight for the receiver.

Even with the view clear and the devices turned off, staticy white lines still flashed across the screen, lighting the room like some old horror film. The interference made it difficult to tell if a tiny moving object was a lamb on the ground or a figment of the imagination. The alarm still had to be set for every two hours, but this time instead of packing on all the farm chore gear and trudging across the lawn, Mom and Kara would scrutinize the fuzzy image, bantering over whether something needed their attention enough to warrant the chore clothes and the trudging.

But take any rectangular room and try to get one camera to cover all the space evenly enough to tell what’s going on in the corners? Impossible! So we added a second, and eventually a third. The visual would shuffle between the views, lingering a few seconds on each.

Camera set-up day was an odd charade of Mom planted by the TV with a walkie-talkie, Kara up on the ladder adjusting the camera, and me walking through the barn to all the different corners (as if I was a sheep) to see if all the blind spots were covered. Invariably, a ewe would deliver right where two cameras didn’t quite show a spot along the wall, and we’d risk missing a delivery.

“The angle is crooked,” Mom’s voice came over the two-way radio. Kara would come up to the camera, her face filling the view, and give it a twist.

“Woah, stop, the other way! Now the world is upside down.”

Set the alarm for every two hours. The screen is still streaked with white, the image is still rather fuzzy, and now they had to wait for the rotation to go from camera to camera and back again to watch for an imminent delivery.

Then we updated the system to be able to stream the signal to a webpage, then download it to a device, like a computer or smartphone. This worked most of the time, except that our internet speed would more than occasionally choke up from too much data uploading to support the images.

As a backup, Mom and Kara kept the TV going in the bedroom, but now we could watch the cameras from the barn while working at the Creamery. Last year, Steve helped us optimize our internet relay throughout the farm so that the barn camera signal could come in strong throughout campus.

This year, instead of the flickering TV signal, we went all digital, with laptops running by our beds and a flatscreen in the Creamery dining room playing the “sheep channel” for checking in on the mommas. This didn’t negate getting up at night, though, watching the rotating views (one of which is infrared for a different night visibility angle). The ewes would be loafing about, chewing cud (nothing too imminent), or one would be up pacing, or standing with her head down in the corner (signs that labor has begun).

It’s never just a glance and go back to sleep check-in, though. If the ewe is standing in the corner, the question is whether a water bag has presented or if she’s pushing, which isn’t always easy to tell when she might be all of two or three inches tall on the screen. It’s a critical decision for the health of the ewe or the lambs whether it’s time for us to make the trek out to the barn and assist, so camera watching can drag on for hours when a ewe has a long labor before a baby presents. Sometimes she’ll look like she’s imminent for days before delivering.

Ninety lambs later, we may have completed this year’s birthing process. There are still two girls who haven’t delivered, but they have yet to develop udders. It’s possible that they didn’t “take” (get pregnant), so we’ve finally been able to turn off the bedside screens and sleep through the night.

The first lambs were born on April 17th, so that’s been a long run with interrupted and little sleep! How luxurious it felt indeed to not set that alarm and get up, watch the camera, throw on the gear, and trudge out to the barn. And what a lambing season—our biggest yet. Now those little ones are out romping in the pasture, having the time of their lives. We’re glad they’re happy and healthy, but we’re also glad to be getting a bit more sleep! See you down on the farm sometime.