A Christmas gift from an old friend…
Jen headed up the hill Christmas morning at 6 AM to do the same thing we had been doing for the last month: check on our final due female, Ascension, who had been living in the Arena’s warm room since November. Within minutes the phones were ringing down at the house, phones which I was unable to find as all of our handsets had been “hidden” the night before as we were hanging out with family on Christmas eve. After running up and down the stairs like a dazed fool, I finally found one of them though and Jennifer informed me that Ascension was delivering her cria but that she only had a head and one leg presenting…we were one leg short!
The other problem was that at least initially, Ascension was not too keen on the idea of letting anybody come to her aid. She kept spinning around and wanted nothing to do with my better half getting in there to help fix what is actually in many ways the least complicated type of Dystocia. Though I arrived up at the Arena a few minutes later to play the all-important (ha ha) role of neck -holder, in the end I wasn’t even needed. Ascension is after all a relative pro at this birthing business, this being her 3rd cria in as many years. Apparently all it took was for Jen to lay a towel down on the ground, at which point Ascension stopped spinning around trying to figure out what it was coming out of her hind end and instead began expectantly sniffing at the towel. The towel on the ground after all is, in most of our females’ memories, where we first put their newborns as soon as they come into this world. So essentially she was saying, “where the heck is my baby?”
Long story short, by the time I arrived Ascension was lying on the ground looking at the towel while Jen, her right arm scrubbed, lubed was up inside looking for our missing front leg! In the end, Ascension delivered a strong and healthy beige boy. Of course this last cria of the 2013 birth class was so much more than just another beige boy. He is the full sibling to our Herdsire, CCNF Elixir, half brother of our young white Champion, CCNF Centurion, and just as importantly he also has the distinction of being the last cria here at CCNF ever sired by Snowmass Elite Legend, whose partial ownership we had given up in trade not quite a year ago. For now we will keep our expectations tamped down and just watch him develop in the weeks and months ahead. Time will tell the story…
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