Oh, baby!

I’ve always had to remind myself to enjoy the calm whenever it is present this time of year. So often we are just dodging the proverbial trees throughout our summer birthing season, and this past week was a perfect example. Just 8 days ago we had a little dismature female born to our female, Alexandra. Alex, who is only 120 lb. or so herself when sopping wet, was a first time mom and her peanut of a cria, who only weighed in at 9 lb., was so weak that she couldn’t even really stand for the first 48 hours of her life as well as being unable to to regulate her own body temperature for the first half day or so. Timing being what it was of course, both Jen and I were scheduled to be off of the farm for a few days starting the next day, Friday. All of which meant that after keeping the little girl — who has since been named Tinkerbell — Thursday night in our bedroom so that Jen could feed her every couple of hours throughout the night, Friday we pretty much had to hand the baby off to Kim and say “hey, good luck with that!”

We had no choice really. After 2 weeks away, I needed to go and pick our kids up at Camp Hilltop followed by a loop out to Cape Cod to fetch our niece, Eve, who was coming to visit us for about 12 days. Jennifer, for her part, had been scheduled for months to teach a birthing and cria care seminar at the Alpaca Academy both Saturday and Sunday in western NY state. Of course we needn’t have worried. Our Kimmy is after all a professional who has gone through several of these situations with us over the years. 

Though with Kim’s nurturing TLC the new cria continued to gain strength every day, by the time baby Tink could finally stand on her own and unassisted on Sunday, her mother was mostly disinterested in the idea of being, well…a mother. It can be tough after all for a first time mom to bond when the birth was tough (it was a mild dystocia) and then the newborn baby was whisked away immediately afterward for the first 12+ hours. “Dude, that weird thing just smells like that other thing that you know, really %$##% hurt!” Point taken.

In fact by the time we were all back home on Monday, we were pretty much resigned to the idea that Alex would not be suckling her own cria. We did try bonding the little girl onto another female, the aptly named Pixie, who had just given birth that day to her own healthy, strapping little female cria. Pixie briefly bought into the mythology that she had had female twins before deciding a day later that she was in fact nobody’s fool and telling Tinkerbell in no uncertain terms that she was not welcome at her milk bar. Sigh. We all made our peace with the idea that Jen, Ian, and Kim would become the primary sources of Tinkerbell’s nutrition at least for the foreseeable future. If only we had one more person we could each play the role of one of the four teats? This is where the mind goes when sleep deprivation is the order of the day.

Thankfully for us, Tink is really, really cute. Unlike some bottle babies over the years, she has also been more than willing to meet us halfway – eagerly sucking down 2 to 3 oz of lamb’s milk replacer every few hours, which seems to be all that her little tummy can hold at a time. After several days of late night feedings (BTW, I am so glad we don’t have a newborn baby human anymore…how did we ever do that and not behave like complete zombies the next day? Oh yeah: huge, unhealthy infusions of caffeine!), as of this afternoon we have introduced the concept of a hanging bottle to Tinkerbell for the first time. Ideally, she will soon master the art of feeding herself on demand! It’s all good…

Follow me on Twitter @CCNFalpacas