Lumps and Bumps

It's okay, I have stopped muttering (well, actually it was screeching)!  Good news and bad today.  First the good, Jayne from Zanzibar is winging her way over for a visit on Friday.  Lovely to hear her voice on the phone today, now I just have to get the house looking presentable - she has a very clean house, create food - she makes a very good cake and have a long chat with the animals to tell them all to behave themselves, some hope!  One of the Owls is flying over with her under their wing - roll on Friday!

On the bad side shearing has revealed a problem - poor Spike (the wether) appears to have an abscess.  It is a round lump, squidgy but does not appear to be painful.  If it is an  abscess it must be my fault and made doubly bad because it is really not where I should have been injecting.  I  am not happy with myself and phoned the vet.  The vet says just to monitor it for now so we'll give it a daily check.  Next I discovered poor Barry has a little cut on his shoulder which was not there yesterday.  Alf is starting to fight a bit and I hope it wasn't him that did it.  Now Alf has been sheared, he looks even bigger and the little ones look even smaller so I think I might have to take the two little ones out. 
The two bottle fed lambs - Limpit and Nonlimpit - are doing very well and no longer limp.  After a couple of days I ran out of the original antibiotic so used Excenell in desperation and that seemed to do the trick.  It also finally cleared Mum's mastitis.  Dobby seems very happy to have black lambs in with him (he is black) and he and Caedmon are back with my white Texel cross sheep but Limpit and Nonlimpit are in with them with their Mum (they are destined to become pets!).  This afternoon The Limpits were jumping all over Dobby while he tried to sleep - Caedmon (white) was on the other side of the field with Stumpy's baby (white) jumping on him.  I know I have said it before but it is fascinating how alpacas seem to react to different coloured animals.

Greeves surprised me just now.  I went over to give Bert her evening tickle (she is particularly fond of a rub under the chin and at the top of her leg) and Little Greeves came over for a kiss - he hasn't done that for several weeks.  He then surprised me even more by charging around and trying to mount every one of the girls - very unsuccessful as he is too small!  He does look rather odd at the moment as we tried not to shear him too short and it has made him look as if he has a very fat tummy!  Having said that he is actually getting much better, not really skinny at all now.

Little Wee has totally recovered from being spayed and, thank goodness, no longer roams around calling all the wild cats. 

She gets on very well with Smudge but Cruella is still wary of her.  The ladder is there as Carl is painting the outside of the house!