Welcome, Loretta

Our final cria of the year was born Saturday afternoon to Reba - she had a gorgeous little girl, jet-black and so teeny.  The other two were around 15 pounds, give or take, but Loretta was a bit under 12.  

I'm glad we've been weighing them, as I mentioned earlier the only 2 times Caleb could catch Bonnie (the first cria), she was gaining about a pound a day.  I checked my alpaca book yesterday, and they should gain between 1/4 and 3/4 of a pound a day, so she's doing great.  We haven't weighed her in a few weeks, but she looks really healthy, and is getting obviously bigger.  

Kenny, on the other hand, between 1 and 2 weeks old only gained 2 pounds, the very bottom of an acceptable gain.  Caleb has started bottle-supplementing him morning and evening, with half sheep milk replacer and half goat milk, what I've seen recommended as the closest to alpaca milk.  Katydid is still giving a quart of milk every 1.5 days, so we'll have the goat milk for a while.  When she finally dries off (since I'm not going to be resuming milking anytime soon, Caleb's just drying her off, we'll do better next year), we'll switch to local, raw cow's milk.  The only problem is that Kenny is really skittish, and it takes both Caleb and Liam to chase him down every feeding.  I was hoping he'd learn quickly that they always bring yummy food, and that may still happen, but it's also possible that getting chased every time will override the yummy food, and it'll just get worse.  I'm not sure what we'll do then, if Annie's not making enough milk now she won't suddenly make more later - he'll need supplementing for a couple of months at least.  And since he does have a mama, we can't separate him for easier catching, he needs to keep nursing all he can.  And separating both of them is not healthy for them socially!  Hmmm - let's just keep hoping he figures out the humans = food thing pretty quick!

With all my unexpected down-time, I'm hoping to get around to prepping some alpaca fleece for carding and spinning before long.  The last few days I've been cleaning up one of my sheep fleeces, I should finish that today. After that, I hope to do an alpaca one before I tackle the last sheep fleece.  I want to get them (the sheep fleeces) done relatively soon, since their uncleaned wool involves a disturbing amount of poop and such, that I don't want bagged and stored for a terribly long time!  Alpaca fleeces virtually never have anything but a bit of grass or such, so they can just stay bagged indefinitely.  

It's so easy to end up just sitting around nursing, reading books, and knitting, but with Caleb working so hard, and a huge list of things that I never get time to do in my regular life, I have to do something a bit more productive!  I'm finishing that sheep fleece today, and Caleb has cut all the less-than-pretty cabbage for me, so I'm off to sit restfully at the kitchen table and make sauerkraut :)