Country Living – Love for lambs

So it looks like the school Ag Day is going to be an epic fail for the Cotton kids this year. At this stage, they have resigned themselves to taking a chook each. Unfortunately, it’s been one of those lemony snickets’ series of unfortunate events. But some of the story surrounding our failure may just warm the cockles of your heart.

In order to save myself from certain neurotic moments and in order to keep my kitchen surfaces in check, I had the idea to post on social media if any townie kids would like to rear lambs for Ag Day and give back. Trust me, baby lambs are completely adorable but big woolly ewes in backyards are not, so it’s worked out well for all and thank you to those children.

Now obviously we didn’t want to give out sickly lambs. So against our farm manager’s advice, I allowed my children, Lolli and Ginger, to keep the paraplegic lamb and a weak one with a bung eye. Ugh, I knew this was going to end in tears, and test my compassion and humility along the journey.

The kids raided all the farm’s first aid kits over the course of this nurturing. I kid you not, my mob had these lambs wrapped up in enough gauze bandages to reach from here to Africa. Lilium, the paraplegic lamb, was hard work man. Lolli gave me instructions to put her on the grass when it wasn’t raining, and I had to turn her over every couple of hours, because she was getting bad bed sores.

At night, Lolli would wrap her in a blanket and place her on a bed of straw in the chook house. Then Lolli decides we need to build it a wheelchair, so she marches us off to Mitre 10 to buy wheels, wood and all sorts of stuff. How do you make a wheelchair for a paraplegic lamb anyway? Well, Lolli hacksawed and hammered away and, although it was never going to work, the love and compassion that oozed out of her in the process was enough to give even the heartless goose bumps. But one fateful morning, Lolli came screaming to me in tears. She had forgotten to wrap Lilium up and put her inside. Lilium wasn’t drinking and was quite unresponsive. So we wrapped her up, placed her by the fire and squeezed milk down her throat. Lilium died that day.

Although farm kids are accustomed to mortality, a little piece of Lolli’s heart died with her.
But that same day, a ray of sunshine entered our life in the form of beautiful Clio. Raised in the city, currently residing in Mangawhai, Clio came to get a little lamb to raise for her first Ag Day. The love in that little girl’s eyes, not only for the lamb that she was about to raise, but the beauty she saw in our farm, almost took my breath away. Clio was as pure as a driven snowflake. She had not been tainted by harsh city whispers that all farmers were bad environmental killers and meat should be replaced by mung beans. Clio had a little pink jacket and a heart as big as an ox to keep that lamb safe and warm.

So to you little Clio, it matters not  the colour of the ribbon that you may get on Ag Day, because you have already won first place. You have given me hope, and no doubt every farmer in this country, that there is a future for all creatures great and small. So there you have it – two little girls the same age, brought up on different sides of the tracks, but with the same love, hope and dreams for the future. You are heroes to us all.

Julie Cotton