My Big Fat Mama

Good morning. I am up here in my loft with the vaulted ceiling and big South windows.  Sitting at my desk. The fire in the big room below is keeping me warm and I can hear rain outside.  The windows are still dark. It is early, early morning.  John and the neighbour boy brought my newly fixed wonky table up to the loft yesterday and took the old much wonkier card table back down.  Now I have one small table for my computer and to my left the larger table with the delightfully peeling green paint, from the junk yard,  covered in my notebooks and dictionaries.   At my back is a wall of books.  So the blog lives on one desk and the Work In Progress lives on the other.   The Slow Motion Work in Progress has more room now.  I swoop back and forth between them in my wheelie chair.  Happy as the proverbial little pig.

Who could ask for more out of a morning?  Shortly Our John will pass up my second cup of coffee. He reaches up as high as he can reach from the room below and I lean over  and reach right down from the loft landing and take the steaming mug.  If we are careful no-one gets burned!

Here is  Big Fat Mama.  Poor darling.  She was outside yesterday enjoying the warm weather. Don’t tell her I showed you these.

But she was not getting up for anybody yesterday.  She just lay there slowly chewing her cud and thinking about life. Looks like she has made herself a grass brooch! 

I know this next one is not her best side. But well you get the picture.  My hopes for a nice little set of bouncy twins might be dashed.  You will remember that she had one lamb her first year, twins the next, then triplets and than last season she had quads.   She always tucks one foot under like that. 

Poor Mama. I have no idea what is going on inside that enormous belly of hers.  Wish they had scans for sheep so I could see what we have in there!

I am still minding the little farmlet down the road while my neighbours are away, so it is a bit busy at the moment.  Lets hope that Mama holds on for a wee bit longer. If she has more than two I will be hand-feeding the extra lambs.  Initially this is every two hours so I am going to have to be very organised.

There were piles of comments and emails yesterday and it seems that postcards have been chosen.  Which is brilliant as they would be my choice too!  So I will watch the numbers and we can start choosing the images very soon.  Though my work up here and on the farm can be very solitary, I love that you are  always pitching in.  You have certainly cut through the loneliness with your keyboard butter-knives.

It is almost dawn. There is a white cat coming up the loft ladder.  I can hear the rungs creaking.  Soon he will sit at the top of the ladder, just inside the loft and stare. Waiting not very patiently for his breakfast. He is the emissary. The rest will be gathered on the cat table, on the verandah, sitting in exactly the same pose watching through the kitchen doors, waiting for White Cat to precede me with his little shrieks.  She is coming! She is coming! At which point they will proceed to Jostle and Mill About.  They are always first to be fed.

Good morning.

c