Two days after Annabelle had her first-day-of-spring lambs, Jessica went into labor. She went off her feed and wandered around the pasture, standing, sitting, tossing her head, and generally looking uncomfortable. The kids set up shop at the edge of the pasture, binoculars in hand. Every now and then I’d holler at them: ANYTHING COMING OUT YET?

Mid-morning, we invited the neighbors down for the show. The lambs might be born in ten minutes or ten hours, I said, but you’re welcome to just come over and hang out for the day. The kids played outside for the morning. At noon, their mother joined us. After the kids ate, she and I visited at the kitchen table, keeping one eye on the window and the livestock activity in the field. Just after I set a pot of coffee on to brew, my daughter yelled that Jessica’s water had broken, which meant the lambs would most likely arrive within an hour. Thinking we had plenty of time, we moseyed out the door, but as soon as we stepped onto the deck, we were greeted with shouting: Jessica had already had a lamb! We scurried down to the field to find a teeny-tiny, sopping-wet lamb laying in a heap on the ground and Jessica pawing the ground, gearing up to deliver another.

The second one took a lot longer to come out, and it was a lot bigger, too. For what seemed forever, it just stuck there, its head out and its body in. Every now and then it shook its head, making its ears flop. Just when I was ready to give my daughter the green light to assist, the lamb starting inching its way out, and finally, finally, it plopped to the ground like a casually-tossed handful of Pick-Up Sticks.

At first, Jessica was extremely attentive to each of the lambs, sucking on their ears and mouths, licking them all over, using her teeth to pull them upright by the scruff of their necks. But then she started butting the little one away, slamming it with her head and kicking at it. My daughter had to hold Jessica’s head so the lamb could nurse.

Within a few hours, it was clear that Jessica was rejecting the small lamb. My daughter went outside every two hours that first night to hold Jessica’s head so the little one could feed. The next morning we ran to the farm store to get milk replacer and a bottle nipple, just in case. That evening, my husband and daughter tied Jessica to the stable wall and left her there with the lamb for an hour. It sounded like Jessica was dying, but it sort of worked. Now she’s sometimes allowing the little one to nurse (and even one of Annabelle’s lambs occasionally helps herself to some milk). We’re hopeful that things will continue to improve, and the wee one appears to be thriving.

It’s interesting how different the mothers are: Annabelle, the more skittish of the two, talks constantly to her lambs while Jessica is mostly silent. All four lambs are frisky, alert, and absolutely adorable. The wee one is super bouncy and follows my daughter everywhere…even into the house.
 

With their gangly legs, wildly wiggling tails, and perpetually smiling mouths, I’ve decided that lambs are springtime personified (animalfied?). We’re getting such a kick out of them.

This same time, years previous: the pigpen, the quotidian (3.24.14), applied mathematics, of a moody Sunday, a list, the faces of my nieces, fatira, whoopie pies, and snickerdoodles.      

Last summer when I interviewed a family for the Fresh Air Fund, one of the family’s grown daughters let slip that she was an EMT. Right away I had a slew of questions. Where did she work? Was it all volunteer? How often did she go out on calls? What types of cases did she see? And then she got our her scrapbook stuffed full with newspaper clippings of the emergencies she had been present for. As I listened to her talk, it dawned on me that EMT work might be right down my older son’s alley.

That evening I told my son all I had learned. “You only have to be sixteen,” I said. “You can’t drive the ambulance or go on calls involving homicide and suicide until you’re eighteen, but you’d be allowed to work almost all other cases.”

“Are you serious? I could really do that?”

“Crazy, right? You’d see a side of our world that many people never see: drugs, poverty, mental health issue. It’d be an education in medicine and sociology.”

As soon as my son turned sixteen, he took his CPR training and signed up for an EMT class. Since January, every Tuesday and Thursday evening from 6:30 until 10:00, he has been trekking over to one of the rescue squads for training. When he was halfway through the four-month program, he needed to do on-the-job observation. In order to get the requisite number of patient contacts in the shortest amount of time, he signed up with the Harrisonburg squad, the busiest squad around. He worked three days last week—one twelve-hour shift and two six-hours—and got more than enough patient contacts.

One afternoon I took the kids with me when I picked him up from the station. While we waited for my son to finish up his paperwork, one of the station men gave the kids a tour of the equipment. They got to poke around an ambulance, measure their oxygen levels and blood pressure, examine the oxygen tanks, peer into the cabs, etc. While we were in the station, an alarm sounded and we watched as some of the volunteers rushed out.

Suppertime is a lot more interesting on the nights my son does runs. As soon as he finishes one story, we all clamor for another. His sisters are the pushiest. You said you went on seven runs, but that’s only five stories. Tell us another! We pepper him with so many questions, he hardly gets a chance to eat.

It’s fascinating the stuff that he’s seeing: warehouse injuries, diabetic crashes, and infant febrile seizures. He’s taken the vitals of a person who had lacerations to the face and throat from an (exploded? failed?) project. He’s put a five lead on unconscious elderly person. He’s seen hysterical wives and mothers. He’s watched as eight adults restrained a full-grown man in the midst of a raging diabetic crash and then seen him transform, just five minutes after they got sugar in him, into another person altogether: stable, calm, and sane. He’s assisting with homeless people, immigrants, and emotionally disturbed people. And he’s loving every minute of it.

Last Friday morning, my husband dropped our son off at the station and then, two minutes later, had to pull his truck over to let an ambulance pass. A second later his phone pinged with a text from our son: That was me!

So this is what our children do. Bit by bit, they carve a place for themselves in the world, learning new things, making themselves useful, biting into life with a passion and curiosity that startles and inspires. For years, we demand our children’s respect, and then one day we look up and realize the tables have turned. Now it’s they that command our respect.

I’m loving every minute of it.

This same time, years previous: the quotidian (3.23.15), and nutty therapy.

This same time, years previous: an accidental expert, the walk home, big businesses read little blogs, a fast update, and caramelized onions.