Helen (Or, Why I'm Not Ready to Have a Baby)

Incase you haven't already seen my facebook profile picture, this is Helen.  She's a Lamb (thats a baby sheep for those of you keeping score at home) and she's very very sweet.  She's also less than one week old, and, as a result, has a lot of needs.  Actually, she mostly just has to get fed frequently, and seems to get cold pretty easily.  In case the image ins't a good visual reference, she can be scooped up with one hand, and most of the time doesn't mind (yes, in that picture she is IN my jacket).

So pretty much she's too cute for words, and is SUPER distracting.  That said, I got to be in charge of her last night, and while I still love the heck out of her, she's' taught me an important lesson.  I don't want to have a kid right now at ALL.   Upon arrival at my cabin round abouts 11:00 last night, I put her down in her box while I got the stove going for us.  She promptly hopped out and started wandering around my mostly dark cabin figuring out which things were good to bump with her head.  She had a lot of fun knocking my big-rubber-boots-stuffed-with-socks (needed to clarify that these function as one noun), and would not eat anything.  No matter how I tried, putting her in her box had very limited success, unless you count success by the number of times she peed on my floor (one time) or the number of things she tried to eat (all of the things), but still, she was having no truck with sleep, or with her bottle.

 So, being a sucker, I wrapped her up in a towel and tried to make her comfortable next to me on my bed.  She'd fallen asleep in my jacket earlier, and I thought maybe the regular breathing had helped put her to sleep.  So she thanked me by peeing on my bed and all over the arm of my one fleece jacket (Irony?).  I put her down on her pee spot put many towels round her, tried again in vain to feed her the milk which I had warmed up with a thermos of hot water, and failing that, tried to go to sleep.  This did not work.  While she had made herself quite comfortable, and passed right out, I was left trying to contort my body around a medium sized no-sleep-zone right in the middle of my bed (what did you THINK was going to happen, D-Rod?).  By about 1:15, she was so zonked out that she didn't really notice me moving her out of bed into her box.  This gave me a perfect opportunity to put my face down on her pee spot, now rather cold, which I took full advantage of.

I fell asleep just a little worried that she hadn't eaten before falling asleep, but I figured she'd be okay.  She was okay, and when she got hungry (6:15) she made her needs quite clear.  Of course, at this point her bottle was ICE cold, as was the milk in it.  I gave her a little bit so that she would stop crying, but was worried that between the cold temperature outside, and the cold milk, she might get hypothermia or something.  So after a quick poop on my floor, the hungry bleating lamb and I went up to the kitchen yurt to warm her milk back up, which she drank with glee.

The moral of this story is I don't want a baby right now, I like sleeping too much.  I anticipate caring for  this lamb several more times, but I'm not ready to do this all the time at all, especially with somethings whose needs will be extending beyond "some milk and a warm place" pretty quickly.

And to misquote Marshall Erikson,  as long as I think Hurricane Rodriguez is a good name, no kids for me! (Though, considering it will be MY kid, Hurricane may double as an accurate description.)