Alpaca Farm Mom vs Alpaca Farm Daughter

The first day of school was today, a day I’ve been dreading since the end of June. I love summer with my girls (now aged 14 and 11). Well, I love that they sleep in all morning and don’t fight and then we have relaxed days of washing fleece and felting and alpaca training. Kenni was starting at the high school for the first time going into 10th grade. Helen was starting 6th grade at the middle school. This means that both will be on the bus together for the first time (not that they will sit together). The bus arrive will arrive at 6:49. Ahhhhhhh! The first pre-school fight was this past week.
Kenni is so smart its scary and very much caught up in a need to be cool and fit in with other teens. Hence our fight. Kenni approached me and said, “I’d like to get my belly button pierced.” I said, “No way and here is why, there is a risk of infection, scaring, and on top of that I think it’s sexual!” We then went around on this for roughly three hours. I, in a brilliant use of the internet, googled “Naval piercing complications” and got some nice gory images. For a while I was winning with a spectacular image of keloids. I then found an article on a mother who went to jail after her 13-year-old daughter nearly died from naval piercing complications. I told Kenni I didn’t want to go to jail. “ I just want to keep you safe,” I said!
“You are being over protective,” she said. “You never let me do anything and I’m moving out when I’m 18 and getting my belly button pierced and if I get a horrible incurable disease its because you didn’t take me when I was 14, it will be all your fault” she blackmailed! “You can postpone this but not prevent it so why not just give in?” she pleaded.
I countered, “A belly button piercing is just a sign post for the vagina!” I thought that was clever and really really funny but Kenni did not! Andy came in and said in a deep evil voice, “Never in a million years is this going to happen under my roof.” That ended it for a while. I was like wow great use of the phrase “under my roof” I hadn’t heard that one since my parents deployed it on me when I was about 14. I can’t remember what I wanted to do. I’m sure then it was so important to me then.
The second fight was last night with Kenni again, it seems all the cool kids leave the high school and go eat at one of the fast food restaurants down on the parkway. Kenni expected that we would cheerfully fork over $4-5 dollars each day so she could hang out with the beautiful people at Burger King. That is just not going to happen we said and she launched into a rant about why-do-we-have-to-be-so-poor. Secretly I’m worried she might accidentally walk in front of a car on the parkway! My farm girls living out of the country at the end of a really long driveway have very little traffic experience. I actually gave them both “look both ways” lectures this morning. Fight 3 the one I was expecting actually didn’t happen. I thought we were going to have a clothing battle but Kenni complied with my suggestion she go back upstairs for two wardrobe adjustments a cami strategically placed under her low cut blouse and then spandex leggings under a way too short skirt. This cooperation was an obvious ruse designed to distract me from the fact that she was wearing make-up. (I was mentally chanting my mother’s finest advice “Pick your battles, pick your battles, pick your battles”). Helen and I had no battles at all. Our battle will be tomorrow as she doesn’t want to turn in the note from the doctor saying she can’t do gym for a month since she broke her wrist in July. She just got the cast off this week and is supposed to take it easy for one more month.
“The bus! I hear the bus”, I scream! “Run run run!” Kenni can’t find one of the snazzy flip flops she was going to wear and since she had spent a lot of time painting her toe nails to match this was a disaster. Our ancient senile cat “Fuzz” also peed on Helen’s nice sweater (left on the floor of the foyer). Kenni informs me in a parting shot, “I just want you to know Bethany just got her belly button pierced”. In a swirling tornado of estrogen they leave. This is the first time ever that I wasn’t allowed to walk (or run) with them out to the bus, I expected it but still it made me sad. The farm is quiet now too quiet! I plot the death of Bethany’s mother. Andy goes back to sleep. I head out to the barn but I miss my girls and I can’t wait for them to get home!

The Reluctant Alpaca Midwife

As I write this we have had over 40 cria, most delivered by their moms with ease but we have a few dystocias i(stuck babies) including one horrible breech birth. Generally it goes pretty good with no help from the farmer but you just never know. I used to look forward with total joy and bliss for each farm birth. That changed after a couple of dystocias, stuck babies. I felt helpless watching and wanted to be able to do something if I could. A reluctant alpaca midwife was born. I took a class on delivering stuck baby alpacas. I don’t know if they have such classes for stuck baby sheep or stuck baby goats but we do have them for stuck baby alpacas. They actually have fake alpaca uteruses and they put real dead baby alpacas in them and you practice figuring out the position and how to correct it. Its gross, no joke but really really helpful. Since I took the class I’ve used it 4 times at our farm and 3 times at other farms. I even un-stuck a friend’s lamb. I’m a big advocate of calling the vet when needed but country vets are far away and sometimes they just can’t get there fast enough. The clock can really be ticking on a stuck baby. Alpacas rarely have problems with births (the estimate is about one in twenty births). When it happens instead of a head and two legs presenting you get things like one leg back, both legs back, neck twisted head back, breech presentation, a litany of terror that no alpaca owner likes to hear.
What can you do to prepare for such problems? You can take a neonatal clinic. One of the local farms Hilltop Alpacas organized Dr. LaRue Johnson to come do this for us with a local vet Dr. Chris Cammon. Dr. Johnson is legendary and he had done this clinic almost a 100 times when he did ours. He's a wiry energetic man with an earthy wit. He just turned seventy but you can feel his spark and fire. Here is the scary thing he brings fake uteruses and uses real dead cria that didn't make it for one reason or another. Some of these sad little babies were dystocias that couldn't be saved, some were born dead for no known reason, some had birth defects. I signed up because I wanted to be able to do everything I could if something went wrong and the vet couldn’t get there in time. Now large animal vets are amazing. They do try to get there but you just never know if they are out on another emergency call, what if there isn’t time? Cell phones being what they are we do loose contact with them on the road. We all live way out in the country and it sometimes takes an hour or more for them to get to your farm. So many of the local farms signed-up for a neonatal hosted by a local farm.
Hilltop Alpacas is perched on the edge of a serene lake in Hancock New York. Today, is the first of October 2005, and the trees are bit late some are just kissed with the first vibrant reds and golds of fall. The air is cool. A new baby alpaca is getting acquainted with her mother in a pasture as we drive in. A good omen for the day maybe? The Youngs run a summer camp here that must be something in this beautiful setting. The Young family has been a moving force in the alpaca industry for nearly a decade. Scott does a lot of the alpaca shearing in these parts and we are glad to have him do it. He descends on your farm like a Viking conqueror and shears alpaca with a quick precise efficiency that is wonderful to behold. He remains patient with all of us as we try and keep up.
Lots of our alpaca buddies signed up. Denise signed up, Donna signed up Linda signed up, Sharon signed up, Dan signed up. Karen signed up. Susan signed up. Cathy signed up. Some like Cathy and Susan had lost cria. You can see the pain in their faces. You just wait so long, a year and there is so much hope. What color will it be? Will it be a boy or girl? Will it champion? Will it be a girl? Will it be the next big thing? Will it be a girl? Okay we all want girls but it doesn't really matter boy, girl, white, gray show winner or fiber pet. We love them all and they are all beautiful. We want to be able to help if a bad thing happens!
Denise and I were nervous, neither of us had ever lost a cria when we took the clinic (knock on wood). I honestly had never seen a full term dead baby before (knock on wood). We were not sure if we were going to handle this dead baby thing very well. Nearly everyone was nervous. The first couple hours was lecture sprinkled with Dr. Johnson's dry sense of humor. Past students had asked him what do you call a male alpaca? A male he replied! What do you call a female alpaca? A female!
It was cold in the large camp meeting room. Cold and yet the wall was decorated with warm bright camp banners past campers had painted. We went over the basics broke for lunch and came back for a bit more lecture. We all knew what the afternoon would bring and the tension heightened. Then Dr. Johnson kicked us out. We stumbled out into the sunshine and watched the new cria play. After awhile, “Come on in”, Dr. Johnson called!
Arrayed on the tables were the fake uteruses. They are made of heavy duty bags about the size of an alpaca uterus. Inflated plastic gloves give them rigid sides. The bags were zippered down the middle so that Dr. Johnson and Dr. Cammon could place the cria in there in a variety of perplexing positions. The first exercise was touch! You put your hand in and tired to determine the position. No talking about it just feel and move on. Cria have just the four legs of course but you have to figure out if you have front legs back legs or one of each. We came up with an observation obviously the legs bend in different directions but still, there is a knobby projection on the second joint of the back leg and the third of the front leg. So we said knob on two boo hoo! (ie you have a back leg) Knob on three yay for me! (you have a front leg). I stuck my hands in the first uterus. Now you are wearing an obstetric sleaves and gloves but its cold and dead in there. I touch the baby and its very slippery, I feel something, an ear? No a tail and what's that a leg? One leg, front or back???!!! Knob on two back leg for you! Posterior with the right back leg presenting. On to the next. Two legs, knob on three front legs for me, and the head right here with them! A normal presentation! Tricky tricky Dr. Johnson, another one is actually a torsion and since the cria is in a knotted twisted bag and we can't feel it very well a bottle neck cue develops by that one. I'm not so nervous anymore and I'm not so cold. We practice correcting and delivering the babies. I didn't think of this but they are all different colors white and brown and fawn. It makes it harder to see them, they are more real. At least one of them was Scott's baby and one was from Susan's farm. I wonder if that makes it harder for them? They are cold but they feel like the real babies they are with impossibly long legs and necks. My hands are covered in lube and dead cria bits. Dr Johnson offers to scratch people noses for a dollar. Its gross of course, the cria leak, puddles develop on the floor and we towel this miasma up with startlingly cheery lost and found camper towels (which are thrown out later of course). We make it through, Dan was worried he'd faint but he didn't. Karen went out for air but we all knew how she felt.
We wash up and sit down to a yummy pasta buffet. Some leave not having appetites for pasta. The cria remain in the uterine bags some sad little legs stick out or an ear. Thank you little lost ones, maybe a future baby will be saved by your loss. We feel better, not that this will replace the need to call the vet but now if disaster strikes and you can't get a vet there is at least you have some skill set to try. Moreover, the ability to tell if something is indeed wrong has been improved. We graduate Dr. Johnson has given us a certificate, we all graduate summa cum llama.