Arrived

Little Ilvija, just 2 1/2 hours old here.

Well the waiting is over and our new baby has arrived. New baby alpaca that is, or cria as I should say. We have called her Ilvija after our vet. When we decided to get our alpacas our poor vet barely knew what an alpaca was, but she has made every effort to find out about them. If we have a visiting vet for some specialist treatment or advice, she is there learning what she can. If there is something wrong and not sure what it could be, we all do our research and confer with each other to decide the way forward. So our cria's name is in honour of all the hard work she has put in and her willingness to turn up and help.

Chanel in labour, having a rest.

Just born, approximately 11am

What's happening? Curious now, but if Ilvija dares to come
anywhere near Aggie, she either spits or runs off. Funny lass!

We are so pleased that we finally have a girl after a long run of boys. The last three years have given us five boys. Nice, but we need girls now. We are running out of space for boys. We were trying to decide what colour she was. At first she appeared all black, but as she dried out you could see a tan colour underneath and the black parts on her feet and back, almost had a purple tint to it. It will be fascinating to see the change over the year, if there is one, especially when she is eventually sheared. She is feeling very, very soft and we wonder if she has inherited her father's type of fibre. Beautifully soft but difficult to felt and spin. We'll see and time will tell.

Starting to reveal her colouring as she moves about to get the
membranes off.

Determined to get standing

The day of her arrival was quite a hectic day. I started off trying to finish off an article that is under review. I mentioned last week that I hadn't heard back, but I got a reply the very next day. They must have been listening. One of the reviews was absolutely stunning. It felt like they were really fishing around to find something to criticise because they were such minor criticisms. On the whole the reviewer stated that they had really enjoyed reading the article and offered their congratulations. My flabber was gasted (not sure where that comes from but in other words I was flabbergasted). The other reviewer had a valid criticism that needs addressing but I only had 10 days in which to do it, five days now. One of my co-authors is on the case though and we are trying to get the relevant info together. I think it is doable. I also got the other paper sorted and that got resubmitted, so I'm on a roll.

Hello sweetie! I'm your mum

And she's off

Anyway, back to the morning of the arrival. I was just getting into the swing of the paper when Ian appeared at the door and grabbed his camera. Chanel is in labour he blurted out and took off. I went to see where we were up to and figured I had time to go and do some sorting out in preparation. I went and filtered some rain water and put a kettle on to boil, then went and grabbed a towel. All sorted we watched and waited. Eventually the head came out, but that is not the normal process. It should have been feet first and we were worried the feet were stuck. Ian rang our vet but as he was talking to her, I shouted to him, I think I can see one foot, then two feet. I turned my back for a second and when I turned around both feet were sticking out, just as if it had been a perfectly normal birth.

Here let me tell you something

So what's going on in the neighbourhood?

Everything progressed well after that. Ian did swing the cria upside down a bit to empty her lungs as he thought she seemed a bit rattly but that was more out of precaution than anything else. I didn't need the hot water and towel after all. Even nicer we were able to let them outside quite quickly as the rainy days had turned into a pleasantly warm, but not too warm a day. It was funny to see all the alpacas taking an interest to see the new one, even the other group of girls on the other side of the fence came running up to look. Chanel is a lovely attentive mum, Ilvija only has to disappear for a few seconds and Chanel is calling for her and looking this way and that to find her.

Everyone has to have a sniff to become acquainted with the
new arrival

Hang on a minute! Somethings not right here! There is a
fence in the middle.

We were expecting visitors in the afternoon so we settled down to have some lunch when Ian got a phone call to ask if a family could come to visit. Errr! Yes! But we have another group coming at 3:30pm. Okay no problem, they came at 2pm. We had enough time to finish off lunch, set up and check on mother and baby. The family were lovely. We were really impressed that both parents took responsibility for explaining everything to their children and demonstrated a curiosity to find out. We were part way through our demonstration when another couple turned up, so they joined in the tour too.

So that's what's been going on. Time to switch it on to remind
a certain someone of what the fence is there for.

Who me? How could you think something like that of sweet
innocent me?

This second couple are actually seriously thinking of getting alpacas and wanted to take one for a walk. There was just enough time to do that before the next group turned up. All was well and the third group were equally lovely. It was a joy to show everyone around and funny to watch some of the younger ones being totally unafraid of the alpacas and thoroughly enjoying feeding them. In fact we had to stop them because, as we explained, if they eat too much, they'll get fat. This is a bit of a problem for those who have far more visitors than we do, even if we had had five groups in total over the weekend, with two groups taking alpacas for walks.

The night before Ilvija was born.

The remnants of the rainbow nearly
three quarters of an hour later.

Mating of the alpacas has continued this week and we finally seem to have sorted out our feisty older lady who was being resistant to the advances of a quite determined but smaller Mr. P. Taking another male in first seems to have done the trick, at least she is more tolerant of Mr. P. and will sit down and go quiet for a period of time now, although still having a spit at him from time to time and making some rather alarming noises of discontent. The spit off test when they explain to the male they are just not interested is not going to be reliable for her. We think we are just going to have to wait until later on in the year to see if the mating was successful.

The clouds were weird that night.

The view as I collected the milk
from my neighbour this week. Hard
life isn't it!

I'm quite pleased it's been a busy week. It's not left me a lot of time to process the alarming outbursts from the American President. It beggars belief that a man in that position can state that congresswomen born in the US should go back to the country they came from ...err that would be America then, with it's failed politics. Hmmm! Wonder what that could mean? The outright hypocrisy of the man is staggering when he is a second generation immigrant himself, since his mother was Scottish. Also four of his five children are second generation immigrants too considering that there mothers were of Czechian and Slovenian descent. How he can still remain in his post with those kinds of views is beyond my comprehension and alarming to say the least.