At Last..............................

We have been planning to start this blog for months now and as the weather is inclement (to say the least) it seems as good a time as any.

It's nice to be able to start with all good news. We have nine breeding females over at our friend's farm to be mated to their prize-winning stud males. We have had two safe births in the past two days, one fawn female and one dark brown male. We will be going over to see them later in the week when OD (only daughter, is down from Uni for a few days). This morning we have been trying to decide on names for them, we tend to call our cria after bands we have seen and enjoyed so have settled on Adora for the female, taken from King Adora and Minuteman for the male. After saddling him with that name we are hoping that he isn't a potential stud.

Yesterday we had visitors. Rosemary, Carl and Sam from Westhill Alpacas came to see us. We had emailed each other a few times after I had been enjoying Rosemary's blog for the few months that we have had internet access down here. Carl and Si talked about boring electricity stuff and things like that, well, they seemed to enjoy it. Rosemary and I were more interested in talking about the alpacas and plans for the future. Four of us had lived in a caravan for 17 months so it is nice to now have a park home and be able to invite people round. The weather was so good that we were able to sit outside and enjoy the views. We are looking forward to seeing them quite a bit in the future. Carl took a liking to our pygmy goats, Sweetheart and Cherub and now wants some. We could have talked for a lot longer but Rosemary is still bottle feeding one of her cria and had to get back.

More good news is that Mark and Mike from M and M Alpacas (henceforth to be knows as MGM, My Gorgeous Men) are coming across with their stud males 'Hallmark' and 'Augustus' on Tuesday to do mobile matings with the last three girls to try to get pregnant. Mark and Mike have become really good friends since we first met them. They have been absolutely amazing and give us a load of laughs when we do manage to get together. Their farm is brilliant and they have worked so hard that every time we visit there are new developments.

This morning I had to telephone Rob at Wellground Alpacas for advice. I am a bit worried about one of our Australian girls. She has been taking herself out of the herd quite a bit and has been humming. There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with her and she is grazing and eating normally. When in doubt we always 'phone our mentors. We did a spit off on her yesterday in case she had lost her pregnancy and boy did she spit. I really hope her pregnancy holds as she is mated to Wellground Close Encounter and we are expecting a pretty spectacular result from it. Close Encounter won Champion Intermediate Male at the Royal Bath and Western Show in 2008. The problem with Wellground is that we are spoilt for choice with their stud males. We are using all of them but we have to choose which one to put with each of our girls.

The rain looks as though it is here for the rest of the day and we are going a bit 'stir crazy' being stuck inside. I can catch up with my knitting so that eventually there will be some products to go on the website, which I hope is a hint for Si to work on getting that set up.