How You Know Your Baby is Growing Up...

-You can't hold them on your lap anymore

-They start eating solid food

-Their voice gets deeper... and louder

-They don't listen as well as they used to when you call to them

-They stop eating dirt and begin to eat trees

-They grow out of their cat collar and have to wear a real halter

-They chew their cud

No More Night-light

As a child, I always slept with a night-light. I guess having an overactive imagination made me "overly" sensitive to the dark. At night, I imagined that I saw monkeys hiding among my stuffed animals, aliens poking their heads up from the foot of my bed, bigfoot lurking in the closet, and Morlocks (an H.G. Wells-inspired horror) drooling in the shadows. That's where the night-light came to be my angel of slumber. Without this beacon in the dark, my nights would have been littered with fantastic frightening creatures of my imagination.

I have long since grown mature enough to turn off the night-light, but somehow not that overactive imagination. Sleeplessness remains a frequent night companion. That isn't what I'm writing about.

Back to the night-light. When Eudora was still a wee one, I always kept a light in her pen, above where she slept. It took two giant extension cords to rig that luxury. The light offered a small source of extra warmth during those long Teton Valley nights, but mostly, having light for some of those 10 pm feedings was greatly appreciated by the "nurse maid."

I am still afraid of the dark. I realized this one night a few weeks ago. It was 10 p.m., I had mixed up a bottle for baby, and was headed out to the lamb pen to tuck her into beddie-bye. The night was cloudy. After that bigfoot show on the Discovery channel I had watched the other day, my imagination was working on overdrive. I ran as fast as I could to the lamb pen, focusing my thoughts on the little animal crying "Maaa maa!" The light was shining bright; I unlatched the door, closed it behind me, and began feeding Eudora her bottle.

The wind was blowing--gusting, really. There was a slight hint of skunk in the air. I heard the greenhouse door lift out and settle back in place with the breeze. My common sense knew the sound was made by the greenhouse door and the wind, but my imagination refused to settle on anything sensical.

By the time I heard the smacking of Eudora sucking on an empty bottle, my mind was swimming in surreal and unsettling imaginings. In my head, I was so certain that bigfoot was standing just on the other side of the tarp behind me. That was the stench of sasquatch wafting with the wind. Every noise in the dark, every rustle, every scratch was the footfall of a gargantuan, nightmarish behemoth.

Eudora was settling down for the night, and it was time for me to run across the dark yard to the house. I started singing outloud, in a quavering voice, "Whenever I hear... the song of a bird..." The greenhouse door wacked again. I slipped out of the lamb pen and latched the door. "...or look at a..." The winded gusted with an eerie howl. I frantically looked around me--all was dark. Locking the lights from the house into my sights, I moved forward. "...a blue blue sky. Whenever I feel the rain on my..." Something slunk through the shrubs in the hippie-neighbor's yard. That was it. I yelped and dashed madly to the back door.

After that night, I never again went out to a ten o'clock feeding by myself.

Not until I reduced Eudora's feedings to twice a day did I finally take out the light. That was the beginning of this week. I figure if a girl is old enough to start eating solid food, she shouldn't need her night-light anymore. As long as Eudora doesn't have any bigfoot nightmares, she should be okay. And as long as I don't have to go outside in the dark, I should be okay.

Oh, and by the way, I do eat solid food and sleep without a night-light.

(clap! clap! clap! clap! clap!)

The Lamb Who Talks in Her Sleep

What more can I say about Eudora? There's so much; I don't know where to start.

Well, it didn't take too long for her to fatten up. Within a couple weeks she was a regular old chub-a-bub. She ate 4 times a day. I felt somewhat tied down sometimes. Suddenly, Saturday no longer meant sleeping in. To the queen, Saturday was no different than Monday or Thursday. 7 a.m. was breakfast time, every day.

I didn't mind. It was fun to take her out onto the lawn and watch her hop around, kick her legs, and eat dirt. She followed me wherever I went, never straying too far and always coming when I called.

Moving home to Driggs was quite the experience. Eudora had been in the car a few times before--we'd gone to visit cousins in town and then gone to Grandma's house. But Bjorn always drove while I sat in the back with Eudora. This time, I was on my own, it was a 4-hour drive, and I had a car-load of stuff plus a live, energetic, toddler lamb on board. I'm a resourceful gal, and so is my aunt, Cami. She provided the chicken-wire and duct-tape and I built a cover for my "lamb-child-transporter." The good news: it worked! The bad news: she pooped in Preston, so we had to pull over and do a little clean up. After that, Eudora slept most of the way home. She's a good girl like that.

So we made it home to Driggs, and Eudora made friends with the ancient Schwinn bicycle doing storage time in the lamb pen. I continued to feed her 4 times a day, and she continued to grow and grow.

Some of my favorite things about Eudora:

-When she gets excited, she jumps up onto the bale of straw in her pen, paws at it, then leaps off, kicking her back legs behind her.

-Every time I walk out the back door and yell "Baby!" She calls back, "Maaaaa maaa!"

-She loves to eat dirt. I don't understand this, but it must be a little kid thing. When we started giving her grain, she wouldn't even nibble at it . . . unless, of course, it fell in the dirt.

-If I talk to her in my "silly" voice, she walks over to me, wags her head, and her ears flap back and forth. That's how she laughs.

-Sometimes, I sit on the swing in the back yard, and she hops up next to me and chews on my hair, my face, my clothes.

-She chews everything.

-If she is tired, she will lie down at my feet so I can scratch her face. While I scratch her, she sleepily scratches me back with her little bottom-teeth on my leg.

-If she is very tired, she will lie with her legs stretched out and fall deep into sheep sleep. One time I caught her having little lamby dreams. Her tiny hooves twitched, and her baby tail flipped and flopped. I even heard her talking in her sleep, but I couldn't make out what she said. Something like, "Mmm . . . Mammmaaa . . ." What a weird-o. Who does that?

-When we take her out to play, especially when the sun is shining (which, apparently, is a rare occurrence in Teton Valley), she kicks, and bucks, and romps around on the grass, enjoying her freedom but never straying too far from mom.

-The best of all is the way she recognizes me as mommy.

Eudora gives me a reason to get up every morning. It is impossible to look into those big, darling, trusting, lamb eyes and not feel good about life.

Eudora

Writing for fun--it's been a while. Sometimes when a person's heart breaks, pieces go flying. And if the break is bad enough, some of those pieces fly so far that they get lost somewhere in the person's soul. I lost my music piece; I also lost my writing piece. Funny, seeing how those were probably the two biggest pieces of my heart.

It's not easy to find the pieces and patch them back in place. Imagine attempting to place an edge-piece of a puzzle somewhere in the middle, and you'll have it about right. Anyhow, the point is that I haven't written this way for a while. But Laura did it--she found the piece for me, and now I've somehow got to get that edge-piece snuggly planted in the middle of my puzzle heart.

What do all these things have in common?

-Coalville

-The D.I.

-sprouts

-poop

Okay, so really nothing, except Eudora.

It was a better than average day. Last week of April; a Thursday, I believe. No rain (or snow, for that matter), and I was driving to a random, little, Utah town: Coalville. Bjorn napped on the passenger side. Only a 2 1/2 hour drive.

Remember what I said before, about pieces flying? Well this was after the pieces flew. Did I mention that flying pieces such as these tend to run off with chunks of aforesaid person's sanity? It is true. They say people do crazy things, when in love . . . I'm proof that after the fact, crazy becomes less of a random display of affectionate actions and more of an irrevocable state of pathetic being.

Basically, the paragraph above is stating my mental state as unstable.

I'm kind of crazy.

Coalville. People asked me, "Aren't there people with sheep in Cache Valley? Why go all the way to Coalville?" Well, there is nobody named Vera in Cache Valley. Vera lived down Elkhorn road in Coalville, and she had a little nursery full of baby, orphan lambs who needed moms. So I drove to Coalville. We got lost a couple times trying to find Elkhorn road, and had to stop and eat our turkey, ham, and sprout sandwiches. A couple dirt roads and a few rickety bridges later, Vera introduced us to the babies. Out of the bunch there was one white one. It was a rather sad-looking waif, skinny as all get-out and smaller than the others.

"Is that one a girl?" I asked Vera, pointing to the scrawny bag of bones in the back. Vera verified that the lamb was a ewe. and she was just born the night before. "Then that's the one I want." I didn't think twice or have any difficulty in making my decision. We loaded the lamb into the car. She rode inside a giant green tub that I purchased at the D.I. the day before. I sat next to her, and she basically screamed the whole 2 1/2 hours home. When she wasn't screaming, she was going to the bathroom. Occasionally she would sit down and snooze for 10 minutes, but at the next bump or pothole she was back up and wailing.

I decided to name her Eudora, after the author Eudora Welty. I was debating between Eudora and Willa, but after seeing the spunk in that baby's eyes, she was clearly a Eudora, not a Willa. Bjorn wanted to call her Queen BathSHEEPa.

We finally got home to Logan, and Bjorn got Eudora to drink her bottle. Then we tucked her into bed. The queen slept in the bathroom that night. Well, she slept until 4 a.m. when she started crying, "Maaaaaamaaa! Maaaama!" I knew that meant me. Dragging myself out of bed and slipping into my blue slippers, I trudged into the bathroom and sat down on the floor. Eudora wobbled on her baby legs over to me, lay down with her chin in my lap, and fell asleep.

The queen slept in the bathroom that night, and so did the nurse maid.

Thank you, Laura, for inspiring me to write again. And yes, you can link this post to your blog, if you like. That was my first day with Eudora. Since then, oh man . . . Lots of wonderful days. I will write more soon.

ALERT!!!

I thought I ought to let everybody know that I've decided to postpone my mission until June 1st. I am going to finish one more semester of school and yes, there is a B - O - Y in the picture as well. Wish me luck with all my life-decision-makings!