A Star is born

Patty finally dropped her cria sometime early this morning. I have my suspicions it might have been around 6am when the dogs started barking like crazy in their kennels in the sun room. Of course it was still dark and we couldn't see anything out there. When the light came, Richard saw an extra set of baby ears out there, so we ran out with towels to investigate. Sure enough, a little llama was already following mama llama around. We found the afterbirth frozen, so it must have been a little while since the actual birth.

New Baby, still covered in gunk.

Patty's little girl.

Star in the sunshine.

We pulled a lot of the dried gunk off of her...the dried up birth sack, but she was still wet and I was worried that the tips of her ears had been frost bitten. So Richard gave the girls some hay to distract them and we took the new baby inside to let her dry in the warm house.

Star in the sun room, inside the house.

The kids had a lot of fun hugging and petting the little cria. You can do that with girl babies (at least, that is my hope). Boy babies will go nuts when they get older if you cuddle them.

Star with a jacket on, getting ready to go back out to Mama.

She's pretty darn cute. 19 pounds. She's actually bigger than Leonardo was when he was born, but she sure seems tiny next to him now.

Leo has gotten so big in the month he's been around. And, he's kind of a brat, always trying to get out of the yard. Just yesterday he climbed through the electric wire, again, and was running around on the boys' side of the pasture. They didn't know quite what to make of the pint sized llama. I chased him back through and Richard put up more wire. He's is certainly testing his boundaries.

So, on this cold, fine Fall morning, we welcomed little Star to our farmstead. She is the second huarizo born here. Thankfully she has the thick fur of her Alpaca daddy, which will help keep her warm these cold nights and mornings.

She's okay. Her ears are fine. Richard washed them off and found it was just dried fluid on the tips, not frostbite. She was completely dry when we took her back out. We left the jacket on her to give her a little added insulation from the cold. Hopefully it will warm up fast this morning.

She's really cute and we are all in love with her already.