The Number Field

There is nothing like seeing lambs playing in the fields. A friend commented that it’s impossible to comprehend the word frolic unless you’ve seen lambs running and jumping and playing games with their little brothers and sisters. We visited a working farm for a live lambing event in the spring, but since we went towards the end of the season, there were already lots of little ones out playing in the fields. But there were still plenty of little ones waiting to come out, and despite the prominent warning about risks to pregnant women from being in the vicinity, we all went to see what was going on in the lambing shed. There was a pen with little ones that were still to young to go out into the field, but were old enough to be held. Elena and Roman looked pretty cute smiling for pictures with soft little lambs in their laps.

Aside from lambs, the cutest baby animals on the farm were almost certainly the piglets. Their poor mother looked exhausted, lying on her side while a dozen or more little squealers all tried to suckle at the same time, jockeying for position and rolling all over each other in the process. Come to think of it, mother sheep never look delighted by their cavorting offspring, either. This may be a universal truth of parenting: no matter how cute our children are, they tire us out. No matter how much we love them, it’s hard to look on them with the same joyful adoration and excitement that an outside observer might have, because by the time they’re born, we already have a great deal of emotional investment in them, an investment that only grows with time. We’re committed to them, and they’re committed to us, bound by family ties, in good times and in bad, not just when they are at their cutest.