Bounce has a new favorite spot to sleep in addition to the floor in front of the woodstove – the corner where the sink cabinet meets the stove in the kitchen. This is progress for our little guy – moving away from the fire means his body must be regulating temperature better and getting stronger. His voice is definitely stronger and so is his attachment to me – my adopted baby has recently developed the endearing behavior of standing next to me while I cook and rubbing the side of his face up and down against my leg.

Now that the immediate problem of keeping Bounce alive has been solved, we’ve got to do some hard thinking on how to practically keep a lamb in the house through the rest of the winter. As his strength has grown, so has his ability to jump out of boxes – to say nothing of his ability to create bigger and bigger puddles on the floor. So now we’ve stolen our cows’ largest water trough from the back pasture to give Bounce a bigger playpen in the dining room. By the way, if anyone reading out there has an actual old baby Pack-N-Play, we’d love to take it off your hands! We think that might be the ideal solution for our house animal problems.

Bounce makes friends with our neighbor. We’ve already traded up from this trough to the largest one we have.

Anyone who keeps animals will likely at some point be called upon to bring one in the house. Such situations seem romantic when portrayed in books or movies – I can still recall with warmth the longing I felt when I first read the James Herriot children’s book “Moses the Kitten” to my kids. Oh, to have a farmhouse with a cozy wood stove in which to warm up orphaned kittens! Of course, we never see what happens in that house between the first night in the bread warmer and the time when Moses moves out to nurse with the piglets in the sow’s pen. Undoubtedly, the sweet little kitten made stinky little kitten poops all over the kitchen until it had the strength to live in the barn and battle those aggressive little piglets for milk.

Husbanding sick animals in the house is easier for some than others. I do like a clean house, but having born four children in 6 years, I can tolerate chaos for a good cause. My daughter Maggie, on the other hand, feels that surprises on the floor outweigh any joy and novelty there might be in snuggling lambs, goat kids, piglets, chicks, bunnies or other animal roommates. My daughter Emma isn’t so fastidious about the floors, but she likes me to lift babies onto her lap because she’s afraid she’ll touch something yucky like a drying umbilical cord if she picks one up herself. The boys don’t seem to mind the mess much, but that isn’t surprising given their bedrooms.

We’ve come up with a few strategies to contain the mess of farm animals in the house, most of which involve washable painting tarps and piles of old towels. Generally, we bring in an old galvanized laundry tub or one of our outside plastic water troughs. The bottom gets lined with towels we can wash every few days, and we throw some fresh hay on top of the towel. Poop, pee and all sorts of water and feed get spilled in the tub, which we can just dump every few days. Sometimes we require a bigger space than that – like three years ago when we needed to resuscitate two Nigerian Dwarf goats kids in the warm water of our bathtub. Though their mom, a first-timer, had dropped them in the snow and licked them off, she didn’t know quite what to do after that. So we brought her in to the bathroom, showed the babies how to nurse, and kept the whole group in there for a month while they got strong and bonded. We lined the whole floor with tarps, tossed in new hay every so often, and rolled the whole thing up and hauled it away when they were ready to move into the barn. Then a quick mop of the floor, and we had the bathroom (our only one at the time) back to ourselves. I kind of missed showering with goats for a while after that.

Buckets of chicks last spring.

Not every inside animal housing problem is as neatly solved, however, and sometimes we find ourselves compromising in ways we never thought we would. My garage bunny was one such situation.

HoneyBun was given to us two years ago – by a family who loved the big, apricot-colored angora rabbit, but found her aggressive toward their new cat. I’d been in the market for an angora, so I could spin the super-fine hair into my soft wool. However, I didn’t want to commit to having her in the house full time, because that lovely fur is like a cobwebby film that sticks to everything, especially upholstery. But I also didn’t want to put her alone outside in a rabbit hutch. So she became my garage dye-studio companion and I set her up in a big cage under a table of powdered dye concentrates.

For a week or so, she wouldn’t even come out of the cage, but once she ventured out, Honeybun became a destructo-bunny. First she chewed through the electrical cord on a box fan, then she chewed holes in a few of the kids’ rubber boots, and finally she chewed through the cables that regulate the temperature on our hot-water heated floors inside the house. We adapted by building shelves and putting everything stored in the garage above her reach. To protect the cables that ran close to the ground, we lined the walls with various empty milk and vinegar bottles. Except for our occasional lapses in putting things away, our stuff was safe from the little fluffy monster.

Unfortunately, there were other issues. Since I couldn’t bear to lock HoneyBun in the cage, she had free run of the garage, which I loved. Whenever I came in to work on my wool dyeing, or wash up in the sink after my farm chores, she ran up to greet me, putting her fluffy paws on my leg to beg for a treat (dog bones, if you can believe it!). But her freedom meant that her poops rarely stayed in her litter box, so I had to walk on the little balls wherever I worked. And her shedding cocooned everything from shelves to drying racks to stock pots, so before I could use anything I had to de-hair it. And that freedom is what eventually led to her demise.

Several weeks ago, I walked into the garage to find HoneyBun hidden under a shelf. Her normally empty food dish was still full from the morning’s meal. And there was a trail of diarrhea into her hiding place. Nearby, a plastic feed sack of wool to be washed had a tell-tale hole eaten through it. Within two days, she was limp and unresponsive, and in spite of another day being syringe-fed liquids in front of the fire, she finally succumbed to death as a result of her own curiosity. Poor pretty HoneyBun – such wonderful company in my studio! She was another one of January’s defeats.

I’ll miss you, my furry friend.

It has been a difficult month, but now the sun is starting to shine more and we see birds outside again. We’ve probably got lots of winter left, but inside we’ll soon be starting seeds for the spring gardens. What else is on for February? We’ll be artificially inseminating our sow, Pigabella, on the 5th – hopefully not in a blinding snowstorm!