They’re here!

The Girls are here!  Our alpacas arrived on Friday, July 13th!

We scheduled delivery for 1 pm because we had a few “quick” things to do in the morning to be sure we were all ready.  The chains on the gates were not quite long enough and we needed different locks… sometimes you don’t know until you get it on the gate… especially when you’re newbies like us.

And we needed straw for the shelter.  We have gravel on the bottom for drainage but we wanted something cozier for them to lie on.  We had no idea how much straw we’d need.  I’d asked about straw pricing at The Country Store in town, which is generally known to be expensive and they said $12.99 for 70 lbs of straw… when I told my neighbor, he laughed and said he’d find us some straw, which was so nice!  In the end, we decided it was easier to pay for the straw in town than to have to find some at the last minute.   We ended up buying two bales of straw for $10.99 each, which was about 10 times the amount we needed, but our girls will be cozy! 🙂

It turned out to be a more stressful and busy morning than we intended and we JUST BARELY got everything done… but we did it!

We started waiting for Shirley and The Girls in the driveway about 12:50, eagerly anticipating their arrival.  Shirley said loading went totally fine.  Our girls had sort of separated themselves from her girls a few months ago… they seemed to be two separate herds.  Shirley said that the day before they came here, Zoe and Phoebe (our white girls) each gave her a nose to nose tap when she was cleaning their water bucket.  That had never happened before and she interpreted it as goodbye.  (insert sloppy sobs from me)  When she backed the trailer into the yard, the four alpacas who were staying didn’t seem to care and the three who were coming to me, were all perked up.  They were ready.  This whole thing feels so meant to be.  We are just amazed at how it all came together so seamlessly.

Shirley and Sherry stayed and visited for a bit.  We had some treats and made sure we were all okay – we were!  Especially because this feels so meant to be.  The Girls were totally fine, like they’d always been here.

Then it was time to introduce the dogs.  We have three dogs – one little, grumpy old man, and two bigger labs.  We weren’t sure how it would go.  We know that alpacas are generally afraid of dogs (with good reason), and we know our dogs don’t like other animals in their yard (at least not at first). We were prepared for it to be kinda messy.  We had two dogs on leash and one on the zapper collar, just in case, and we headed down.

I think it will take a few days before the dogs are completely comfortable with the alpacas… they still are agitated in the evening when they can see them down there moving around, but I think it will be okay after that.  They’ll probably just ignore each other… or maybe they’ll be friends!

Later in the evening, The Girls were grazing, drinking water, cushing down to rest, taking dirt baths, and just relaxing in their new home.

We’re so happy they’re here!

AAAAAAAND, Shirley brought me EIGHT BAGS of fiber!

I have so many plans!!  Stay tuned! 🙂