Spring babies liven up farm

The family property is home to sheep, goats, chickens, deer and a llama.
By DENISE DICK
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
NORTH LIMA -- A Sharrott Road couple got a special spring delivery just in time for the Easter season.
One of Maria and Ralph Neopolitan's sheep gave birth to triplets the same day one of their goats bore kids. Three days later, another goat gave birth.
The three lambs and six kids frolicked around late one morning last week, alternately getting milk from their mothers and playing with one another.
"We just have them for ourselves," Maria Neopolitan said. "I just love them."
While growing up in Italy, her family raised animals.
"I always wanted a lamb, but my family would never let me have one," she said.
After meeting her husband when he was in her town, San Felice a Concello, near Naples, to visit relatives, the two married and moved to the United States.
"When I came over here, a friend had them [lambs] for sale and I bought them," Neopolitan said.
The couple has lived on their five-acre Beaver Township property since 1973.
Other animals
Besides the goats and sheep, they own chickens, dogs, cats, five deer -- Rudy, Bambi, Stacy, Philomena and Bianca, an albino; and a llama named Charlie.
"My favorite are the deer right now," she said.
With the exception of the dogs and cats, most of the four-legged residents don't like strangers. The mother sheep baa-ed repeatedly, shielding her young from visitors' gazes, and Rudy the deer butted his antlers against the wire fence, warning people if they approached too close.
Other than the new babies, Charlie is the most recent addition to the animal menagerie.
"He's a baby and he likes to play with the sheep," Neopolitan said of the lone llama.
One of the goats gets up on its hind legs and kicks its front legs, playing with Charlie, she said.
"He likes that," Neopolitan said.
They bought Charlie at an auction in Rogers last fall. The first deer came to live on the farm about seven years ago from a deer park in Pennsylvania.
"We just have them to have them," Neopolitan said. "We don't make any money from them."
Two more of her sheep are expected to give birth soon. Every couple of years one of them bears triplets.
The sheep that bore the triplets March 31 was a triplet herself, born in 2001, and featured in another Vindicator article.